The Future Doesn't Suck. One of the most deeply embarrassing ideas humanity has ever come up with, embarrassing in the sense that it is shaming to belong to a species that is stupid enough to have seriously considered it, is the idea of destiny.
We are not here for a reason, to fulfil a purpose. We are here because we were caused to exist. Come on people, think about what actually happened. The hand of fate did not make you. You exist because your parents engaged in sexual intercourse on a particular occasion. An almost limitless number of events could have taken a different course and you would not exist, either no child would have been created or your place might have been usurped by another brother, sister, half-brother, half-sister or perhaps even a pet. Pull back another generation and the possibilities explode exponentially.
Believers in fate never make it clear over what sort of timescale they believe fate works. Does it live next Tuesday and direct things from there or is it sat on a higher perch thirty years in the future? Or does destiny work on the scale of the galaxies? In trying to ensure that Cinderella and Prince Charming live happily ever after does destiny have to ensure the creation of enough heavy elements to form a rocky planet for them by creating stars and waiting for them to die? Or perhaps I am being too small-minded, maybe the entire universe has been caused to come into existence by events which are to happen billions of years in the future. Maybe. But pardon me if I dismiss the entire notion of fate and destiny as absurd and contrary to everything we know about life, the universe and everything.
Causation runs linearly. The present is shaped by the past, not the future. What is happening depends on what has happened, not on what is destined to happen, or still less by what was prophesied to happen.
The notion of prophesy is even more absurd than the idea of fate. Some desert-dwelling beardie goes all wide-eyed and babbles some nonsense and credulous people write it down as if it was not so much a prediction about the future as what The Future Must Be simply because he has been witnessed saying it. If the guy could predict the future he'd be or at least work for a bloody successful merchant, surely, not by wandering about in the desert eating locusts or whatever prophets-in-waiting do.
The Future Does Not Suck - Reprise
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe the present is caused by the past and those superstitious idiots who believe the future sucks.
The superstitious worldview that everything happens for a reason (i.e. the future sucks) does not stack up to observed reality and careful scrutiny using the tools of rational analysis.
The superstitious idea is that if Jane met John as a result of having an oil leak in her car that this "was meant to be" so that they could meet. But why? How far ahead is the future sucking? From ten years into a happy marriage between Jane and John or from twenty thousand years in the future in which the great ^14 grandson (via John's second less happy marriage to the bereavement counsellor) has to swerve to avoid hitting a dog in his aircar so that brave sick child Laura is not deprived of her only friend? Come on, Laura needs that dog, was all that groundwork with Genghis Khan, Napoleon and the invention of the bacon double cheeseburger wasted?
The concept of the future sucking, of destiny, is an insult to our intelligence. It requires there to be an intelligence operating in the universe capable of plotting trajectories so complex that they bugger the imagination even just beginning to sketch out their vastness. Chaos theory has lent the understanding of why this is so absurd more weight. Tiny disturbances can have enormous repercussions. An ill-timed fart, a telephone call, noticing an insignificant piece of fluff on the carpet can cause a person to change their train of thought and so delay a decision until later, which may change either the decision or its consequences, which ripples out into bigger and bigger ripples and more and more complicated interference patterns ensuring that two thousand years later not a single person alive is the same person that they would have been had that ripple not happened. The implications of chaos theory clearly show that the tiniest of changes can have effects right across a complex system, after a month a butterfly flapping in the Amazon can change the weather in Beijing, so surely after two thousand years a single fart could change a government. The tiniest decisions we make today could and indeed must be matters of life and death in the future: holding in that fart really could kill a kitten. So could letting it go. Life's like that.
The other way to ensure that you can go on imagining that the future sucks is to imagine gods and demons playing with us for their sport, interacting with the universe in real time, doing magic, playing chess with real live pieces and pawns. This idea might have played well with the ancient Greeks but does it really make any sense to us today? Can we really imagine a god or gods watching over us, not knowing for certain what is going to happen but prepared to mess in our affairs to make things happen for their own reasons?
Wouldn't chaos theory also work on acts of gods? Making John fall for Jane would change dozens of lives, some in small ways, some in more major ways. Within a few years the ripples that push out from that event would have changed thousands of lives in some way or another. Just follow the life of Julie, babysitter to Jane, five years later. By taking that job (because God wanted John to marry Jane) Julie doesn't go out with Wayne, so doesn't get chlamydia or have an abortion she gets weepy about fifteen years later, so instead of becoming an alcoholic at 35 and a mother of three she develops an interest in French after watching a late night film with subtitles and as a consequence falls under the spell of Douglas. Because she meets Douglas she becomes a teacher and finding it stressful and unrewarding she takes early retirement in the South of France where she dies of skin cancer, childless, a failed painter. The red boots Julie buys as a direct consequence of that babysitting job cause her to fall out with her best friend, fail to become a bridesmaid, godmother and lifelong friend of a large family of popular and outgoing children. Did God want all of that to happen? And that was just one chain of causation, something as major as making a couple fall in love would cause hundreds of such chains, or indeed nets. If we follow another chain no doubt we can find more changes caused to other lives, some minor, some major, some for the good of one, some to the detriment of many. For instance if Julie didn't buy the red boots (because John didn't marry Jane and there were no children to babysit) they would have been reduced by 20% and sold to Fiona, who wears them out one Saturday afternoon, the flash of red catches the eye of a farmer driving by who loses his train of thought and therefore decides to plant the oats next to the road and the rape near the woods rather than the other way around, which leads Wayne to take his new girlfriend for a different walk and get lucky with Fiona's older sister ... etc. etc. Life is far more complicated than pool and it really doesn't do to slam the cue ball as hard as you can and just hope for the best.
Isn't it significantly simpler to look upon life as the result of what has happened in the past rather than what wants to happen in the future? Working forward into an unknown future from a partially known past makes far more sense for us living our lives. We don't need to plot and plan twenty moves ahead and thirty eight levels deep. We don't need to stress out over decisions. If you stop consciously making decisions you don't drop down dead. If you plan everything in great detail you don't stop being surprised by what life brings.
The life we are experiencing would not have happened if the past was different, but that does not imply that the past was made to be that way because we have to be where we are now. That is absurd and colossally arrogant! We didn't have to be, either as individuals or as a species. We just are. Imagine taking a pack of cards loosely in your hands and flinging them at the ceiling. The pattern they make when they fall would take you an hour or so just to describe and an eternity to replicate using the same method. Our lives are a result of a process vastly more complicated than that. Calculating how that pattern emerged is not necessary to make it happen. The present is caused by the effects of the events of the past not by the forces of destiny: the future does not suck.