Does anyone have an answer?

Nice question. I think we are all responsible for our futures. We have the power to change what happens in our lives or how they go about. When it comes to religion we are told constantly by our elders everything is written for us (our relationships, employment, how many children we have… etc)… and if we knew what the world had in store for us we would try so hard to avoid any evil/misfortune that occurs in our lives. So I suppose we walk the road blindfolded. We never know what is going to happen next. Whether its an earthquake, a tsunami or a new world order… everything changes and sometimes its beyond our control. Other times ‘luck’ (which is something I don’t believe in much) is on our side. I suppose ‘luck’ does it have its place and somethings do happen by ‘chance’… other times we can just justify it as a miracle. And… miracles do happen… its just in a materialistic, secular world sadly not many of us notice them. Not necessarily are all of them dramatic… sometimes they just happen as way of telling us something.

Please open your blindfolder mona by closing to GOD so you take a torch for searching in peace both heart and world

i dont think there is an answer to that, its like asking does god exist… we all hear of people who shaped their own destiny and other people along with it ( Arafat, Castro, ben gurion, ghandi, Malcolm X) but we never hear of the many that did try to change their destiny, and placed as much effort as these guys but it didnt succeed.. i think ultimately its matter of choices and how we go about making the right choice… in life 1+1 doesnt equal 2… so we tend to find the optimum solution, in the circumstances we are in, based on previous knowledge, calculated risk etc… but if things are already destined for us? then why exist? and why does allah have a judgment day? its kind of like here is a test, i know what your score will be, i know what answers you will get wrong, and what your outcome after the test will be. but just take the test anyway so i couldnt be at fault when questioned…. because my tests are multiple choice you always have options….. i would lean on more on the side that we make our own destiny… nothing is certain, but we create the shapes and walk the paths that lead to it… if things dont work out as we wished them to be destined… then its just life…. and life is perfect in its imprefections

We have a part of our life that is predefined and we have to accept it .. not just a part of life but things happen in our life like Born or Death ..

And there is another part of our life that need us to work harder to achieve our own destinies .. If we did the right actions in our life, used our minds perfectly, then this is our own destiny and we control it ..

It’s our choice at last .. whether to let ourselves going “blindfolded” or we achieve our own goals in life

Very difficult question I think it’s a combination of the two.

While we have freewill to allows us to make choices, leading us through our life. Our choices are based on our experienced socialization, so we never really have full freewill as each new decision we make is based almost completely on what happened before we made it which allows us to draw a line through our life from one choice to the next.

If the question is about whether Allah predetermines all of this – I do not know. I’d like to think the Creator loves the Created enough to allow us to utilize the intelligence & reasoning skills we were given to make our own choices.

We shape our own destiny, we choose our own choices, if i would speak from a religious point view i would say god we would do this and that but in the end we are accounted for what we have choose

There is a level of comprehension that we can not reach regarding this matter. If you want to look at it in a way as everything is predermined, in Allah’s view.. In our view, we make our own descisions.. He knows what is going to happen, while we only know what just happened. To us, our lives consist of our surroundings, family, friends…etc. We know what we see and do and what we want to do and where we want to go, etc.. To Allah, he see’s everything, every person, the past, present, and future. So do we walk blindfoldly? No.. I visit your page from time to time, why today? Cause Allah said I would chose to. I don’t usually post comments, why today? You get the idea… Just to sit and contemplate this notion actually is a form of worship, obviously you would want to be in awe of Allah’s work..

I know you hate my philosophical standpoints, but here goes:

From a physics point of view, at the most basic (atomic) level we have the laws of uncertainty (we can never know the speed and location of a particle at the same time) and probability (we can only know the chance of an electron being somewhere, we never know where it actually is). So this would indicate nothing is predestined, but acually literally happens by chance.

However, humans arent single atoms, and these effects are only relevant
at the smallest level. I belief that we can shape our own future, but only in a limited way. Your life is shaped mostly, for or good or for worse, by things like your family, environment, country, culture, genetic make-up etc.
About actual predestination (god has decided and knows everything long before we were born): it would mean that to God, the passing of the millions of years would be nothing more than watching a video tape you have already watched before. Would He, the Almighty choose such a boring existence? i think not.

You shape your own destiny. Your future is what YOU make of it so if someone sits around at home and does nothing then they obviously won’t get anywhere in life. That’s what I believe, simple as that.

@Mona

The previous topic about marriage gets 113 comments, this one only 10. I guess marriage is more important than the ultimate question of life

My biggest regret is that i dont know more smartasses

Who cares about the nature of things when you have a beautiful spouse. Its only lonely people who think about things like that.

So what would you do if i said that i have the answer from the Most High and said that everything if predefined?

or the other way round, everything is random

Maybe not knowing is better than knowing?

We think we shape our destinies but we really don’t which is why we are blindfolded. Take off the blindfold, figure out your role in life and you will find your destiny.

In different ways, everybody who has commented has given you the answer. Even smartass maarten with not knowing is better than knowing. Not knowing is what makes life such a wild ride.

We are the sum of our choices in life. We shape our role or roles in life. Whether this is preordained and predefined I don’t know and I don’t think I want to know. If you take the ability to choose from us human beings then our lives are reduced to nothing. Doing nothing is a choice.

And, no Mona I don’t want that tiny glimpse of knowing, I would rather live the adventure

Ah yes. Of course we want that little glimpse. That’s why we wonder about it. It’s a deep question with an even deeper answer. But if you can figure out the role you play in the grander scheme of things, then you’ll get that glimpse. It won’t be clearly defined for you. It will be more like a sense or feeling of “knowing”. But you will have a vague sense of where your life is going without knowing exactly. That probably doesn’t make sense because it’s complicated. So I’m going to stop here because now I’m getting a headache thinking about it.

I STRONGLY believe we are shaping our own destinies.
There is limited “material” we can work with resulting from external circumstances, but we always always have choices left.

And the “kismet” attitude holds people back. Discourages them of taking control.
Very detrimental.

There is an old joke in Ukraine.
“One time a very poor man got tired of being poor all the time. He prayed to God every day and finally God answered his prayers: once the man woke up and saw God by his side, telling him that he will get rich and will win a lottery. The man got so happy. He was waiting one-two-three days, weeks and weeks but he never won a lottery. When he died he went to heaven, saw God and asked Him furiously – you told me I’d win a lottery, why I never did? Then God answered – why did you never buy a lottery ticket?”
I’m not best joke teller, but I like the story. Some things are predetermined. Some things/signs/help are given to us along the way. But it’s up to us to choose to use it or not.
Maarten, great smartass discussion

Hm, I say that everything is pre-defined, but our choices are what makes them happen.

Islamically, when you learn the creations, you learn that the second creation is the pen and the guarded tablet which holds everything that happened from the begging of time and everything that will happen untill the end of time.

now my mother and i argued one day, i dont know how it came to it, i cant even remember the background story to it. But we were arguing because she thinks that allah dosent make us do stupid things allah gave us brains to figure out right from wrong…. example If i jump infront of a car, that purely had everything to do with me. But i would argue that yeah i jumped infront of the car, but its by the will of allah i jumped infront of the car, if allah didnt want that to happen I wouldnt of done it.

and i just wanted to leave a little quote, it kind of has a bit to do with pre-destination.
– God doesn’t give you the people you want God gives you the people you need. To help you to hurt you to have you and to make you into the person you were meant to be.

Great Question! This one kills my brain.

Right now, I think I will mostly agree with Jazzy. God I think is outside of time. He can see all of time the way we see a picture, for example. So he knows everyting and to Him, it’s all pre-ordained.

But since we do not know ourselves, we are then living with, what I feel to be the ‘Illusion’ of Free Will… which bothers the shit out of me.

On the other hand, What if our free will is real.. and our choices affect the universe, like ripples in an infinite ocean. In that case, would “pre-destiny” (from God’s perspective) be an ever changing, real-time video rather than a picture?

Islamically, when you learn the creations, you learn that the second creation is the pen and the guarded tablet which holds everything that happened from the begging of time and everything that will happen untill the end of time.

What evidence is there for such a tablet? In any way, this belief, when taken seriously would lead to apathy. Why bother if everything has been decided beforehand?

If i jump infront of a car, that purely had everything to do with me. But i would argue that yeah i jumped infront of the car, but its by the will of allah i jumped infront of the car, if allah didnt want that to happen I wouldnt of done it.

This would imply that all murdereres, thieves and rapists do their evil because Allah wants it.

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?”

Epicurus – Greek philosopher, BC 341-270

@Mona
If you wish so, so be it. I understand you rather like to hear opinions you agree with, we all do. I still think that my comment wast out of place, since the topic is predestination.

Im sorry if i caused you offence. Not that I apologise for my opinion, but still it is your weblog and I am your humble guest. I guess converts are the worst.

@maarten

You remind me of a story told to me as a child, when I asked questions about heaven and hell…

I won’t relay the story here, but the jist of it was that if once we are born, and since God knows what we will do, why doesn’t he just throw us to the place where we will eventually end up (heaven or hell), and the answer was because then we wouldn’t understand why we are there (in heaven or in hell) if we did not live our lives and make the choices that sent us there.