[Sara] Serendipity. It's one of my favorite words.
[Jonathan] It is? Why?
[Sara] It's such a nice sounding word for what it means: a fortunate accident. I don't really believe in accidents. I think fate is behind everything.
[Jonathan] Oh you do?… So everything is predestined, we don't have any choice at all?
[Sara] No, I think we make our own decisions, but fate sends us little signs and it's how we read those signs that determines whether we are happy or not.
These words from the video Serendipity, which I watched last night, got me thinking about destiny and fate and things that happen that may well be fortunate accidents.
I remember speaking with a friend a few months ago about fate and destiny. When I meet this friend it was a result of Serendipity. I rambled that I dislike the idea of destiny or fate or luck because it means I have no control over a situation (my nature of a control freak coming out again). What I was saying was that I want to have free will.
Then this morning I read Scott Adam's Dilbert Blog and he basically said we are all moist robots with no free will.
In a prior post I asked who is at fault if a guy pokes a bear with a stick and the bear kills him. Then I sweetened the pot by supposing the bear was actually an irrational guy whose religion says you need to kill people that poke you with a stick … The correct answer, and the one that no one offered as far as I could tell, is that it was no ones fault. Not the guy with the stick, not the bear, and not the irrational religious guy. Each creature acted according to its nature and its programming, as all moist robots must.
The bear is a furry moist robot. You poke him, he mauls you. It's that simple. The bear's brain isn't equipped for free will. Neither is yours or mine.
To add to all that Paul says that "God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family", then adds just a sentence later that God "is so rich in kindness and grace that he purchased our freedom". This just brings heaps of questions to mind like; If God decided, how can we be free? And what if he decided not to, do we still have freedom? Are there boundaries between destiny and free-will?
It seems I may have become a fence sitter on this matter, in a serendipitous way.