In my continuing quest to understand the nature and conflicts of metaphysics and religion, I am intrigued by the question of what we mean when we toss around the terms fate and destiny, and what religious people mean when they speak of providence and of God’s plan.
Both fate and destiny describe some form of predetermined future. However, dictionaries say that fate implies a blind, unchangeable outcome driven by outside forces (fate comes from the Latin Fatum, which means ‘that which has been spoken’), while destiny suggests a purposeful goal shaped at least in part by personal choices and efforts.
In Greek mythology, the ‘fates’ were three sister goddesses who ‘personify the inescapable destiny and lifespan of every mortal and God’. Clotho, the Spinner, spun the thread of life at birth; Lachesis, the measurer, measured the length of the thread, deciding how long that person lives; and Atropos, the inevitable, cut the thread with her shears, marking the exact moment of death.
We speak of accepting one’s fate, and the term fatalistic implies a passive acceptance of what is often a difficult outcome. People from every era and every culture have bemoaned the often cruel and arbitrary nature of fate.
Fate implies a lack of free will. If your fate is predetermined, then in theory what you do cannot affect or change it. Yet even people that accepted the concept of fate continued to act as if they had free will, probably because it is against human nature to cease acting on one’s behalf. Perhaps they were willing to accept the somewhat dispiriting notion that everything we do is predictable in advance and simply hope for the best.
In the midst of the enlightenment, when the laws of physics and mathematics were being discovered, it was tempting to imagine that the universe was completely deterministic and that everything could in theory be predicted. This seemed to lend some credibility to the concepts of fate or destiny. But as science progressed into the twentieth century, the role that chance, noise, probability and randomness/stochasticity play completely changed our perspective and introduced a new level of uncertainty in both the physical and the human world.
The concept of a predetermined outcome, or fate, is no longer embraced by most rational people unless they believe in a religious version, which is known as providence or more simply, God’s plan.
The monotheistic religions appear to have a spectrum of beliefs about the nature of free will and predetermination. Many religions believe in predestination, which is similar to fate in that it posits that the entire path of our lives is known by God. The issue of free will is debated endlessly, and different groups at different times have come up with ways to reconcile predestination and free will. But contradictions and logical absurdities abound in these attempts to fit ancient concepts of fate and providence into a world where science, logic and reason predominate.
Some theorize that God is outside of time and history and is able to know and observe everything about our lives without denying us free will. But many of the same people speak of God’s plan as if one’s life has been planned or is at least in the process of being planned as one lives. How this can coexist with free will is never completely explained.
Most religious people believe that God intercedes in our lives in enacting his plan, but the question of how a merciful and loving God that is acting on our behalf allows horrible things to happen is only vaguely addressed. The typical answer is that evil occurs because God is not a puppet master and that he allows us free will and that humankind’s sin causes bad things to happen.
But this is a woefully inadequate and illogical answer. If God can and does intercede yet allows evil to occur then that begs the question on what basis God intercedes? Why cure one cancer and not another? Why save one life in a plane crash and not the rest? The usual response is that God’s ways are mysterious, a profoundly unsatisfying explanation.
Whether fate or providence, the idea of a predetermined path of life is both pain and solace to many. If one’s life is burdensome and full of failure, then the idea of fate may bring some measure of comfort, as one can rationalize the misfortune as inevitable and avoid responsibility. Similarly, if a great tragedy occurs, some may find relief in believing that God’s plan will bring some good out of it eventually.
Accepting the fact that events in our lives or in the world may be purely random is difficult and distressing. But what remains is indeed true free will. How we react to events can have impact on our own lives and the lives of others. We do have agency, however feeble it may seem, and we must do what we can to have positive effect. It is the most needed characteristic of humanity.
