RB

 Yes — if that is the claim you’re asking about, I would refine my previous answer considerably. There is nothing obviously unscientific about Balsekar’s causal picture. In fact, a substantial part of it is quite compatible with the way science understands human behaviour.

The important distinction is between “scientifically plausible” and “scientifically demonstrated.”

What Balsekar is saying

His position can be expressed roughly as:

At any moment, what you do depends on the state of the organism, its genetics, conditioning/history, and the circumstances acting upon it. Those factors themselves have prior causes. Therefore the individual cannot step outside the causal chain and independently determine what happens.

That’s a perfectly coherent form of causal determinism.

And science gives us plenty of evidence that behaviour is strongly constrained by exactly these sorts of factors. Neuroscience, psychology, genetics and environmental science all describe behaviour in terms of interacting causal processes rather than an immaterial “chooser” standing outside them.

Where science actually becomes uncertain

The controversial word is “deterministic.”

At the level of classical physics, deterministic causal evolution is completely legitimate. And even deterministic systems can be extraordinarily unpredictable because tiny differences in initial conditions can produce enormous differences later. This is well established in chaos theory. 

But fundamental physics complicates the picture.

Quantum mechanics has both deterministic and indeterministic interpretations. For example, the Schrödinger evolution of a quantum state is deterministic, while interpretations involving wave-function collapse introduce genuinely probabilistic events. There is no settled interpretation that establishes that the universe is fundamentally deterministic—or fundamentally indeterministic. 

So Balsekar goes beyond what science currently establishes when he says:

Everything that happens is necessarily determined by the entire preceding causal chain.

Science hasn’t proved that.

But science hasn’t proved the opposite either.

And there’s an important point about quantum randomness

Suppose quantum mechanics ultimately showed that some event in your brain is genuinely random.

That wouldn’t automatically rescue the conventional idea of free will.

Imagine your brain is about to choose A or B, and a quantum event determines whether it chooses A or B.

You could then ask:

“Did I freely choose A, or did randomness determine that A happened?”

Randomness isn’t the same thing as authorship.

This is one reason the free-will debate is much deeper than “determinism versus quantum mechanics.” 

Your point about results is particularly interesting

Balsekar’s distinction between effort and results is actually quite defensible.

You can influence an outcome without controlling it.

For example:

You study → you improve your preparation → you sit the exam → the result depends on many additional conditions.

Your effort is itself part of the causal chain. It doesn’t have to be uncaused in order to be real.

This is where I think Balsekar is often misunderstood. He’s not necessarily saying:

“Don’t make effort because nothing matters.”

He’s saying something closer to:

“Effort will occur when the conditions for effort occur. Don’t imagine that a separate autonomous entity is standing outside causality and ultimately controlling the result.”

That is a philosophical interpretation of causality, not a claim that contradicts established science.

The one genuinely unscientific leap

If Balsekar says “cosmic law” merely as another way of saying the total causal order of nature, that’s philosophically respectable.

If he means there is a specific cosmic intelligence/law that science has established determines every event, then that is not scientifically established.

Science has no demonstrated evidence for a cosmic law of the specifically spiritual/metaphysical kind.

So I’d put it this way:

Balsekar’s claim	Status scientifically
Genes influence behaviour	Strongly supported
Conditioning/history influence behaviour	Strongly supported
Circumstances influence behaviour	Strongly supported
Brain processes cause/shape decisions	Strongly supported
We don’t control external results completely	Obviously supported
Human actions have causes	Strongly supported
Every event is completely determined by previous events	Not established
The universe is fundamentally deterministic	Open question
There is no separate metaphysical “doer”	Not a scientific question settled by experiment

And there’s an important subtlety: even if the universe is deterministic, that doesn’t by itself prove Balsekar’s entire philosophy. Compatibilist philosophers argue that a person can still genuinely choose even in a deterministic universe. The SEP notes that this remains an active philosophical dispute. 

So I think your instinct is right: Balsekar’s teaching isn’t something modern science has simply “disproved.” The stronger claim is that he takes a scientifically plausible causal picture and draws a metaphysical conclusion about the absence of an independent doer.

And that is where the really fascinating question begins: what exactly would “control” have to mean for a person to genuinely be the doer? Once you examine that carefully, Balsekar’s argument becomes much harder to dismiss.