I had a wonderful discussion about religion and faith yesterday with some friends which was followed by my listening to a radio show phone-in about fate and whether people believed in fate. For some reason this sparked a few neurons in my brain to contemplate my thoughts on those issues. I’ve always had issues with free will and my own need to feel absolutely in control on my own life, but it’s not something I’ve thought about in a long time.

In my musing, I have come to the following conclusion regarding free will and it’s impact on fate and the future. I believe that at any given point in time, the same events/actions will always take place. My reason for believing this is hopefully based on the logical assumption that two components define any resultant event/action. The first is history and the second is the environment.

If I work on the assumption of a simple equation where, history + environment = action, then in my mind, there is no possibility of free will. We may have the intelligence to make decisions for ourselves, but those decisions are based on our personal history and universal history and take into account current environmental conditions at the time. Which leads me to believe that any individual will always make the same conscious and subconscious decisions at any given point in time. Obviously I could never even begin to prove such a theory, but it makes sense to me on a logical level.

When I look back at moments in my life, I may muse to myself that I wish I’d done something different at a given point in time, but logic suggests that I wouldn’t. I made a choice based on all available data at the time and unless there is some mysterious random element to life there is nothing to suggest I would have made a different choice. If everything in life can be explained by science (eventually), then I am led to believe that everything can be broken down to the same base energy/matter/particles and they have set behaviours. So no matter the vast amount of those components in the universe, it all has a set behaviour and therefore is predictable in any size combination.

The natural conclusion of this thinking is that free will is an illusion, that the future will always follow a single path and that there is such a thing as fate. Although referring to future events as fate all seems very supernatural and I’d rather stay grounded in science. In addition, I think time travel is impossible, but that it may be possible to freeze yourself and reawaken in the future, thus effectively travelling forwards through time.