Director Roger Nygard traveled the world asking theologians, scientists, skeptics, and everyday people 85 tough questions to try to understand The Nature of Existence! Now that he’s asked the experts, it’s YOUR TURN! To offer your own insights on today’s question, “Is everything predetermined?”, Leave a Reply below!
Depends on what you mean by everything.
If so, I don’t believe we have any dependable way of knowing it (or what is yet to be determined), so it doesn’t seem worth worrying about one way or the other.
Supposing that all events that occur have already been determined, might imply to some the existence of a prime ‘determiner.’
To others, it might imply the end result of natural forces acting as they would whether we were here to observe them or not.
The more we study about the particles that make up matter, and how they interact, the know we can determine at the macro level.
Only some questions, example “would you like another beer?”
We either have free will or everything is pre-determined. I have difficulty believing that there is only one way that things can happen (though that is one possibility). Free will gives rise to more possibilites (therefore more plausible to me). Free will also takes into account action and inaction as possibilities. In a pre-determined universe everything proceeds as it is “planned” therefore our actions or inactions will be as they were destined to be – meaning we have absolutely no control. I like to think we can control our choices, we just can’t control the outcome.
It is like we have been programed.
In Reality, which I believe is beyond the understanding of any mortal being, time as we know it does not exist. All moments are somehow present in some form of infinite existence. Although we do make real choices in our lives, it is in Reality determined what those choices will be, because all events which we perceive as past, present, and future are part of one infinite whole which exist now and always has and always will. This as I said is utterly beyond the comprehension of our earthly brain. My personal belief is that, once I am free from the restraints of my earthly body, this Reality will be somehow revealed to me. I believe this revelation is the “nirvana” that every being seeks from the moment of birth.
Metaphysical reality is determined. The nature of human free-will and choice is not.
The law of physics that states, “an object in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force,” is evidence of a predetermined reality. All that is in existence was set in to motion and continues to move along the path it was set to. The individual parts collide with each other setting those parts to new directions. For example, this happens on a large scale with planets being pulled toward gravitational fields, and on a microscopic scale with our brains responding to perception through chemical signals. We fail to see this because our perspective is set to an individual point, constantly encountering a seemingly infinite number of “outside forces.” This creates the illusion that we have choices, make decisions, and are in control of the outcome of our lives.
However, you have to note the unpredictable randomness factor inherent in quantum mechanics (a consequence of the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg), which makes outcomes unpredictable, or at best, subject only to probabilities.
if everything was preordained, the guy who preordained it was some serious perverted stalker