Free Will or Fate

You are holding a glass in your hand. Someone tells you that if you open your hand, the glass will fall on the ground and break into pieces. You open your hand and the same thing happens. How did he know all that? Was he from the future? No. He could tell that based on his knowledge. Because of gravity there was potential energy in the glass. When you opened your hand, that energy was converted into kinetic energy and the glass moved towards the ground. When it hit the ground, as a reaction it was broken because of the force applied on it by the ground. It appears to be a simple event but when analyzed, became more complicated. It is still very simple for the physicists who can make it sound like a complex nuclear explosion, filling the entire black board with equations. So, don’t mess with them.

God has created everything. His knowledge about His creation is complete. Because of that He knows all the schemes that we are planning in our mind while deciding about our next move. This doesn’t mean that He made us do that move. We decided every action of ours, ourselves. When something bad happens as a consequence of our actions, we tend to affiliate it to fate, even though we were the ones to decide and execute it. So I agree with the saying that man is the architect of his future up to some extent. There is some fate involved. How? Let’s see.

I was born in Pakistan. Even if I wished to be born somewhere else, I couldn’t make it happen. This was already decided by God. Some people have been assigned to me with different roles, making them my family. Again, I have no choice in changing these roles or denying them. God chose them for me and I have to accept that. That is why good parents, brothers and sisters are a blessing (and I consider myself to be among the luckiest people on earth because of that). This is fate.

Fate also plays a role in our career. It is shaped through our free will, but eventually it is fate that dictates it. That is why out of all the people, few are chosen to do something big (good or bad) like Einstein, whom the world knows for his theories in science. This had to be done by someone in order for science to move to the next phase. Fate chose Einstein. Why? That is known to the Writer only. God has not revealed that to us. However we as humans can do some study on Einstein’s life to try to find some points that support this decision. So, God has given us a situation. What we have to do is act wisely.

Life is not about playing a good hand but playing a bad hand well

As far as simple tasks are concerned like doing some worship or sin, I believe that that is purely free will. So there is no excuse for committing a crime and saying that it was fate that chose me to accomplish that.

In the End, we will not be accountable for failing to become Einstein, but for failing to do justice to the Role, that we were assigned.