Predestination

Question:-

I live in Morocco, working as an English teacher in an American school in Rabat, and I sometimes have discussions with my students about free will and pre-destination.

My students insist that although Allah knows everything and has already written the future, they still have free will and will be punished or rewarded according to their actions.

I don't understand. For me, if everything is already decided then we have no choice in our actions, and it is not fair to punish us if we do something bad. It was Allah who decided before we were born that we were going to do something bad, so why should we be punished for doing it? The same also applies to people who do good things and are consequently rewarded in heaven. Why should they be rewarded for something that Allah decided they would do?

Answer:-

The problem, as I see it, is a confusion about words and phrases.

There is "will" and there is "freedom". But there is no "Free Will".

Will means that we have intentions that we can carry out. Freedom means that there are alternatives. But each alternative requires a cause. (e.g. A marble in a bowl can move along one of any number of ways, but each requires a causal force.)

Allah is the creator of all things - matter, energy, intelligence, life, and all processes and Laws of the Universe. Some things are commanded, some ordained and some permitted.

All things have causes, including the phenomena of nature and our ideas and faculties. But human beings have been given the power of thinking, of data processing. This does not mean that thinking can be done without data or without the causes of thought - the psychological, biological and physical laws and processes, the neural connections, the electronics, the blood circulation, the oxygen, the nutrients, the biological processes in the rest of the body, the psychological influences of culture and so on.

There IS NO FREE WILL. If there were, it would mean that there is more than one centre of initiative in the Universe - more than one god and they would limit each other. That is, what one god did would be outside the control of another. They would not be omnipotent. The Universe would not be a self-consist Unity. There would be disorder and chaos in the Universe and we would not be able to recognise or understand or control anything.

Apart from this, an action based on free will, one that is not constrained by any causes would also not be constrained by any facts or reason or purpose. It would be entirely arbitrary and useless and conflict with everything else.

To deny that "free will" exists is to affirm:-

(a) The Unity and Omnipotence of Allah, and thus the fundamental unity of existence.

(b) That we must conform to Allah's plans in order to do ourselves any good.

(c) That in order to transform ourselves we must put ourselves under an appropriate set of causal influences. e.g. a proper environment and discipline.

Your idea of fairness is based on the false idea of "free will".

Natural Justice means that actions have consequences according to Laws created by Allah.

It is also an inbuilt law in human beings that they avoid suffering which comes from self-contradiction, inner and outer conflict, disintegration and destruction (which is formulated as Hell), and to seek that which will lead to happiness, harmony, self-fulfilment, self-enhancement, inner integration and peace (which is formulated as Paradise).

It is a question of finding out what will achieve those goals and behaving accordingly. This is a matter for seeking the appropriate data and processing it correctly. This is what religions require us to do for our own sake.

The fact that all things have causes and that all these causes are inter-related and derive from the single creative act, or Big Bang, means that the future is already implicit in the past.

When asked this question about the desire or effectiveness of making an effort or not, the Prophet Muhammad (saw) is reported to have said:- That too is ordained.

However, we do not know what the future is. One could think of Reality as consisting of a Field of Potentialities in which the actual or manifest world is a small part. In this Field whatever a person does is an actualisation of certain potentialities.

Another way of looking at this is as follows:- There is a Universal Plan and a Process of Selection. Entities that conform to the Plan survive and prosper and those that do not are destroyed. This destruction releases the material of which the entities consist for a new construction which is also selected in the same way. Therefore, the outcome is the same whatever you do, the Plan of Allah is inevitably fulfilled.

I hope this is clear.

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