People often ask me, "Jason, do you think that we have free will or that everything is predestined?" Well, people usually DON'T ask me that. Usually they ask me things like, "Are you insane?" and "Why don't you put some pants on?" Occasionally, though, people do ask about free-will and predestination.

It happened most when I was going to my ultra-religious college. Predestination is a very big deal among the religious sect who want to prove what good slaves they are to their deity of choice by declaring that He/She/It controls everything they do. On the other hand, you have some people who's egos couldn't stand the possibility that they're not in complete control of themselves.

Either way, it seems to me to be a stupid question. If we could absolutely determine whether we were predestined or free-willed, what difference would it make? What the hell possible difference would it make to our daily lives?

But nevertheless, I shall attempt to tackle this problem in the most thorough way possible.

They way I figure it, nothing "Just happens". There is a direct causality to everything that happens. For example, I'm currently in a bad mood because my goddamn cable box isn't working. I don't know WHY it's not working, but it's not working for some reason. Even that reason has a cause, only right now I can't figure out what THAT is, because I've been on hold for 30 minutes because everyone else has the same problem! AUGH!!

So anyway, everything has direct causality. Even seemingly random things like the balls bouncing around in the lottery, meeting a long lost enemy on the streets, or catching cholera. Like the balls in the lottery, the multitudes of people bouncing around in the case of your enemy, or the millions of microbes swimming around in your lemonade, there are many, many factors that combine to bring you the winning number, face-to-face with your nemesis, or a fatal case of the shits. Anyone with perfect knowledge who could see how all of those events interlocked would be able to say, "Well of COURSE it turned out that way!" Regular people, of course, don't have that luxury, and to us it seems random. Rolling a die is simply a matter of velocity and the angle at which the die hits the table. If you could somehow figure out those numbers, you'd know what number would come up every time. The technical name for that is determinism.

Which brings us to our wills. It's pretty much a foregone conclusion that things around us happen because they are caused by something else, but what about our thoughts? I would content that we're slaves to pretty much the same thing. Virtually every thought we have is inspired by some external influence. What seems more random is no doubt the result of a synapse firing off, cause by some molecular reaction, which was caused by another one, etc. Our reactions to events are dictated by our state of mind and past experience. I would contend that the source of our will is in our very physical brains, it is a result of both external event stimuli and internal, molecular stimuli. I don't know if you'd call that free will or not...

"So we are preordained?" Not necessarily. Although anything with perfect knowledge of how things interacted on a subatomic level would be able to predict how things would end up, that says nothing about "predestination", which implies a conscious plan that had been set up in which everything is actively is controlled. BUT, given that everything has causality, there would be no need for an omnipotent creator to control things all the time. All it would have to do is set things in motion and then go fishing for eternity. I don't know if you'd call that predestination...

The upshot is that everything, no matter how seemingly random, has an exactly 100% chance of happening or not evening, given the forces acting upon it. Of course, we have no way of figuring out what all those are, so to us, it's random.

It's just one of those questions that has no answer and makes no difference, and yet people cling tenaciously to one or the other. You might as well ask, "What color is your shit before you've eaten?"

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