Free Will/Determinism Paradox

I haven't been as obsessed over thinking about all of this stuff lately, being more busy with the day to day and not having as much time to sit and ponder. But, as I was sitting on the lawnmower, a thought popped into my head regarding free will. One of the BIG questions is whether or not we have free will. Do we decide our destiny or does everything happen for a reason?  Some say it's both.

I happen to believe everything is random, meaning I do believe we have free will. To me it makes sense that I exist because my parents made a choice, not because I was destined to be here.

Christians tend to avoid this topic. I can remember how I viewed the ideas of determinism and free will, as a Christian. They sell you this hybrid idea where everything happens for a reason, as a part of God's divine plan but where he gave humans free will so that they could CHOOSE to worship him instead of being programmed to. 

There are a lot of reasons this is a problematic teaching, but today we are just going to focus on how it doesn't make any logical sense whatsoever. In this case I am not going to accept the "God works in mysterious ways," argument because you literally cannot have it both ways. You can't have free will and determinism. I'll explain why and use the example that came to be on the mower yesterday. 

If the answer to the big question is determinism, every single minute detail must be pre-planned, because like the butterfly effect, every decision and every action results in something very specific. Therefore nothing would be able to deviate from the plan or it would change the outcome. So, if everything happens for a reason, there can be no free will. God would have needed to not only KNOW what choices would be made by every living thing since the start of time, he would have had to have planned what those decisions would be, in order for everything to play out properly. In other words, my choices would never be mine. I would have to make the choice God needed me to make to further the plan. So, to say people can simply opt out of God's plan makes zero sense at all. The plan must include everything and everyone, if it all happens for a reason. If everything happens for a reason there should be no consequences for making the wrong choice because there is no wrong choice; only the one God has laid out in his divine plan. A hybrid situation cannot exist. It creates a paradox.

Here's what I was thinking about while mowing:

Where I live, near an intersection, I can choose one of two roads to get to work. They both eventually get me from point A to point B. I can either drive one mile west and one mile south or I can drive one mile north and one mile west. Both bring me to the road that takes me into town, to my job. 

Let's say that most days I take the north/west route but for some reason, this morning I decided to take the west/south route and before I can make it to the road that takes me to work regardless of which path I start out on, I am in a terrible accident and I die. 

Did my free will kill me? I had the decision to make, whether to go this way or that and had I stuck with my usual route, I would have been perfectly safe and made it to work without incident. Did I make the choice that killed me or was it all part of God's plan and he made me choose to drive toward my impending death? In my case, not only would I die, but I would die and be sent to hell for being a non-believer. Would THAT be my free will sending me to hell? And if so, the God that loves me so much and wants me to be with him would plan my death before I was able to reconcile everything so I could join him? That was his plan? Some may look at this scenario and say that God decided my time to go and I chose not to go to heaven. That would be where the free will part came in. The problem with that argument is, they would be saying that free will isn't actually free will, but only free will in some instances. Like, I couldn't NOT choose to drive the route that led to my death, because PLAN. But, I COULD choose to worship God just in case so I wouldn't go to hell. What!? Free will means free will; as in free all the time! If I can only choose a few things and everything else is a way that has already been paved, that's not free will at all. That's manipulation.

God having a divine plan is something the church made up at some point. If you read the old testament at all; even just Genesis, you can see clearly that the Christian God has no actual plan. And is that Elyon or Yahweh?  

People talk about all lives being sent here by God and life being sacred and you look around and see that's not it at all. Why would God send lives to earth who would only know suffering by being born with cancer or AIDS or by being born into slavery or into a life of excruciating poverty or sexual abuse, physical abuse or both. God chose for those kids to be born into that life? Or was that the free will of the adults who made the choices they made without there being any other reason? 

Life has to be random. It has to be. Free will cannot exist alongside determinism.