Rocco D’Ambrosca: 12/17/2008
The questions of destiny and man’s fate in life are questions as old as time. Since the earliest forms of religion to the earliest philosophical questions man ever asked, fate has always been at the center. Man has always questioned his path in life and even tried to discover what lie ahead of him. Each religion and culture has had a different view on fate and how to attain their futures through some form of divination, or the act of predicting the future. Whatever the case may be, fate exists in combination with our possession of free will.
Many nature based tribal religions have centered around the use of sacramental psychedelic hallucinogens such as mescaline containing cactus or psilocybin containing mushrooms. The tribe would take them in a group ceremony or by a designated tribal priest or shaman. Through the use of these substances they believed they traveled into the realm of the supernatural and divine, or spirit world to attain knowledge of the future or just general knowledge. Other religions such as Judaism and Christianity have relied on prophets, mystics, and saints to foretell the future. Even today, many among us go to fortune tellers, read their horoscope, or try to interpret their dreams.
Why is there such an obsession on the future? We as a species are obviously obsessed with it. What drives us to such lengths and obsession? The easiest and simplest explanation would have to be our mutual obsession with trying to control our lives and direct it where we want it to go. The foundation of this in the west would have to be the Christian and Jewish belief in free will.
In Genesis, first chapter of the bible, God creates man and woman and gives them free will. He commands them not to eat of a specific tree in the garden but they do so anyway, proving their free will (Bible). The question that immediately arises from this is, didn’t God know they were going to do that if he is all knowing and all powerful? Why would he command them to do or not do something if he already knew what the result would be? This very much appears to be a trick question. The essence of the situation is that God is simply testing his creations’ obedience to him regardless of him knowing the answer. He has given them free will so that they can choose to love and obey him or not. He wants them to want to be good and faithful and not just do it automatically, like programmed machines. But along with this is the greatest question, how can we have free will if fate exists?
The first thing that must take place is an explanation of why fate exists before we can examine how free will factors in. Aristotle talks about a causal chain. He believes every action has a cause and each of these cause and effects are connected one after another from your birth until your death (Stanford). Therefore, he argues that every choice and decision we make is simply the fruit of all previous experiences and choices. How could fate not exist if it is presumably already known by God, prophets, and others or already decided by our previous experience in life? The simplest explanation is that fate must logically exist. However, this is all subject to whether God exists and knows our future or if others such as prophets have ever truly known the future. Just one legitimate prophet and his or her correct prophecy would immediately prove the existence of fate. How could someone know the future accurately if fate didn’t exist? They simply must go hand in hand.
The Old Testament, first half of the Bible, is riddled with prophets. The entire basis of the Jewish and Christian religion is based on the voices of prophets. The belief in these religions is that God speaks to the human race, his children, indirectly through chosen people that he uses as prophets to deliver his message. One of the first prophets of the Old Testament is Noah. In Genesis the story of Noah is told. Noah was a wise old man that God chose to help save all the creatures of the world. God had grown tired, angered, and frustrated by the humans he created. He saw them as filled with evil and unchangeable. He believed Noah and his family to be good people and warned him of a coming flood that would wipe the earth clean of the evil humans. God planned to have Noah build a giant ark, or boat, to hold Noah and all of the creatures of the earth. Noah did as God told him, constructed the ark, gathered all of the animals, and stayed on the arc with the animals and his family for the duration of the flood (Bible). The interesting thing is that this story of a flood is not only recorded by the Bible but by other cultures outside of the religion of Judaism. The Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient story from 3000 B.C. Sumer or present day Iraq, describes a world flood strikingly familiar to the story of Noah’s flood in the Bible (Gilgamesh). This would have to mean that the story of the flood really occurred. This does not mean that a man named Noah existed, that he really got all of the animals of the world on a single vessel, etc, etc. The most pertinent question is whether Noah really knew about the flood ahead of time because God told him or if the Jewish people created this entire story to explain the event of the actual flood. Most likely the later is the case but how can we truly ever know.
The same is the case with the rest of the Bible. There are numerous stories of prophets knowing about and influencing many other verifiable historical events in Jewish history. Events included would be all the historic wars the ancient Jewish Kingdom had with their surrounding neighbors (Bible). But just as with the story of Noah, how can we know which events were actually known before hand or just written down with a religious twist after the fact? Again, we may never know. The only time that there is a slight possibility of verifying the validity of religious prophets is with the coming of Jesus in the New Testament, second half of the Bible. Prophets in the Old Testament allegedly predicted his coming. The problem with this is that you first must accept that Jesus really existed and was the messiah, savior, they described hundreds of years before he came and if the writers of the New Testament didn’t misrepresent or otherwise skew what those alleged prophets said would occur.
What are we left with to try and prove divination? There are plenty of others who are credited as being seers or prophets. The most famous of these is Nostradamus. “Nostradamus has been credited with prophesying dozens of pivotal episodes in recent history, including the rise of Adolf Hitler, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and, most recently, the destruction of the World Trade Center towers.” (Nostradamus). In the case with Adolf Hitler, just as with many others of his alleged prophecies, the writing that is supposed to predict the event is very easily subject to criticism and could just as easily be interpreted in many other ways. “A notable quatrain (Century 2, Quatrain 24) reads: Beasts ferocious with hunger will cross the rivers, The greater part of the battlefield will be against Hister. Into a cage of iron will the great one be drawn, When the child of Germany observes nothing. Nostradamus followers claim that the name “Hister” is a direct reference to Hitler. Another quatrain refers to a ruthless leader born in Western Europe, to poor parents (as Hitler was), and yet another one refers to Hister’s conflict with Asia and Africa. Skeptics ascribe the apparent accuracy of these quatrains (and others) to two major factors: problems with translation and simple coincidence.” (Nostradamus). But just as with the prophets in the Bible predicting the coming of Jesus, the prophecy in question is not determined to be the prophecy of a specific event until after the fact. Fate just as the existence of God and a hundred other questions probably will never be answered. But based solely on the causal chain described by Aristotle, there is very strong evidence for a decided path or fate for the individual based on every second of their life leading to a highly predictable continual path or destiny.
Back to the question of free will. How can it be that we still possess free will despite being locked into a fated path or destiny? The problem lies with an erroneous causal association between the two. They are actually not connected at all. Their mutual existence is purely a coincidental association. If fate exists and you are walking down a predetermined path, why must you not be able to decide what happens in your life? Think about a character in a movie, the script is written with a predetermined path for the character, but the character is still in control of their wants and goals. God just like the author of a story creates us with specific character and personality and places us in this world to act according to our own wants and will. Just because our path is predetermined doesn’t mean we are not deciding it. We are perfectly capable of making free decisions in life and we do. The fact that we may be predetermined to walk a specific path has absolutely nothing to do about whether we decided to walk it or not. The case very well may be that we sit down with God before our birth and decide our entire lives or that we are simply born with the subconscious knowledge of our lives which slowly slips into our consciousness in everyday life in our decisions or in those eerily prophetic dreams some of us occasionally have.
Fate exists in combination with our gift of free will. We are all destined to follow a specific path decided by ourselves in combination with God’s plan for us. The question of fate has always been on the mind of man, and will continue to be an obsession of man for many, many, centuries to come. We may never know if fate truly exists just as we may never know if God exists. But, there is very strong evidence in the model given by Aristotle with his causal chain theory.
Works Cited:
“Aristotle’s Natural Philosophy.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 31 July 2006. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 17 Dec. 2008 <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-natphil/>.
“How Nostradamus Works.” How Stuff Works. 17 Dec. 2008 <http://www.howstuffworks.com/nostradamus.htm>.
The New American Bible. Wichita, KA: Fireside Bible, 2002.
Sandars, N. K., trans. The Epic of Gilgamesh. New York, NY: Penguin Group, 1972.
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