After writing that post, I began attending Colorado State University for my Master's in Literature. One of the first classes I took was a graduate level course in literary theory, where I was re-exposed to the work of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and exposed for the first time to Ferdinad de Saussure, Gilles Delueze, Terry Williams, Judith Butler and Alain Badiou. These philosophers are some of the most vital and important in contemporary English studies, or have been at some point, and all of them deal, or have been used, with questions regarding ontology. Ontology, or the question of being, is essential to any discussion of free will. From a Christian stance, the question of ontology, or what our being constitutes, is a question that is usually assumed to have been answered from the get go. Most of us who were brought up in evangelical circles have been told the purpose of life is to worship God and get souls saved. I'm being reductionist here, but that is the general means by which most of my evangelical experience has answered the whole "what's the meaning of life/being" question. This short answer allows us to take a stance that is both free-willed and predestined. If the meaning of existence is worship, and the meaning of earthly life is salvation, then the "predestined" notion fits with worship and the salvation is free-willed, i.e. personal. Basically, what part of a free-willed, sinful person would worship a holy God, unless that person made a choice to and then the "deep longing" inside someone is filled by enacting their predetermined purpose, worship. This is how I've come to understand the argument from most of evangelical, Protestant Christianity in how this interplay works. Ultimately though, the stance is that God is in total control and most of our free will is, to an extent, an illusion. This highly Calvanistic tendency has permeated western Protestant Christianity, but I'm not ready to throw it out the window yet.
To take a step away from Christianity, I'd like to return to the postmodern philosophers I was talking about before. These philosophers have concerned themselves with a question of ontology, coming to a "conlcusion" if you will, where they reject any stable notion of being.* To go back to the example above, if someone were to say, "the answer is worship of God" then a response in this mode would counter by saying, "but you are not a being that can do that, because God, religion, and your notion of free-will are totally bound up in the ideological constructions of Western society. You do not have free choice, only the ability to work within a system that shapes you in a certain way." In essence, the notion of being is radically under question and to many in a post-structuralist mode, there is no "real" agency. To be reductionist again, free-will doesn't exist because there are forces (not insidious, just for clarification) that mold and shape every person to conform to the cultural norm of the time they are born, from birth. This is seen as neither good, or bad, just the way it is. Taken to its extreme, this is a form of relativism that isn't totally about "all truth is truth" but "all truth is a construction, so no one truth can be totally trusted as all encompassing." We are, in this vein, "predestined" in a sense, but without a end goal.
I am going to take up my further thoughts in other posts, just because this is turning into a long explanation. Look for part three soon.
*Badiou has been associated with an anti-postmodern movement of Continental philosophy, though from what little I've gathered he is not throwing the post-structuralist view totally out the window, and has been actively associated with attempting to return to some stable notion of being that doesn't rely on modernist assumptions and includes postmodern assertions.
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