Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence

"This book’s about the death of mysticism, and it was the book that killed anything like that in me. I’m an atheist; I don’t believe in star signs or luck. It’s a discussion between Leibniz, who was a philosopher and mathematician, and Samuel Clarke, the philosopher, scientist and champion of Isaac Newton. Leibniz was defending a position that suggested we had no free will at all. He was trying to reconcile the experience we have of free will with God’s omnipotence, and in order to do it he suggested that we have no ability to test our own experience, that we exist in complete isolation from each other and the world. Clarke just comes back very pragmatically: common sense questions, and I found that every time Clarke was talking I was going, ‘absolutely right, quite right’. And I ended up feeling that while there was fun to be had in the Leibnizian point of view, life is just too short… People will talk about flavours relating to one another according to season or whatever, but I want to ask, if lemon juice, from a summer fruit, is doing a particular job, supplying a bit of bite, a bit of acid in a dish, can I do that with something else, like vinegar? “I don’t say conventional wisdom’s all bad; there’s plenty of good eating advice in the Bible” What’s wrong with that? Another chemical that has the same effect? I don’t say conventional wisdom’s all bad; there’s plenty of good eating advice in the Bible. But you should be able to unpack it, question it and push the boundaries a bit further."