Free Do You Think You're Clever? by John Farndon

young Oedipus, learning from the oracles at Delphi of his tragic destiny (fate foretold) to kill his father and marry his mother, flees Corinth and ends up in Thebes, where he unknowingly fulfils his destiny.
    The idea of being trapped by fate is a powerful and emotive image, and recurs again and again in literature. It touches the very core of what it means to be human. Those who strive vainly against their lot and fight against fate seem somehow to be heroes, even if they fail. They are those who, like Prometheus stealing the secret of fire, gain their heroic stature by trying to wrest control of the human story away from the gods. They are heroes because they give the human story dignity and pride. They show that even if we fail ever to break the bonds of fate, we are so much more than mere playthings of the supernatural. That’s why, however appalling it seems to kill your father and marry your mother, Oedipus is heroic in his anguish. That’s why, too, Satan in Milton’s
Paradise Lost
is not simply a nasty demon, but a heroic, tragic titan. Nietzsche’s superman, the
übermensch
, with his ‘will to power’ is in some ways the ultimate tragic hero, gaining his status by banishing any idea of gods from the world altogether and courageously staking out a future in a world devoid of fate and devoid of meaning.
    Accepting one’s fate, on the other hand, can either be seen as Zen-like wisdom – why fight what you cannot fight? – or it can be a way of shelving responsibility. If you commit a crime, you can always blame fate. If you cannot be bothered to take a decision, you can say, ‘What’s the point?’, just like the First World War soldiers who fatalistically sometimes declined to wear uncomfortable helmets, saying that if their number was on a bullet it would get them anyway. In this troubled world, many people turn to astrology for the same reason, and ‘it’s written in the stars’ is the same as saying ‘it’s fate’, or listening to supernatural voices. For most people, fatalism – accepting that your whole life is decided by fate – seems a defeat, a sign of personal weakness, or worse, a corrosive cynicism, like that of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Lermontov’s Pechorin and even Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
    Yet philosophers have long had a problem with the concept of fate. It’s not so easy to dismiss with logic as it first seems. If you accept that the world runs by cause and effect, if one movement causes a predictable effect, as Newton’s Laws of Motion bear out, then the future of the world is mechanically predetermined, right down to the movement of atoms; the events of the past inevitably determine the future. So the future can be changed only by changing the very laws of physics. Since we humans are part of this deterministic universe, then our future, too, must likewise be entirely predetermined. If so, that’s not so very different from saying that our lives are controlled by fate, except thatit’s mechanical laws and not heavenly hands that guide our fate, and our oracles are scientific prediction.
    Where, then, is the scope for human free will in this deterministic world? We might believe that we are independently making the decision at this very moment to carry on reading here, or go for a drink, to agree with the ideas expressed or dismiss them as nonsense. Yet is this an illusion? Are we, in fact, trapped in the predetermined course of our lives as surely as Oedipus, blithely thinking that we are heading on our own path, but likewise mechanically fated to end up in our own personal Thebes? Schopenhauer thought we were, suggesting that water might say to itself, ‘I could behave as a breaking wave, or a gushing waterfall, or a calm pond, but today I’ll choose to be a raindrop’, while all the time it’s controlled entirely by mechanical forces. Wittgenstein put it even more simply, imagining a leaf in autumn saying, ‘Now I’ll go this way; now I’ll go that’.
    Dualists who,