Science

Yes.

Our universe had two seemingly contradictory properties: determinism and probability.

Determinism states that if I put a cat in a box, fill it with poison gas, and wait 30 minutes, it will die. Probability says that if I put the same cat in a box with a radioactive isotope that has a 50% chance of decaying in 30 minutes, which triggers a sensor that releases the gas if it detects decay, then after 30 minutes the cat has a 50/50 chance of being alive or dead and I have no way of actually knowing until I open the box.

With determinism, we can always predict the next step in the chain, but with probability we can only predict the likelihood of an event happening, but we don’t know the outcome until we actually observe it.

If we lived in a universe with only determinism, there would be an unbroken chain of cause and effect and our actions would all be preordained. If we lived in a universe with only probability, then our actions would be arbitrary because we would never be able to predict their outcome.

However, we live in a universe where our actions have predictable consequences, but there are also things happening we can’t predict. This means our actions are both meaningful but not fixed. Therefore, we have free will.