In a nutshell, my belief system is pretty simple and can be described by determinism. I don't believe that there was a beginning and I don't believe there will be an end, to the universe that is. We are a bunch of bundles of energy that collide and combine together to form particles, atoms, molecules, etc. Somehow out of the collisions of particles at the proper angles and momentum, we came in to being. All because of cause and effect.
Last night I was thinking about fate. Fate is something I always ascribed to religion, so I always put it out of my head. You always hear from theists that God as a grand plan for us all. Fate always sounded to me like something that was beyond my control. Something is going to happen to me whether I like it or not. Anything to do with predetermined fate or destiny always put me off.
Sure, you can hold an object up in the air and say it is predetermined to fall to the ground. But can you really be sure that it will hit the ground? No, you can't. Say a gust of wind blows you over on your back and the object lands on your groin. We can't know because we don't know or have control over all of the globules of energy in the world or universe. If we did and we knew nothing would interrupt the object as it fell, you think it would be okay assume that the object was predetermined to hit the ground. But, this is also not possible.
Now unless there did exist a god who knew everything and had absolutely no effect on the universe unless he or she willed it and this god told us everything there was to know about the universe, there is no way we could know for sure. Why? Because in order to find out for ourselves, we would have to measure. And in the process of measuring, we change what we are measuring, giving us skewed results (Uncertainty Principle).
But with this deterministic viewpoint, everything is predetermined - but there is no way for us to know exactly what the results will be. So in a sense, we are fated, and we do have a destiny.
An atheist who believes in fate. Weird!
It is bizarre to think that every whimsical action we take is predetermined. Like mentioned before, imagine that we know everything there is to know about the universe without making any measurements. We would then be able to determine or calculate that John Smith from Austin Texas will perform a cartwheel on his front lawn at 5:34 p.m. to show off to his children. It is difficult to accept that everything I am doing right now could have been foreseen if this knowledge was available. Every letter I type is predetermined. It seems very bizarre, but it seems to make sense.
In the same way, it seems far fetched to believe that if I tap the floor right now with my finger, it will send energy from the point of contact all the way to the other side of the earth. But it all boils down to cause and effect. We may not be able to measure it in its finest detail, but it exists.
