Determinism

The view that all events are determined, which means there is no free will and that there is only one possible history of the world, either because every event in the universe is sufficiently caused by prior events (causal determinism, natural determinism, or hard determinism), divine providence (theological determinism), or on the semantic grounds that propositions about the future must already have fixed truth values (logical determinism). A variant of causal determinism, termed “soft determinism” or “compatibilism,” holds that human behavior and actions are determined by causal events but free will exists when defined as acting according to one’s nature.