Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Doctrines

Determinism, fatalism and free will

Also Known As Freedom and necessity · compatibilism · hard determinism
Philosophy of Religion

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Origin 300 BCE to 2000 CE

Determinism holds that every event, including every choice, is necessitated by prior causes; fatalism holds that outcomes are fixed regardless of what one does; libertarian free will holds that some choices are genuinely open; compatibilism holds that freedom, rightly understood as acting from one's own will, is consistent with determinism. In religious form the debate concerns divine foreknowledge, providence and predestination, and it connects to the atlas's existing treatment of predestination and free will.

Facts
Status
Status Within the Tradition
Standard teaching, not formally defined 1
Standing as a Comparative Category
A standard analytic category in the study of religion 1
A standard and enduring problem in philosophy and theology.
Doctrinal Category
Philosophy of Religion 1
Origins
Origin Period
300 BCE to 2000 CE 1
Held By
Cross-cultural 1
Learn More
Whether Anything Could Have Been Otherwise

Three distinct claims are routinely confused here, and separating them is the first task.

Determinism is the thesis that every event is necessitated by prior events together with the laws of nature, so that given the past, only one future is possible. Fatalism is the different and older thesis that certain outcomes will occur regardless of what anyone does, that the appointment in Samarra is kept whichever road is taken. Determinism does not entail fatalism: on a determinist account what one does is part of the causal chain and makes a genuine difference to the outcome, whereas fatalism holds that it does not. Free will is the capacity at issue in both.

Hard determinism accepts determinism and concludes that free will, understood as the ability to have done otherwise, does not exist. Some contemporary philosophers and neuroscientists hold it, and the experimental work initiated by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s on neural activity preceding conscious decision is regularly invoked in support and equally regularly disputed on methodological and interpretive grounds.

Fatalism in its ancient and folk forms appears in the Greek Moirai, in Norse wyrd and the Norns, in popular understandings of the Islamic vocabulary of qadar, and in the widespread sense that what is written cannot be evaded. Theologians in most traditions have resisted it, since it makes moral exhortation pointless, but it recurs in popular religion everywhere and is remarkably resistant to correction.

Libertarian free will holds that determinism is false, at least for human choices, and that agents originate actions in a way leaving genuinely open alternatives. It is the position most religious doctrines of accountability appear to require, and its standing difficulty is to explain how an undetermined choice is not simply random, which would make it no freer than a determined one.

Compatibilism holds that free will and determinism are consistent, because what freedom requires is acting according to one's own will without external constraint or compulsion, not that one could have willed otherwise. It was the Stoic position, was developed by Hobbes and Hume, and is the majority view among contemporary academic philosophers by a substantial margin in surveys of the profession. Its critics regard it as changing the subject rather than answering the question.

The religious versions of the debate track these closely. Islamic kalam set the Qadariyya and Mu'tazila against the Jabriyya, with the Ash'ari doctrine of kasb attempting a middle course. Christian theology ran Augustine against Pelagius, Luther against Erasmus on the bondage of the will, and Calvinism against Arminianism, with Molinism as an ingenious attempt at reconciliation. Hindu and Buddhist traditions meet the question through karma, and both insist that karma is not fatalism, the Buddha is recorded as rejecting the doctrine of Makkhali Gosala, who taught that everything is fixed and effort useless, as the most pernicious of all views.

Molina's Middle Knowledge: A Specific Attempted Solution

The main entry's passing mention of Molinism as "an ingenious attempt at reconciliation" between divine sovereignty and human freedom compresses a technically sophisticated proposal still actively defended and disputed in contemporary philosophy of religion.

Luis de Molina, a sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit, proposed that God possesses, beyond knowledge of necessary truths and of what God has decided to create, a third category, scientia media, middle knowledge: God's knowledge, prior to any decision to create, of what every possible free creature would freely choose in every possible circumstance. On this account God does not cause a person's free choices, and they remain genuinely libertarian-free, but God nonetheless knows with certainty what any person would freely do in any given situation, and can therefore choose which possible world to actualize based on that knowledge, achieving providential control without ever determining any individual free choice.

Molinism was developed to counter the rival Dominican position of Domingo Banez, which grounded God's providential control in a more direct divine "physical premotion" of the will, a position Molina's Jesuit successors argued came dangerously close to determinism, and the resulting De Auxiliis controversy, mentioned elsewhere in this collection, was fought before Vatican tribunals for years without a decisive ruling, leaving both positions permitted in Catholic theology today. The theory has drawn renewed attention through Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig, and its central difficulty, the "grounding objection," asks what makes counterfactual claims about a free creature's hypothetical choices true or knowable at all, even to God, if the choice remains genuinely undetermined.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Related To

Studied as a cross-cultural comparative-religion category rather than a teaching of one named tradition. Classification follows the doctrine's own authored Tradition field (Cross-tradition / Cross-cultural).

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
Sources
1. Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005s.v. Free Will and DeterminismView the Source
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (eds.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2024Entries Causal determinism; Fatalism; CompatibilismView the Source
The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions
John Bowker (ed.), Oxford University Press, 1997Qadar; PredestinationView the Source
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.