Jere asked:

Is there really such a thing as fate? Is it God's will that propels us forward or do we make things
ourselves as we scurry along through life? My friends and I debate this constantly and are looking for
another opinion. Any response would be welcome!

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You don't have to believe in God to be a fatalist. But it is an interesting question whether, if an
all-knowing God does exist, it follows that everything that happens to us was fated to happen to us, or
everything we do we were fated to do.

In the very act of creating me, or creating a world in which I was to exist, an all-knowing God must
knoweverything that I will do. No ruse that I can think up can ever take God by surprise. God can see
my entire life history, from beginning to end.

That does not mean that I must always do God's will.God's will is that I should be moral and good.
Whenever I do wrong, I go against God's will. How is that possible, if in creating the world, God chose
me?The answer is that every act of creation — including the creation of the universe itself —
involves adjustment and compromise. It is logically impossible that beings who have the power of
choosing between good and evil should always choose good and never evil. For any single wrong
action that I might do, it was indeed in God's power to have created a universe like this one with
someone like me in it, who chose the right action instead. But in that alternative universe, I would
inevitably do wrong on some other occasion.

Even if, in some theologically subtle sense, my doing what God knows I will do is not necessarily
doing God's will, it is still rather depressing to think that our lives are mapped out for us in this way.
From God's point of view, nothing is new, everything is a foregone conclusion. It is only our ignorance
that leads us to thing that 'we make things for ourselves'.

However, throwing aside belief in God is not sufficient protection against fatalism. You can have
fatalism without the foreknowledge of an all-knowing God. All that is required is the notion that every
statement that one might make, whether about the past, present or future hasa truth value, true or
false, whether one knowsthat truth value or not. For example, I do not normally decide what I am
going to have for lunch the day before, and even if I did, I would always be free to change my mind.
Yet if the statement, 'GK has eggs for lunch tomorrow', has a truth value, if it is already true nowor
false now,then I have no freedom to depart from the choice I am fated to make.

The solution which philosophers opposed to fatalism have put forward is to deny that it makes sense
to talk about the truth or falsity of a statement about the future in terms of its either being 'true now' or
'false now'. To say that a statement about the future is true or false is simply to say that we willknow
one way or the other, when the time comes.

Geoffrey Klempner