Fate vs Choice
Fate vs Choice. Many people have been asked their opinions on this, and often the reply I see is that they believe that they live their lives making choices. However, is this really the case? I want to present some examples, as well as some trains of thought. To me, fate is having your life and actions already predetermined before you have made the action, and choice is, simply put, being able to make choices and decisions for the paths that lie ahead of you. I’ll be using examples from the movie Minority Report, the Bible, as well as the illusion of choice.
A little background information about Minority Report, in case you haven’t watched it yet or you require a refresher. In short, the movie takes place in the future, and they are able to predict murders before it happens. The main character, John, soon becomes a to-be murderer, and he tries to escape capture, and tries to prevent himself from committing the heinous act itself. In the end, he does commit the murder.
So as you can see, the prediction of murder is fate, and the main character is trying to go against fate by attempting to not murder. If he did have a choice, then why did he still choose to murder the victim eventually, when he did not want to do it in the first place? He made a choice not to murder, but in the end, the murder happened, like the prediction said he would. To give you more background information, John works as a officer in the PreCrime department, where they discover murders before it happens. Many people have argued that there is no such thing as fate, and that you always have a choice. However, let me pose this question to you. If the John never found out that he was going to murder someone, and he somehow still managed to evade capture, would his murder be considered fate, or a choice?
And this brings me to my next point. The illusion of choice. Do we really have a choice? Us choice-believers live out our lives day by day, doing what we decide to do. However, how do we know that what we do isn’t already pre-determined? How do we know that we aren’t following what fate has laid out in front of us? Look in front of you. Press a letter on your keyboard. Did you choose to pick that letter, or did you just do what fate meant for you to do all this while? Simply put, just because you were not told that pressing the letter “k” was something that you were fated to do, does not mean that you chose to press “k”. Hence, the illusion.
The last thing I’m going to cover is the Bible. I’m pretty sure you have some sort of basic idea of what I’m going to talk about. Divine powers and God would eventually lead to the foretelling of events. I will use a more prominent example in the Bible - the events leading to the crucifixion of Christ. Jesus foretold the betrayal of some of his disciples, and sure enough, it happened. I’m not going to explain this. It’s the same concept as in Minority Report; they seemed to have been given no choice at what they do at all, since what they were going to do was already predicted and pre-determined for them.
Instead, I’m going to present a different idea here. Was Christ predicting the choice of his disciples, or was he laying out their fate for them? In fact, this question can be applied to John in Minority Report as well.
I am not going to support any side in this argument. This is something that can never be answered. There will be no definite answer, and no one will know the answer, unless they meet God or whichever higher power there is in their afterlife. As you can see, I have asked many questions in this argument. I never laid out any sure and definite points, instead only giving examples and questioning certain ideas.
If you were to really ask me what I believe in, I would say that we have a choice in our actions. What you believe in is up to you. I just had to write this to express what I’ve been thinking about for quite some time.
