Friday, June 29, 2007

Part Deux: Luck vs. Free Will

…Continued from last blog Luck vs. Free Will.

So luck vs. free will. Some people call it predestination vs. free will or fate vs. free will. If I were to start believing that I have a lucky or unlucky personality that would seem rather superstitious. It would mean that my skills, choices, and intelligence have nothing to do with what happens in my life. Fate or luck, by this definition totally contradicts the greatest gift that God gave us: Free Will. It is our choices in life that lead us to lucky or unlucky circumstances. Case in point, my string of unlucky happenings can be attributed to the following: I wouldn’t have run into the tree had I paid attention better or for that matter, chosen not to drive that day. I wouldn’t have been delayed at the airport had I chosen to fly a different day or for that matter, decided to drive to Montana. My friend’s ceiling wouldn’t have collapsed had he chosen to live somewhere else and his car wouldn’t have broken down had I not tampered with the engine! (joke).

Alas, these two arguments are the extremes. On one hand is having no control over our lives as in luck or fate and on the other is having total control of our lives as in free will. There is an element here that cannot be forgotten when we think about free will and choices. It is Faith. Faith is the other element of our lives that we use to attribute to the things we cannot explain. We have to have faith that our choices are the right ones and if they turn out not to be, then something good will come out of it. Some people say, “it must have happened for a reason.” Yes, I didn’t want to hit that tree, but I learned to be extra careful when backing up a 15 passenger van. God was telling me something there. He wasn’t putting a voodoo curse on me making me unlucky so that I hit the tree, but He was saying, “you made a choice and it didn’t quite work out perfectly, hence you are human. But you also must have faith that I gave you that choice and so you still have free will. You can learn from it and maybe even something better can come from it.” Faith is knowing that we won’t always be right, we won’t always be “lucky”, but we will always have free will to do what we think is right. And learning from our mistakes to make something good come out of them is such a noble thing to do. Rather than saying, “why do these things always happen to me,” we should say, “I’m going to take this curveball, learn from it, and do something positive from what I learned.” Doing so takes faith, good decision making…and even a little bit of luck :)

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Our moral freedom, like other mental powers, is strengthened by exercise. The practice of yielding to impulse results in enfeebling self-control. The faculty of inhibiting pressing desires, of concentrating attention on more remote goods, of reinforcing the higher but less urgent motives, undergoes a kind of atrophy by disuse.
PEACE BE WITH YOU
MICKY