the will to act

One of the most memorable scenes from the 2005 movie Batman Begins showed a young Bruce Wayne training with his mentor. They had a conversation that went like this:

Mentor: Your parents death was not your fault, it was your father’s. Anger does not change the fact that your father failed to act.
Bruce: The man had a gun.
Mentor: Would that stop you?
Bruce: I’ve had training…
Mentor: Training is nothing, the will is everything… the will to act.

There are moments in life we all regret, where we know that if only we had had the will act, that then our lives may have turned out differently. One of my friends studying to become a priest told me last night that most everything that happens in life is God’s intent, but yet we still have free will. This somewhat puzzled me since how is it that God can intend for events to happen, yet we can still have influence on our own futures? I think one way of looking at it is like this: God is like a helicopter pilot that can see above a highway that winds through mountains. He can see where the cars are going, but the drivers in those cars can’t see what’s beyond the mountains obscuring the winding path.

From This Rock Magazine:

Q: If God knows today what I will do tomorrow, what happens to my free will?

A: Nothing at all. God’s foreknowledge of something isn’t the same as pre-ordaining it. In fact, it isn’t really foreknowledge. What we call God’s foreknowledge is merely knowledge of what is future for us. From the divine point of view, it’s knowledge of the present. Remember, unlike us, God is outside of time. His existence isn’t divvied up into compartments known as past, present, and future. He simply is. As a result, God sees what is past, present, and future for us as one grand Now and understands how it all fits together.

Think of it this way. You’re traveling through the mountains along winding roads. You don’t know what’s ahead. A helicopter flies overhead. From his vantage point, the pilot sees miles beyond you. He knows where you’ve been, where you are now, and where you’re going.

God is like the helicopter pilot. He sees the whole road of life, while we see only immediately ahead of us. His knowledge of where we’re ultimately headed in no way diminishes our freedom.

Here’s that scene from Batman Begins that I’m talking about.