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Free Will and your Destiny?                                                                                    

Posted at: Apr/13/2009 : Posted by: mel

Related Category: Perspectives,

This is one of those great debates in philosophy. Since I am doing the writing I get to expound on my view. Your understanding of these concepts, personal beliefs, and your personal philosophy in this view will have a great deal to do with how your life unfolds. Still, your personal philosophy is "your" personal philosophy.

No real discussion on this theme can proceed without throwing out the term “determinism”. Determinism is philosophically defined as the concept that every event, including behavior, decision making, and actions have been pre-determined by an unbroken chain of events. This is exemplified in the argument you sometimes hear, “why did God let this happen to me”. Sorry for throwing God into the discussion this early, but the quote is very common and therefore very important.

The counter to determinism is the “non-deterministic” or “free-will” philosophy of life and human action. The concept of non-determinism implies two very big concepts that many people will struggle with. The first is that everything that happens in your life is because you caused it to happen through choice, action, or lack of action. The other criteria is randomness. These are a couple of pretty harsh terms which many people find contradictory to their religious beliefs, and therefore quickly and easily dismissed.

Determinism, also referred to as “fatalism” implies that everything in your life is the result of some grand scheme or design. Some folks also credit the events of their life to fate, hence the term “fatalism”. On the up side this is an easy idea to get your arms around. If things go well you can say that God or fate has great things planned for you and is shining on you. If things go badly, you are being punished, even if you don’t know why or for what. If thing go asunder, it is not your fault, how many times have we heard that one. accepting responsibility for fault or blame is one of my key concerns with determinism. I will give you the criminal behavior argument to explain my concern. We send people to jail as a punishment for behavior we call criminal. If you accept the deterministic view of life than the actions of the criminal were determined for them long before they were born, and we should therefore not punish them since these anti-social action were therefore ultimately not their fault. Success and failure play into this argument as well. The fatalist will argue that their lack of success compared to another can be rationalized by saying it is “not my fault”. How many times has this been used to explain grades in school, work challenges, relationship issues. There is an obvious sacrifice of personal responsibility in favor of some higher plan, design, designer, or puppet master determining why things are the way they are.

Non-determinism as the term implies is the virtual opposite of determinism. This means you are in charge of your destiny. I like to call this self-determinism as I find it a more descriptive term. Critical to self-determinism is the concepts of responsibility and choice. What makes self-determinism tough for many to accept is the personal responsibility side. It is easy to say, I have a degree because I worked hard. For the person who accomplishes less it is tough to admit that “they did better than me because they worked harder”. Accepting responsibility for success is easy, accepting responsibility for the lesser outcome is very tough. Does this mean that we can all accomplish big things? I believe that very few of us are willing to try to the level warranted and may find it easier to blame others or outside forces. But I do feel that most of us with focus and dedication could do more and accomplish more than where we are currently at. You will have to search your heart to see how you feel about that. Some will argue that self-determinism takes God or some other higher power out of the picture and therefore promotes atheism. I disagree and feel that this is where the term ‘free-will” becomes critical. If you are religious, your religion provides you with lessons that can be subjectively applied to your day to day choices. Free will is where you make a choice as to how much you apply these value lessons of your life in your actual decisions, if you even chose to apply them at all. Ahh….so you logically ask “what about catastrophic events?” If you are involved in a car accident, does this mean you did something wrong while driving and need to accept the responsibility? Your home gets broken into while you were at work, is this your fault? Should you blame yourself if a tornado destroys your home? This list could go on and on, but the obvious and reasonable answer is that not everything that happens to you is something you have an ability to control or guide. These things you can’t impact we lump into a bucket called “randomness”. Some people have argued to me that allowing the randomness in our world is blasphemy implying that creation was not done very well (assuming you believe divinity has responsibility for this effort). I disagree strongly. Much like no two snowflakes being the same, variety (implied randomness) can be beautiful. If we knew in advance all the hurdles in life there would be no challenge and no personal growth. Sometimes the randomness comes in a catastrophic form that is more than merely a challenge we overcome via achieving personal growth.

So I am down to the summary. On the one hand you have determinism which says our lives are predetermined and our destinies therefore were written before we were ever born. Determinism obviously absolves the individual of a lot of responsibility. On the other hand we have self-determinism which means each of us can learn as we go through life. Implementing this accumulated knowledge to a greater or lesser degrees in our progression through life. Empowering each individual to make decisions at the various junctions of their lives is “free-will”. Using “free-will” effectively is therefore the greatest gift and the greatest challenge we have each and every day. My perspective I think is obvious, but your choice is your own…free will being what it is.

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