If you think about it carefully it seems impossible to reconcile two things which most people would very much like to believe – one, that they enjoy free will and in some ultimate sense are masters of their fate, and, two, that the God of all creation is omnipotent and has a master plan for us all.
The two do not appear logically compatible. Surely there must always be a conflict between human freedom and the infinite knowledge and power of God. Even the angels, Milton tells us, were in “endless mazes lost” when they tried to figure out how God could know in advance what we humans were not programmed to do in advance. Philosophers and theologians have twisted themselves into verbal knots to surmount the problem – finding some favour, for instance, has been the argument for “backward causation:” when we freely act today, we bring it about that God foreknew yesterday that we would so act today. Work that one out if you can.
On the whole the determinists seem to have won the argument. Either everything we do must have been foreseen by an all-knowing God which means that our actions are preordained and therefore are not free. Or, if there is no God, our actions arise inexorably out of the workings of a universe whose laws are set in iron and do not permit any such thing as
