Free will

Do I believe in free will? I’ve come to comprehend believing in free will and believing in God seems to be the same thing.*
*This connection is rather abstract but bear with me for now.

So, I think my answer to that is yes, though I also believe a large part of your life is preordained. This is at least, in all practical aspects true; we do not choose our parents; we do not choose our genetics/physiological make-up; nor do we choose the environment we develop in during the years our development is most critical and simultaneously easily influenced.

I am not very tall and therefore will, for example, never be an NBA player; whether I learn to live with that or not (ha ha), it is the truth. Hence, one might say we were born with a slew of imperfections, perhaps carried on by the sins of our past lives, or you might even say that epigenetics demonstrate the perpetuation of certain methylation patterns from one generation’s genome to the next – thereby increasing your risk of developing lung cancer. Is that ‘fair’?

I like to perform a thought experiment whereby you have now become the proud owner of a chicken farm. You are the farmer, and the chickens are normal people – humans. Now, is it ‘fair’ what we do to chickens in coops? To pigs, cows and sheep for that matter? To believe in a god, is not the same as to believe the god is ‘fair’ or ‘just’, and not purely vengeful out of spite. The interpretation of good and evil was traditionally the philosophical territory of the ancient religions, in the East it is more accepted that you were born with the gift of a ‘good‘ life; but even then, one might ask, “我們說一個人好命, 首先, 甚麼是 ‘好’ 這個字.”