The old skool thread

[Takeda Shingen]

Originally Posted by geetrue

You don't have to get huffy puffy ... as a matter of fact I do.

Where do all of those smart people come from ... I will not make that claim for myself, but I seriously wonder how do those people do it.

You know the computer code people, the inventors of motherboards, cpu's, thin screen this and thin screen that.

Who has the scales on smarts?

For example Russia never ceases to amaze me on how they can build such wonderful submarines yet they can't keep them operational.

Where do smarts come from? Before birth is called genes?

How do they get that old grey matter going in the right direction?

Not just Russians of course ...

You're sounding like a Augustinian predestinist. Are some premordially equipped and destined with the end already ordained? In other words, are people simply destined for greatness and are gifted to those ends? How much truly free will do we have?

Most follow the Aquinian view of predestiny as pertaining only to spiritual salvation, but I wonder sometimes if predestiny does not affect more than that aspect of life and death. I sometimes wonder if I am not the plaything of something larger and greater than myself. It would be wholy arrogant for me to believe that I am the highest being in the universe. Maybe it is a god. Maybe it is something else. I don't know.

What I do know is that I have had numerous occurances in my life that have seemed too fortunate to be purely coincidental. Is, therefore, the ultimate end of the free will argument simply that we don't have free will? If I think that it is by my own will that I type these words that is one thing, but if I am unable to see outside of myself to realize that I am coerced to do so is something else all together.

In any case, how can I truly know? Does one develop his abilities, or are those abilities decided before it all began? I have no idea.