Destiny and Free Will

Chapter Four - Fatalism and Universal Correction

I'm obviously intrigued by the idea that everything happens for a reason. I also like determinism. However, both theories eliminate things I like (i.e. free will and divine intervention respectively). If only there was a theory whereby certain events happened for a reason, certain events could be manipulated by some cosmic force, but other events were not. Fortunately, there is a view known as Fatalism (from the root word 'fate'). 

Fatalism is the view that certain events are destined to happen, but others are not. This is another 'have your cake and eat it too' theory. Where it differs from soft determinism is that fatalism implies a divine being or a mysterious force in the universe, which causes or influences certain events to happen. Soft determinism has no stake in what happens to you. 

For some, fatalism provides a happy medium - or it's what some philosophers like to call a compatibilist view. It embraces the idea of destiny, but allows for the individual to choose from a variety of different paths to get there. There may be a certain event that happens for a reason, and must happen, like misplacing your car keys, but the little details leading up to that moment could be slightly, or even drastically, different.  

There was a short-lived television show called Flash Forward that addressed this notion quite nicely. The premise of the show was that one day the entire world blacked out and people had a "flash forward" - they caught a glimpse of their future. As a result of these flash forward visions, many people behaved differently and did things they would otherwise not do in order to conform to what they saw.  

One character learned Japanese and flew to Japan because in his flash forward he was with a Japanese woman. As a result of seeing this, it turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.  

Another man had a vision that he solved an important equation after he slept with a woman that he hadn't even met yet. As it turned out, sleeping with the woman wasn't vital to solving the equation - that part of the future was incidental - but he did need to meet the woman and be at her house to solve it, which he did and was - oops, spoiler alert! 

Another character in the show saw that in his future, he had inadvertently killed a woman in a terrible accident. He challenged fate and did the most altruistic thing imaginable. He committed suicide, thereby changing his future so that he could not possibly kill the woman. Although this action demonstrated that the future isn't written yet, and people have free will, the woman still died in some other way. Ironically, she was hit by a car driven by the very lady that was searching to protect her from such fate.  

These scenarios are obviously created from someone's imagination, but it does raise some interesting questions about destiny and provides good workable examples of this compatibilist view.  

The show described the flash forwards as merely one possible future. If you believe either: (1) everything happens for a reason, and you also want that notion to be compatible with having free will; or (2) that certain events are determined to happen, which are guided by some mysterious force, but the actual mechanics of how it happens aren't set in stone, then you will likely endorse fatalism. 

I mentioned how on the show there was a lady that was supposed to die on a particular day in a particular way. As it turned out, she was hit by a car instead. In this case, we would say that she couldn't escape her fate. But what are we really saying when we say this? We are saying that the universe, or some other thing, has motives and a self-correcting mechanism. So if you were supposed to die on a particular day, then you are going to die that day - the universe is going to get you! But that seems a bit strange, right? 

There is another wonderful example of this idea, which comes up in the movie The Time Machine (based on the book by H.G. Wells). Although this scene was not in the original book, the movie describes an inventor who wants to go back in time to save his fiancée from being killed. He toils around the clock, day and night, and eventually builds a time machine. Once complete, the first thing he does is go back to the night when his fiancée was murdered. He meets her in the park and then requests that she goes home right away because the park is where she is originally killed. By avoiding the park, he avoids the murder, but then as they are crossing the street, a horseless carriage runs her over and kills her. The inventor then set his time machine back one day before the incident. This time he was determined to not have the love of his life suffer the same fate that she had previously. He avoided the park to steer clear of the gunman and he avoided the street to keep away from the horseless carriage, but all that didn't matter. As hard as he tried to circumvent the known disasters, something else would happen, and the woman would die another way. The distraught inventor recognized the pattern and finally submitted to fate. "I could come back a thousand times and see her die a thousand deaths," the inventor says.