"[blah blah blah] [something about a celestial voice]/If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice."
That the one you're thinking of? Because now it's stuck in my head, and when you have a song in your head that you only know a few words to, that's
annoying.
Although it does make one think. So I've been asking friends all morning what they think of this arguement as it applies to RL, and I've gotten two answers. The first is that there is both free will and fate. Free will is you making decisions that appeal to you, and fate is when a higher power steps in to knock you down a few pegs and keeps you from getting cocky or screwing up too badly.
The other answer is that there is only free will and that what we like to think of as "fate" is just a series of circumstances that come out in favor of a certain occurence.
So I considered that for awhile, then I considered a post of alatar's (from yesterday morning), and then I considered a few if/then statements, and here's what I came up with:
If you've got an open ended question like with The All-Mighty setting up the rules and then sitting back to watch the game, then you can have both fate/destiny/higher power and free will. Because the Ultimate Plan of Eru is to sit back and see what happens, but not to encourage it or tweak it.
If, on the other hand, you've got a clearly defined (or defined in any way) ending to the story (Eru's got something in mind that's going to happen), then anything you do plays into it and it's already been forseen. If it's already been forseen, it's already happened, and you can't change what's already happened, even if it happens in the future.
Now since I don't think that last bit made any sense at all, I'm just going to give up for awhile, since I suspect that I might be being pig-headed without noticing.