Last week, I posted on the phenomena of artificially binary debates, "false dichotomies," if you will. Which brings us to today's post: an example of a common one.
Fate:
The world is deterministic. Your path was chosen before you were born; you were predestined by a higher power; chemicals in your brain and genes make all your choices for you. It's a common belief, more so than one might think - you and your S.O. were meant to be together; all things work together for good for those who love God and have been called according to His purposes.
Free will:
The world is what we make of it. Each of us chooses our destiny, and can change the world. As the great philosopher Sarah Connor put it, "the unknown future rolls towards us." Skynet is not a sure thing.
So that's a long-running schism-starter in a nutshell. Now, if one can think of a case in which it could be "both" or "neither" of the above, rather than either/or, then we will be starting to think perpendicularly. Philosophies such as the Blind Watchmaker tend to avoid the dilemma by taking elements of both, for instance - in the moment, we have free will, but back in the day there was a Creator who started everything running. Similarly, many Christians (and Hindus, etc.) would put this in the aforementioned category of "mystery" - deities know what will happen, but we don't, and thus we have free will and responsibility for our actions, and yet can also rely on not being able to really catch the higher powers unawares. (Of course, I must acknowledge that this conflict wouldn't be such a big deal if not for the plenty of other Christians (and Muslims, etc.) over the years who have taken a more hard-line Fate approach, coming down on the side of Predestination emphatically.)
The above syncretic systems are a good start. Even more purely perpendicular is the common "who cares?" approach of agnostics - if we don't have free will, it sure still feels like we do, and we should just act with what we know even if everything winds up having been fated. Another perpendicular one is the hypothesis of multiple universes: everything can happen and is happening somewhere, so the illusion of choice (whether by fate or by you) is only an artifact of us having ended up in this particular universe.
Quantum mechanics indicates that the future arrives as probabilities resolve, as we observe it - so personally, I'm agnostic about the existence of other universes, but what's interesting about that is that our universe is not really knowable. When observed, it is deterministic... until then, it behaves as though both options were equivalent. Now, I know many have used the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle as pop psychology, as if to say that all knowledge is thus impossible, when that's really way beyond the scope of a little equation talking about position and momentum. But when we are talking about determinism in particular, it's relevant, I'd say. And sure, maybe all that is too small a scale - God or Fate may operate at a more macro level of physics, right?
Anyhow, all this rambling is just to explore a popular conflict, and try to make a case for nuance. Many folks I've met will pick sides quite readily on this point, but worse, will assume anyone not in full agreement is secretly working for the other camp. This may be the real danger of false dichotomies.
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