Do You Really Choose, or Was It Always Going to Happen?
The Scholar Who Argued With Everyone
You are in an ice‑cream shop. You choose chocolate. Was that a real choice, or was it already decided by everything that happened to you before you walked in?
That is exactly the kind of puzzle that kept Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (1149–1210) awake at night. He was a Persian scholar who lived over 800 years ago, in a time of warlords and spies and shifting courts. From his birthplace in Rayy, near modern Tehran, he traveled all over central Asia looking for teachers, patrons, and anyone smart enough to argue with him. He spent years moving between the courts of two rival empires, the Khwārazm-Shāhs and the Ghūrids, becoming a glittering ornament to sultans — but also being accused of secret loyalties and dragged into religious feuds.
Al-Rāzī was a theologian of the Ashʿarite school, meaning he started from the idea that God directly creates everything that happens. Yet he did not hide from philosophy. He fell in love with the works of the towering thinker Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna, 980–1037) — and then decided to take nearly all of them apart. He wrote massive “summae,” books that examined a question by listing every conceivable answer, weighing arguments for and against each one, and only rarely naming a winner. Some readers found this maddening. The great Sufi poet al-Rūmī later compared his method to tearing science apart like bread and feeding it to the birds. But for al-Rāzī, the hunt mattered more than the capture: testing every idea was the point.
Can You Learn Something on Purpose?
Imagine you want to learn what a dog really is. You look up a definition: “A dog is a four‑legged mammal that barks.” But do you now know something new about actual dogs? Al-Rāzī would say no. That definition just explains what you already meant by the word dog. It does not reach out and grab the real animal.
He used an ancient puzzle to make this point. If you are trying to learn about something you know nothing about, how can you even start? You would not know what to look for. But if you already know what you want to learn, then learning is pointless — you already have it. Al-Rāzī pushed the puzzle further than earlier philosophers had: even if you know a thing in one respect and not another, the problem just splits in two. The part you know, you cannot learn. The part you do not know, you cannot search for. Therefore, he concluded, you never intentionally acquire knowledge. Instead, all knowledge is necessary — it comes to you whether you want it or not.
He called the first step of knowing conceptualization, forming a mental concept like “dog,” and the second step assent, judging that the concept matches reality. In his view, neither step is under your control. As an Ashʿarite, he believed God directly creates every event, including every thought in your head. When you see a red apple, you have no power to see it as blue. When you form a belief, you do so because God made that belief appear in you. You are not the driver; you are the passenger.
Like Dominoes Falling
If your beliefs are forced on you, what about your choices? Al-Rāzī took the next step and embraced full determinism, the idea that every event is the inevitable result of earlier causes.
He argued that your actions are produced by three things: your motivations, your beliefs, and your capacities. Do you control any of those? No. Your motivations arise from desires you did not choose; your beliefs, as we just saw, are given to you; your capacities — how strong, clever, or patient you are — are not chosen either. When all three are in place, your action must happen, just as a ball must roll when pushed. He put it in terms borrowed from Ibn Sīnā: for anything that could have failed to exist, there must be a reason that tips the balance and makes it exist. When that reason is present, the thing happens necessarily. So your decision to pick chocolate was not a free choice. It was the last domino in a chain that started long before you were born.
Al-Rāzī did not hide from the strange consequences. Even your desire to learn philosophy is not up to you. Your very reaction to this article — surprise, disagreement, curiosity — was, in his picture, already settled.
So Why Be Good?
If you cannot help what you do, why bother thinking about right and wrong? Al-Rāzī still had an answer, and it turned ethics into a kind of self‑interest.
He started as an Ashʿarite theologian who accepted a divine‑command view: an act is right because God commands it, wrong because God forbids it. But he gave that idea a twist. Why follow God’s commands? Because God has promised pleasure to the obedient and pain to the disobedient. Pleasure, he thought, is the only thing that is good for a person just because of what it is. Pain is the only thing that is bad in the same fundamental way. So the whole point of right action is to maximize your own pleasure and minimize your own pain.
This made him a consequentialist: what matters is the outcome. And he was ready for the hardest objection. Imagine you find a sick stranger alone in a wasteland, with no one watching. You stop and help. What pleasure are you getting? Al-Rāzī’s reply: you act on a principle like if you were in that person’s place, you would want to be helped. But this is not about doing your duty for its own sake. It is about your own long‑term benefit. You want to live in a world where people help one another, because that world is more pleasant for you. So even hidden kindness is, in the end, an investment in your own happiness.
The Feeling of Choosing
You still feel as though you are making choices freely. Al-Rāzī knew that. He did not think we should pretend otherwise in daily life. But he trusted his chain of reasoning: if everything has a cause that makes it necessary, then the feeling of freedom might be no proof at all. It might just be one more sensation that was determined to arise.
This question did not end with al-Rāzī. Philosophers today still argue about whether determinism is true, and whether it is compatible with being morally responsible. The Persian scholar’s approach — weighing every position, even the ones that scared him — shows that a good thinker is willing to follow an argument wherever it leads. Next time you make a choice, you might wonder: was that really me, or was it always going to happen?
Think about it
- If a scientist could predict every choice you will ever make, would it still make sense to praise or blame someone for their actions?
- Imagine you are forced to believe every thought that pops into your head, like a movie you cannot pause. Would you still want to seek out new ideas? Why or why not?
- If you found out that all your decisions are determined by your brain chemistry and past experiences, would it change how you think about your friendships or your goals?
