OT: Some of mankind's toughest questions

[Kamog]

Just a few days ago, I was discussing the purpose of life with a colleague at work. He had recently watched a program on insects and their life cycles, and it was explained that the purpose of life for an insect is only to reproduce. They just have to grow and survive long enough so that they can reproduce, and then their job in life is done and they die. We hope that us humans have more of a purpose to life than just the biological function of propagating the species.

[ZeroAdunn]

The reall question is: Do we have free will?

If you believe in an omnipotent and omniscient god, then no we don't have free will.

If you believe in a purely scientific action reaction, relative forces, and all that mumbo jumbo, then no we don't have free will.

For each of these situations, there can be no true free will. If god is all knowing, we do not truly choose, because the path was already laid out for us when the universe was created. If everything is merely a mathamatical theoram of relationships between components of the universe, then we have no free will, because we cannot change how these things happen, because we ourselves are merely expressions of that equation.

In truth, I think the reality lies somewhere in between. I firmly believe that there is something more to life than a random collection of molecules, and that something is what makes us truly alive. Who knows? I certainly don't, but the reall question is, what is the point in debating it? Nobody can answer it one way or another, because ultimately, no on will know untill they reach the clearing at the end of the path.