Determinism, fatalism and predestination
While the terms are often used interchangeably, fatalism, determinism, and predestination are discrete in emphasizing different aspects of the futility of human will or the foreordination of destiny. However, all these doctrines share common ground.
Determinists generally agree that human actions affect the future but, because the future is predetermined, human action is just part of the overall cause. Their view does not accentuate a "submission" to fate, whereas fatalists stress an acceptance of all events as inevitable. In other words, determinists believe the future is fixed because of absolute causality, whereas fatalists and many predestinarians think the future is ineluctable despite causality.
Therefore, in determinism, if the past were different, the present and future would also differ. For fatalists, such a question is negligible, since no past could have happened other than the one that has happened.
Fatalism is a broader term than determinism. The presence of history indeterminisms/chances, i.e. events that could not be predicted by sole knowledge of other events, does not exclude fatalism. Necessity (such as a law of nature) will happen just as inevitably as a chance—both can be imagined as sovereign.
from :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatalism |