Philosophy

            In Fate, author Richard Taylor discusses several areas covered under the following sections: Fatalism and Determinism, Fatalism with Respect to the Future and the Past, The Sources of Fatalism, Divine Omniscience, The Story of Osmo, Four Questions, and The Law of Excluded Middle. The first section, Fatalism and Determinism, starts out with a very simple definition of Determinism: "the theory that all events are rendered unavoidable by their causes." In the end, Fatalism and Determinism can be considered similar enough to have the same meaning and the same theory or philosophy. .
             In the section Fatalism with Respect to the Future and the Past, the actual fatalist is discussed. A fatalist being one who feels that all events are and always have been unavoidable. With this in mind, some fatalists may try to read signs or omens to possible predict future events or to develop a stronger knowledge of the past and how it has and will affect them. Most fatalists consider the future in the same way any average person would consider the past, as concrete, fixed, and unchangeable. Just as we cannot change past events to suit us now, fatalists take the approach that there is no changing the future, because of the determined path of all events. "We say of past things that they are no longer within our power. The fatalist says they never were." .
             Sources of Fatalism stem mostly from theological ideas or presuppositions of science and logic, according to Taylor. He also brings the idea of God into theory with the possibility of God being all-knowing and all-powerful in which case, everything is arrange and we, as humans, have no choice but to "watch things unfold." However, without God being considered as an option for predetermined occurrences, it is still simple to see all future events are determined by the events preceding them and one is a direct result of the other. Taylor also believes "no one needs to be convinced that fatalism is the only proper way to view the past.