Reconciling Free Will, Faith, and Fate

A Modern Philosophy by Justin Aclin

“Were anyone ever to discover the meaning of life, the Universe would immediately cease to exist and be replaced by something infinitely more confusing.”

            -Paraphrased from Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

            I have always considered myself an individualist, and have taken great pride in my individuality.  So it disturbs me, when reading philosophy, when a philosopher says that there are no individuals, or that there is no free will.

             Such disturbance causes me to question my beliefs, to examine them as I never have before.  One goes through life with certain very strong beliefs, but very few people actually think about the dogmas that they subscribe to. 

Upon close examination, many of my beliefs contradict each other.  For example: I believe in the individuality of human beings, in free will, and that I am the master of my own destiny.  At the same time, I believe in an omnipotent God, and that everything happens for a reason.  Obviously, I can not go about believing all these things.  Ironically, however, that’s just what I’ve been doing.  The task now falls on me to pick up the pieces: to examine my beliefs and either make them all agree, or find some new beliefs.

First, I must examine why my beliefs contradict each other.  It seems appropriate to start with God.  I believe in a God who gives order to the cosmos.  I believe that by praying, I can get God to affect the outcome of my future.  However, if God can change the future, then God must know of the future.  And if God knows of the future, then the future must be preordained.  And if the future is preordained, then none of us has any free will.  And without free will, there can be no individuality, because an automaton behaving differently than the rest of the automatons is still behaving according to his programming, as it were. 

Problems like this have plagued philosophers and theologians since the beginning of monotheism.  As if that isn’t enough, there’s the matter of fate.  There are two schools of thought on fate: either it exists or it doesn’t.  Fate is both one of the most comforting and one of the most frightening concepts to me.  If fate exists, there is an order to the universe, and things happen for a purpose, and I can believe that my purpose may be grand and no matter what I do, I will still achieve it.  Without fate, the universe becomes a series of mind-numbing coincidences, and I could get struck by lightning tomorrow.  However, the idea of a preconceived future makes me claustrophobic.  Suddenly, the path of my life seems like a sled racing downhill toward a tree and there is no hope of steering it.  There is a definite beginning, and a definite end, and the straight line down the middle is merely incidental.  This notion of fate almost produces nihilistic thoughts.  It can also lead to feelings of laziness and paranoia.  It would be all to easy to say, “No matter what I do in my life, things will turn out the way they are meant to, so I can just lounge around and things will happen to me.”  This soon turns into “But what if they want me to just lounge around?” and soon you are caught in quite a cumbersome loop of logic.

So the question remains, How do I reconcile my warm and fuzzy vision of God and fate with my ardent desire to be free, or do I realize that maybe they’re not so warm and fuzzy after all?  Well, I’m not ready to give up just yet.  What this requires is careful, orderly thought.  In other words, philosophy.

If I’ve learned nothing this year (and that would be unfortunate), I’ve learned that in order to produce a philosophy, one must be aware of the philosophy of the past.  The danger in this lies in absorbing too much of what you are reading.  The task of the philosopher is of course to write convincingly, and it is all too easy to swallow whole cloth the theories of any given philosopher until reading the next, contradicting theories and believing in them.  Still it cannot hurt to see what minds greater than my own think on the subject, so I shall do just that.

The problem of God vs. Free Will first sprung up when monotheism did, so a good place to start is Augustine.  Augustine believed in what I am seeking a way to disprove: that God, through His omnipotence and omniscience, rules over the free will of men.  Then came Aquinas, who said that God exercises control over all that has happened and will happen.  Apparently, this then split his followers into two schools of thought over how this accounted for free will.  One school of thought, the Thomists, said that God premoves man along the path that he would have chosen anyway, or something of the sort.  The competing school of thought, the Molinits, held that that did not account well enough for free will, and they said that, when it comes to future events, God sees things as they would happen if the things that need to occur, occur. 

 Which brings us to modern philosophy.  Descartes sat the fence, making a case for the existence of free will in his Meditations, but at times believing in limited determinism.  Kant came up with the most convincing argument yet.  Kant had split the world up into phenomena and noumena.  According to Kant, the laws of nature governed the world of phenomena, the world of appearances, so everything was predetermined.  However, Kant insisted that in the world of the noumena, which lay outside time and causality, there is freedom.  That’s not perfect, but it’s a start.

So, in other words, the answer so far is that no one knows.  This still leaves the matter of reconciling my beliefs in God, in individuality, and it destiny.  Of course, it is all fine and good to work out a system which would account for all three but which is so methodical it could not possibly be true.  I have found, however, what I believe to be the answer to all of my questions, and what could quite possibly be the truth of the universe, if not something very close.  And it came to me, appropriately enough, in philosophy class one day.

First let us reexamine the problem one last time.  If God is omnipotent, then God can see the future, implying that the future is fixed in place, implying that our lives are lived according to a certain plan which cannot be changed, implying that we have no free will of our own.  So, to account for free will, the problem becomes, simply, how can the future be known if it is indeterminate.  The answer of course, must come from our understanding of how time works.

Time, as we understand it, is much like a straight line.  We are born at point A, live our lives on the lines intersecting points B, C, and D, and die at point E.  Once again, we are a sled plummeting down a snowy hill. 

But what if time is not a straight line?  I cannot remember who first suggested the idea (though I sincerely suspect I heard it from comic books), but there is a school of thought that states that for every decision a person makes, the line of his life branches out into two lines: one for the choice he made, one for the one he did not.  Say, for example, that Johnny Unlucky is leaving a party.  He’s about to get a ride with his friend Bobby Drunk.  He gets in the car with Bobby and is involved in a severe accident which cripples him.  Now, at that same instant, another Johnny decides to get a ride with another friend and is spared the accident and the paralysis.  He then lives out his life parallel to the paraplegic Johnny: two time strands of the same life.  Robert Frost touches on similar themes in his poem “The Road Not Taken”.

At this point you might be saying “What does any of this have to do with free will and all that?”  Well, I’m getting to that.  My idea is not the parallel reality idea.  That already existed, hence it wouldn’t be my idea.  Rather, I say, “Turn that notion on its head.”  Say that, instead of the path of a life forking when a decision is made, the forks are there all along.  Go back to the example of Johnny.  Johnny is traveling down the timeline of his life.  He is given the decision to either get a ride with Bobby or not to.  Down the path of his life, both of these decisions are already accounted for.  Also accounted for is if Johnny should choose to walk.  Or take the bus.  Or stand on his head and recite the alphabet backwards.  In other words, absolutely any decision Johnny might make in that instance, or in any other instance in his life, is already accounted for, and it’s the same for all of mankind.  I call this concept the Futureweb.

At first the concept is a little hard to grasp.  “So if I move my index finger a little to the left right now,” you might say, “I am following a different strand of my web than if I had left my finger still?”  Yes, the differences might be minute, but it still takes the web in a different direction.  Also, take into account chaos theory.  You having moved your finger might cause a tornado that wipes out a village in Ethiopia.  The Futureweb accounts for all of this.  It is infinite in scope and impossible to comprehend.

“I still don’t see how all this ties into God and all that.”  Well, fine.   Allow me to explain.  God knows the future.  This is, evidently, some sort of perk that goes along with being omnipotent.  Now, just because our human minds cannot grasp the Futureweb in its entirety, that doesn’t mean the same goes for God.  God, being omnipotent, can sort through the Futureweb like an Easy Reader book.  This means that God does not only know what is going to happen in the future.  God knows what could possibly happen in all possible futures.  Ever.  Therefore, God gets to keep his omnipotence, man gets to keep his free will.  End of story; everybody’s happy. 

Only it’s not the end.  First of all, this paper is still several pages too short.  Secondly, the observant reader will recall that there was a third “f” in my cleverly alliterative title.  Yes, it’s our old friend fate.  How does fate fit into Futureweb?

I’ve often said to others that sometimes I can feel the hand of God guiding my life.  In other words, there are certain things that seem so important, and often are so coincidental, that they seem like destiny.  Going to this college was one of those things. 

To examine how the Futureweb idea accounts for fate, let’s return to our metaphor of the sled and the hill and the tree.  At the onset of this paper, the sled was making a straight beeline for said tree.  Now, the sled has an infinite expanse in which to navigate the hill, dodging this tree and that, becoming airborne ever so briefly, and then resuming its downward trek.  Somewhere, eventually, it will meet a tree, but now at least there’s a more enjoyable ride on the way down.

Now, on this hill there are certain areas that dip down.  Around these areas, the ground will start to subtly slope so that it leads the sled into these pockets, should the sled wander near one.  Fate works a lot like this.  There are certain events in a life which are so monumental that they bend the Futureweb around them.  So, as the course of the life makes its way along the web, it has a greater chance of falling into one of these depressions, one of these Things That Are Meant To Be.  That’s fate.

Does this mean that these events, these depressions are inevitable?  Of course not.  One could always steer a hard left and escape the gravitation pull.  But in my experience, things happening for a reason are usually good in the long run.  The point is that there is always room for change, that nothing is absolute.  That’s why prayer has a point, or wishing, or whatever you want to do.  God can affect the course of a life along the Futureweb, can provide guidance to make the right choices.  God might deflect Johnny from getting into Bobby’s car.

Now, at this point, my readers might be wondering why I stated above, “our human minds cannot grasp the Futureweb in its entirety.”  To give you an idea of why this is, let’s try to imagine how large the Futureweb might be.  Start with a single strand, a single human life.  Every moment of that life, there are infinite numbers of branches accounting for everything that person might do, and every branch has infinite branches accounting for everything that the person who takes those particular paths might do.  Infinity to the infinity.  Now, consider that there is one of these branches for everyone who has ever lived.  That’s pretty big already, but I’m not done.  The average male releases several million sperm in a single ejaculation.  All of these have a strand as well.  When one considers that a split second meant the difference between their life developing and someone else’s, it’s rather humbling.  So now, we’ve got a pretty big web.  Let’s not forget animals, who certainly have a choice of what they do and have an affect on the lives of each other and ourselves.  Also consider, that everything that these millions of people, both actual and potential, do, affects someone else, linking all the strands together and forming new branches and new possibilities, and you get an idea of why it takes a Divine Will to make sense of it all.

An interesting question is: what becomes of the strands that are not used; the people who were never born, the Johnny who stood on his head and recited the alphabet backwards?  Do they fall away like rotting branches from a tree, streamlining the past of the Futureweb if not the future?  Or do they remain there, uselessly taking up space in the infinity of the cosmos?  Well, one must consider that the universe naturally tends towards chaos.  The whole of the Futureweb was present from the dawn of time (hypothetically of course).  If, as mankind and the universe age, the Futureweb streamlines itself out as it goes, it would be making itself less chaotic, thus defying the nature of the universe.  So, if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that all the roads not taken still exist somewhere out there, behind us or parallel to us.

            The only problem I see arising from this theory is the question of origin.  If the Futureweb is such that it maps out the whole course of the history of the universe and of all universes, who made it?  Was it made by God, or did it make God?  Is it in itself a being, or is it merely a map?  Also, there is the matter of fate.  Who made these depressions  in the web?  Were they events that God feels necessary so he added extra probability to?  Or are they events that, of their own volition have great cosmic importance and, as such, weigh down the web with their very existence?

            My best guess is that, in the beginning, there was nothing.  God laid down the capacity for the Futureweb and from there it grew by itself.  I see it stretching out across all of Creation, like a rapidly forming crystal.  In its many branches, worlds form where now there are no worlds, and species evolve as the dominant species that never existed.  All these possibilities are laid out before time starts, and then God presses the “start” button.  I see time as a little red dot at the beginning of the Futureweb, and as time marches forward, it makes its way along, taking first one path and then another, seemingly haphazardly.  The worlds which could have been are not, and the species never spring up that would have wrested the planet from us.  Eventually, mankind evolves, and the red dot which was chance and nature becomes many red dots, each travelling their own section of the path, making their own choices and intersecting with each other. 

            I think the strengths of the Futureweb theory lay in its simplicity and the way it accounts for chance.  One must remember that no matter how free our wills are, we are always subject to coincidence as well, as illustrated in the example of how completely unlikely it is that any of us were born as the people that we are. 

            Of course, I do not propose to have solved the problem that has dogged philosophers for hundreds of years in these few days at my computer.  I could be wrong, but I don’t think any major philosophical works have ever been submitted for grades.  However, what I hope to have accomplished here is to possibly provide an alternative to the rigid thinking that has kept this matter stagnant for so long.  Our understanding of time has taken us as far as it can go, and perhaps it is time to reexamine it and see if other models fit our necessary beliefs better.  Maybe Futureweb is not right (and if it was, according to the quote which started this paper, the world would be ending imminently), but I hope that it can provide a model of unconventional thinking which will take philosophy into uncharted territory.  Now, if you excuse me, I’m going to go jump up and down for no reason and change the path of my life

.

Bibliography

Although it’s not truly a bibliography in the traditional sense of the word, I wish to acknowledge that the source I used for my brief (very brief) history of the problem with free will was drawn from the Catholic Encyclopedia by Michael Maher, copyright 1913 by the Encyclopedia Press, Inc.  The particular copy I used was located online at http://www.knight.org/advent/cathen/06259a.htm . My good thanks to the people at the website and at all the websites that eventually led me there.