Belief in fate
Belief in fate is the belief or conviction that a certain life path or certain events in a person's life are more or less deterministically predetermined. Some people believe that they can influence their own destiny, others believe that it is not possible, still others consider the idea of destiny to be wrong and believe that life depends on chance or free will .
Often the belief in fate is embedded or shaped religiously . The assumption that the fate of man lies in the hand of God or an overpowering divine being and is determined or at least guided by him is found in the belief in divine providence , which plays an important role in Islam and Christianity . Depending on how much room for maneuver in decision-making is given to the free will of the person vis-à-vis the predetermined or intended fate, these ideas diverge quite widely and range from an explicit rejection of the concept of fate in many Christian directions to a belief in fate, as emphasized in Islam, for example, up to the idea of a predestination of the salvation of the soul , i.e. the predetermination of the future fate of a person after his death, as it was also taught in Christian theology following Augustine, for example, by Martin Luther , who thus the doctrine of the sole effectiveness of divine grace and the inability of man to earn salvation through good works. In their radical form, which deprives man of any possibility of influencing his fate and participating in his salvation, these ideas become just as much as a philosophical determinism (which postulates that earthly events, including human actions, cannot be influenced by the will and to this extent is related to belief in fate ) rejected in both Christianity and Islam.
Philosophically, the position and evaluation of chance is of importance, which in the belief in fate and providence is often understood or interpreted as divine or fateful fate and partly - as in consistent determinism - is rejected as non-existent (“there are no coincidences”). In contrast to deterministic ideas, the belief in fate emphasizes the inevitability only of the result (the "determination") of a process or a biography, but sometimes allows the individual the possibility of free will decisions, which of course do not influence the occurrence of the predetermined result, at least not prevent it.
Classic examples of this paradoxical moment in the worldview believing in fate can be found in the ancient world of legends, for example in the stories of Oedipus or Odysseus , whose protagonists are free in their actions and do everything possible to escape their fateful destiny ( prophesied by oracles ), but ultimately it is precisely through this that they realize their own predetermined fate.
On the other hand, strict determinism excludes the existence of free will decisions and thus certain actions from the outset, insofar as it assumes a mechanistic predetermination of all contingent events - including human will and action - by known and unknown causal factors and accordingly less on the result of the determination (the Fate), but rather looking at the strict dependence of all phenomena, including all apparently self-determined life processes, on given causes.
The belief in fate and the deterministic world view are united in the emphasis on the inevitability and lack of alternatives to reality, which leads to a more passive, fatalistic, sometimes indifferent or - also ethically - indifferent attitude to life and the striving for self-determination and world change as an illusion understand.