I saw this statement today. Would the design of cells suggest that there is a destiny or fate? Do you believe in destiny or fate?

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InterfaithForums.com-Where your ideas and beliefs count.

Well I think destined and designed are two different things. Cells are destined to duplicate. Many go haywire and duplicate completely opposite then they should. Does that mean cancer was destined or designed? I have no clue. I do know this: You cannot control or attempt to find order in the natural law because the natural law ends up making a platypus and then you are totally screwed.

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You are the place where I find shelter left out in the cold.
You are the Hell in helter skelter

You didn't immediately think it was a non-sequitur of comic stylee proportions?

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-Scott

It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. -- Bertrand Russell

Absolutely I do not believe in destiny or fate. The notion that events are laid out before us, waiting to happen, is contrary to everything I, as an atheist, believe, but also contrary to the notions of free-will.

As an atheist, I believe that free-will is the simple consequence of an absence of god. For the person of faith, I suppose that free-will is a necessary gift from God, or there is absolutely no purpose in heaven or hell, or behaving so as to attain to either one, since that would have been decided from the beginning. That would definitely be a outlook of purest desolation!

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evangelicalhumanist: Greek "eu"=good and "angelos"=messenger. Spreading the good news of Humanism.

What about the absence (or presence) of god equates to free-will in your opinion?

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-Scott

It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. -- Bertrand Russell

I admit, I probably should not have included that comment, it was a bit on the gratuitous side, and surplus to what I needed to say in order to answer the original question. However, since I did bring it up, I suppose I'll have to try and answer.

I have read so many arguments on the subject of "free will" that it begins to boggle the mind after a while.

But the place where the argument gets itself into circles and knots always seems to center on god. Is god omniscient? If so, he knows what's coming and free will is meaningless --- that sort of thing. Think about the Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, and their belief that those who will be going to heaven, all 144,000 of them, have been known since the beginning, and were all born before 1935. Thus, either those 144,000 have no choice but to be perfect, while the rest have no choice but to be sinners, or they have and exercise their choices, and the whole scheme is perfectly unfair.

There are other examples, and the debates around free will rage on and on.

I do not buy these arguments, any more than I'm interested in ontological arguments in support of the existence of god (you know, "since god is the most perfect, and existence is more perfect than non-existence, therefore god must possess the quality of existence, therefore god exists").

In any case, the question that was originally put was "do you believe in destiny or fate?" My answer was that I do not, because that would leave us without free will. I believe myself to have free will, and therefore I am not destined for anything whatever.

For the person of faith, free will would seem to me to be a necessity, otherwise there is no sense in providing reward and punishment for one's use of it. In other words, if there were no free will, there would be great injustice in rewarding or punishing people for things over which they had no control. A belief in a god that unjust would be intolerable (at least to me, and I suspect to many more thinking people -- though not all! ). Therefore, a just god necessitates free will.

Without god, what are we left with? Perhaps Newton's clockwork universe, and everything is, if we had enough mathematics to work it out, pre-ordained by the initial state of the universe, with every atom doing precisely what it should as a consequence of the conditions the moment before. I cannot accept this either, and would therefore opt for a more chaotic universe, one in which life, once it began, could make "choices."

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evangelicalhumanist: Greek "eu"=good and "angelos"=messenger. Spreading the good news of Humanism.

i dont believe in fate or destiny... i believe in free will... but i do believe in consequences [positive or negative] from our actions.

so i guess i believe that we have certain "fates" because of our actions due to free will.... okae... now i just confused myself

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[belief is NOT the same as TRUTH]

makes it impossible now for me not to believe in fate and destiny. The experience completely dismantled any notions I might have entertained about "free will" had I been previously "religious" which I was not at all.

It really doesn't matter so much what a person believes about "free will" because without experiencing maya free will is the obvious paradigm of choice. No one wants to be told nothing matters in what they do, their lives are pre-ordained. But it doesn't really work that way, because, we human beings really can't see our futures or know them, so we're all stuck learning how to best deal with what we've got on our personal plates in this daily world existence. Most of us just try to get along. Some of us try to lead others out of dire straits and some of us think they're on missions from God. Luckily, God does sort out the whole business one way or another, so I put my "faith", i.e., my trust in God or that Great Mystery that leads us all on the path to full humanity.

Fate implies no purpose to my existence *Whoosh !!...I just vanished* ..except perhaps for the amusement/entertainment of such a thing that created fate !

Destiny implies no purpose to the choices I think I have made which created the life I now exist in...except...ditto above !

If there be such predetermined paths as fate and destiny then what on Earth am I ?...except an automaton !

But destiny does exist in certain applications....Prince Charles is destined to be King for example, though destiny does not guarantee success of that which one is destined for.

Y'know ?...I'm sure I was supposed to say all that !!


Hugs & Shmishes xxx

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Snowman1 Men are the same as women, just inside out !Snowman1

and these are mine, mine mine mine ...oh...and wifeys too !

I see. Cannot accept it? Is that a rational or an emotional refusal?

As for me, I don't pretend to know enough to be sure, and I am aware of the unpopularity of determinism in philosophical circles, but what I do know, and feel I understand about the reality we share leads me to the belief that the universe is deterministic (but not determinable - notions of fate and destiny are useless as far as I can see).

I used to feel free-will was impossible. Now I think 'free-will' is a term I used incorrectly. It's not that we as humans are free to choose between lengthy list of options, imo. It is more a case that we have the genetic framework for conscious interpretation of the deterministic patterns around us i.e. we can simulate using information of our senses and processinging in our brain. As complex chemical systems we can grasp likely outcomes of our (and others') actions on present conditions. That gives the all important illusion of choice, in what I feel is an inexorable process of causation. I think I might be a 'chemical fundamentalist'.

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-Scott

It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. -- Bertrand Russell