One of the numerous questions that has plagued mankind since the beginning of organized religion is free will vs. predestination. People each have various positions regarding this, but what we can’t deny is that our opinions for this specific debate are completely bias and one sided. I admit, for the majority of my life I was the same way.

The truth is most people refuse to believe in predestination. They constantly try to convince themselves that they are not simply mindless creatures in some great plan that God has set, they want confidence in the fact that they can make their own decisions and have a say in the type of person they become.

The thing is, there is no genuine way to prove the existence of free will. I still don’t deny that free will exists. To me personally, it is a leap of faith that we must chose to take in the same way that we chose to believe in a god or an afterlife, something that our pathetic human minds cannot comprehend. However, when we question whether god does or does not exist, the world we know inevitably points towards existence. For many of us, we begin asking ourselves how can anything exist if no one created it? And, for many of us, it is enough. On the contrary, everything in this world that we can comprehend points towards predestination.

Whenever we make a decision, any decisions, what do we base it on? We base it on our past experiences, and if it’s a moral decision, then sometimes on the type of person we are born as. Once you have given it some thought, you will find that statement to be true. Anything we freely chose to do will be based on trial and error or what we have experienced or saw in the past. Some other decisions will be based on how we were born, whether we are impatient or patient, stingy or generous. Where then, does free will come into play? That is a question that perhaps no one will be able to answer in our lifetime.

Eventually, this leads us to the last question, one that affects every living person on the face of this planet. Our world is plagued by murderers, thieves, and rapists. To us, they are the scum of the earth and should be sentenced to a lifetime of prison, or even execution. While I do agree they should be punished, it is because of the fact that it is necessary to prevent them from doing farther harm.

But who are we to judge them? We cannot know what is happening in their minds. Can we really judge them when we do not know the story of their lives? Whatever your beliefs, it cannot be denied that many of these people have been neglected and abused as a child. We can’t say for sure that they chose to become what they are because as far as we know, nobody has a choice to the type of person they are born as.

Many of us chose to believe in free will because we do not want to believe in a system in which we cannot make our own choices. However, the other reason that sometimes isn’t as obvious is the fact that the majority of us are relatively good people. We want to believe that we are these saintly people in our minds of our own accord, not through some entity’s will. I firmly believe that everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, but the fact of the matter is, we have not yet proven either one and until then we must respect the beliefs of others.