A Short Mediation on Philosophy (and cocaine)

Philosophy is a subject that has been discussed by man for LITERALLY hundreds of years.

On the question of free will.
Do we have free will? Everything points to yes. We certainly have the feeling that whatever we are doing at any given moment is our free and unobstructed decision, usually taken as what we like to think of as the best possible of all alternatives.

HOWEVER
How can we live within a world in which it is generally accepted that things act within a causal framework AND still believe that we ever had any choice in the matter as to whether or not we were going to eat that cheeseburger or lock our keys in the car for the tenth fucking time this year?!

Time can be seen as a line (ex. ------------------) There is a beginning and an end, the end being, for the sake of argument, the present. Now, that line is punctuated by an infinite amount of events, all being affected by the events that occurred earlier in the line (1--------2-----3---4--) Here we have the cross-section of the time line, event 1 could probably be... I dunno... my father deciding to have that one last beer in 1985, event number 2 is him forgetting to wear a condom, event 3 is my being born, and event four is my 5th birthday where I cried because the clown my mother hired for me couldn't adequately perform the simple task of making his nose honk (what the hell?).

So this is how we generally accept that things work, every event has a cause. However, then a ll of these events must stem back to the beginning of time... to the FIRST event in the universe which caused the second which caused blah blah blah. So when I decide to stay up all night watching G-String divas on HBO and doing lines of coke off of a birthday card from my grandmother... how can I really say that I ever had any choice in the matter? One's choices should always leads back to the big bang, in some way or another.

"AH", you say, "but there's the question of God". God gave us the ability to decide what we are going to do with our lives and whether we will subsequently burn in hell or lick postage stamps for Pat Robertson in heaven. We will forgo the question as to whether or not there is a God for a later session that will never occur. Instead, we'll chalk everything up into two possibilities. A:There is no God and everything we do falls into this causal matrix already discussed. Or B: There is an omniscient omnipotent omnipresent power out there who breathed life into man and... made woman out of spare body parts... apparently.

What does it mean if there is a God like this? Well, God started it all, he made the universe with a flash and a flourish and everything in it, including porcupines and that Uncle that never comes to Thanksgiving anymore. Now, it was supposedly God's plan for man to be made in his image and... do things. Also, he supposedly gave us free will. Ah, but a problem arises from this version of our oft bearded, oft sandaled creator: how can an omniscient, omnipotent power create something without knowing before even creating it exactly how it will behave in the end? Omniscient means that God knows everything that will ever occur from the alpha to the omega, so when God created you... wouldn't he have to know that you were going to lose all of your money in a pyramid scheme or marry a waitress named Claire and have a child with a lazy eye? He would have to (that minx)!

So the God argument is a bust unless he lacks some of his all-powerful... powers... which would take that capital G down a peg. The only way would be for God to be able to limit his own knowledge... which is a logical conundrum right next to "could God make a vodka gimlet so powerful that not even He could finish it without going into that fucking story he always tells at bars, around closing time, about his son?".

CONCLUSIONS: Who the fuck cares? The illusion of free will is so good that it is indistinguishable from the genuine article. Besides, philosophers are just hacks who play with words in order to escape the fact that they drive a ford Taurus and watch entirely too much Jeopardy. At the end of the day, it doesn't actually matter whether or not you had any choice in taking that girl home last night who, in the daylight, kind of resembles Al Franken-- you still have to make her coffee and get her the hell out of your bed.