Frayn’s ultimate charge against determinism is that it is too comprehensive a theory — since it covers the behaviour of literally everything in the universe — and thus can neither be falsified nor completely proved: ‘For causality to mean anything there must be some possible alternative.’ He therefore condemns it as no more than ‘a circularity, a principle held up by its own bootstraps’. A quasi-religious faith, in short, which is a claim uncomfortably similar to that made about the theory of evolution by thinkers on the religious Right. The complex human eye that they point to as evidence that an intelligent designer must have been at work is paralleled in Frayn by the complex human mind into which we cannot see clearly, and which therefore serves as evidence of universal indeterminacy.
Ironically, despite his many provocative statements about a human-dependent universe, Frayn seems to be a materialist at heart (without us ‘the universe will go on exactly as before’, he surprisingly declares in the epilogue) and this means that his attempt to replace machine-like determinism with an ‘incipiently humanistic’ free will fails in the end, for probabilistic quantum mechanics — really the only plausibly non-deterministic tool a materialist has to work with — grants us no more control over ourselves and our own black-box minds than a clockwork universe does. We’re sitting in the back of the car; even if Frayn is right that the steering wheel is unlocked, with arms outstretched we cannot reach it and can only watch it spin.
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