Free-will v/s Destiny
Understanding whether free will and destiny go hand in hand or against each other.
Most of us today find the idea of arresting, punishing, and killing animals for crimes ridiculous and find these stories trivial. But these stories actually raise questions about how responsible are we humans for our own actions.
In 1266, the monks of Sainte Genevieve monastery in France sentenced a criminal to death for the crime of murdering a child and then eating the body. The condemned did not dispute the case and accepted the sentence, although that might because the accused was a pig the animal not what we call people in anger.
There are similar cases for capital punishment for crimes committed by animals recorded in history even though they sound bizarre today they were historically accepted and records dating as far back as the 9th century reveal a long trend of humans putting animals on trial for their “crimes” against us. These records show various animals and insects such as weevils, slugs, pigs, roosters, and other small mammals like mice, rats, monkeys, etc.
Some cases date back to the early 1900s where an elephant was taken to court for killing people in a circus. There is even a case recorded in 2008 in Macedonia where a bear was convicted for stealing honey.
These stories and cases for “crimes” committed by animals in the modern civilized world are not conducted because we understand and consider that animals can’t make moral decisions the same way we are capable of.
The established thinking is that animals even well-trained ones, are slaves to their nature and instincts, acting out their urges without first passing the impulses through a filter of morality.
We consider ourselves as superior creatures because we believe that we are independent, free-thinking creatures capable of making good moral judgments. Based on this belief, when we make bad moral decisions we usually risk some form of punishment by the laws and regulations put in place by us.
This view of the world relies on the assumption that each one of us has free will, which means that we have the freedom to choose our actions, even if those actions can harm someone else.
Is this the only viewpoint?
Since humans have evolved from animals and we do share some similarities with species in the animal kingdom, what if we actually have no more free will than bears or pigs or slugs? This question has been haunting philosophers, scientists, and lawmakers for a while now by a while I mean thousands of years, which has lead many of us to believe that this problem is unsolvable and the greatest mysteries of all time.
Over the last few decades with help of scientific advancement, we have used neuroscience and quantum physics to gain some useful insights but the debate continues as we try to understand if we truly have free will and if we don’t then how can explain the way our society functions.
If crimes are committed and they are morally wrong is it completely the fault of the person or were the incidents destined to happen? If something good happens and we have achieved something great do we celebrate? Or do we consider it an act of luck or a destined result from the path?
You might be wondering these sound ridiculous and be wondering that of course, you have free will if not you will choose to do something else than read this article but what if it was destiny that led you to this moment and free will was a construct of density and these thoughts were set to occur.
There are various religious texts which tell us that fate is written and everything happens according to the fate each of us is given and astrology also helps us believe that horoscopes and various other factors drive how our lives can function and there are records of where it has come true and impacted lives of various people.
Yet we choose to believe in free will more than fate or destiny because it makes sense to all of us, mainly it feels right. This is because the idea of fate or destiny does not sit well with us as it becomes limiting and takes the power of choice away from our hands which is discomforting and questions our life the way it is has been, currently is, and will be in our future.
Every day we come across numerous decisions seemingly made at our own discretion like eating, cooking, waking up, sleeping, walking, thinking, driving down a certain path, and other such minuscule choices we make because we want to choose what we wanted to.
Destined to happen
There is a theory or belief called “Causal Determinism” according to which every event is fully decided by some event or cause that occurred before the current one occurring and this continues till the chain or decided event is complete. This theory takes choice away from our hands and thus leads to a never-ending chain of cause-and-effect that stretches back to the very beginning of the Universe.
According to this theory choices and thoughts are not driven by us but by an event that is out of our control and beyond the realms of our understanding and that has led us down this path of existence that we are in now.
Determinism also implies that the independent choice or role that we play to come down a certain path is an illusion and it's just a construct or an idea. Shakespeare’s Macbeth also had this duality in the constructs of its story.
Like mentioned earlier religious texts and beliefs had this idea at its core and one such belief is that occurs in Greek Mythology in the “Myth of Fates” or “Moirai” three goddesses decide the destinies of mortals when they are born, weaving the individual threads of their lives to a tapestry encompassing all humankind. Their power was believed to be so strong that even Zeus could not alter the course of history, and he is the God of Gods.
Similar themes exist in Hinduism, Buddism, Norse mythology, Roman mythology, and paganism. Most of the world’s great religion also includes a version of this view, in which God knows what is to happen and occur through time in everyone's life.
Fate still occurs in a secular world and many atheists and agnostics recall at least one experience which they write it off as destiny because it seems too good to have occurred by chance or luck.
Destiny to happen and Determinism are not the same thing even though they share a similar idea. This belief is a subcategory of “Determinism” called “Fatalism” as it believes that life is influenced by some higher power that exists above us watching and changing what happens constantly.
The occurrence of a grand plan?
In the so-called grand plan of things, there need not be any laws that dictate laws of cause-and-effect because everything is meant to be as if someone controls everything across all of space and time.
In ancient Greece, people believed that fundamental laws nature, not the gods that decided the events of our daily lives. Philosophers developed the idea that we are all made of similar constructs and the motion of these constructs is decided purely by the natural laws of causation. In their view, the future was entirely determined by the past.
As our understanding of the natural world and the laws that govern it expanded, Determinism became informed by the disciplines of science, and few people had a bigger impact on the development of modern Determinism than sir Issac Netwon the smartest person in the 17th Century.
It was his laws of motion and discovery of the universal force called gravity that helped us uncover the very rules that govern our universe giving Determinism a scientific foundation. These laws have had a great impact because they helped us almost accurately predict the consequences of almost any action.
This was taken to the next level by Laplace who helped create a thought experiment called Laplace's Deamon which in theory led us to believe that we can predict and unravel how cause-and-effect occur in any given timeline. Though this experiment has been disproved by Thermodynamic irreversibility the idea of our lives being predetermined by cause-and-effect has not gone away.
Conclusion: It should not matter
There does not exist any scientific theory the explains Everything but debates, experiments and scientific advancements with new theories and principles like the Uncertainty Principle at the quantum level have us lead to believe that both free will and determinism exist, and go hand in hand in a deterministic universe.
This is because our universe operates under different laws in the macro realm(planets/gravity) and micro realm(quantum/atomic level) so until we have a unifying theory this debate can exist together in the world.
It does not matter if we are destined to do things or have the free will to choose as it should not make a difference we should not care about this because we still live our lives the way we want to and should continue to do so if we feel our decisions are a result of free will as determined or not it ends up the same.
Morality and actions someone takes towards a person can be questioned and forgiving other’s behavior can be altered but if we function by our emotions and logic we use to function as a society together we can make a better world as long as we live.