Determinism, Fatalism and Predeterminism
While the terms are often used interchangeably, fatalism, determinism, and predeterminism are discrete in emphasizing different aspects of the futility of human will or the foreordination of destiny. However, all these doctrines share common ground.
Determinists generally agree that human actions affect the future but that human action is itself determined by a causal chain of prior events. Their view does not accentuate a "submission" to fate or destiny, whereas fatalists stress an acceptance of future events as inevitable. Determinists believe the future is fixed specifically due to causality; fatalists and predeterminists believe that some or all aspects of the future are inescapable, but not necessarily due to causality.
Fatalism is a looser term than determinism. The presence of historical "indeterminisms" or chances, i.e. events that could not be predicted by sole knowledge of other events, is any idea still compatible with fatalism. Necessity (such as a law of nature) will happen just as inevitably as a chance—both can be imagined as sovereign.
Likewise, determinism is a broader term than predeterminism. Predeterminists, as a specific type of determinists, believe that every single event or effect is caused by an uninterrupted chain of events that goes back to the origin of the universe. Determinists, holding a more generic view, meanwhile, believe that each event is at least caused by recent prior events, if not also by such far-extending and unbroken events as those going back in time to the universe's very origins.
Both fatalism and predeterminism, by referring to the personal "fate" or to "predetermined events" strongly imply the existence of a someone or something that has done the "predetermining." This is usually interpreted to mean a conscious, omniscient being or force who has personally planned—and therefore knows at all times—the exact succession of every event in the past, present, and future, none of which can be altered. One of the most famous theological interpretations of this idea is the Calvinist Christian notion of predestination, in which all occurring events have been already willed at the beginning of the universe by God. Contrarily, determinism does not usually imply the existence of such a supernatural being; many determinist models fall under scientific rather than religious or mystical philosophies.
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