The Fate Debate

By Wendy L. Hawksley

Do you believe in fate?

Many Pagans tend to find the idea of fate to be far too Christian for their tastes or at odds with the idea of free will. The idea of something being “in God’s hands” or predestined tends to be more of an Abrahamic ideal.

Then again, there are also plenty of Pagans who do believe that things happen “for a reason”. They may see it as relative to Karma or feel that we planned our life path before birth.

What is the purpose of believing in fate? Is it something meant to comfort us in times of trouble? Is it simply a way to explain coincidences? Is fate logical or emotional, rational or spiritual? Are the ideas of fate and free will mutually exclusive?

One way to test your views on fate is to play the “If I Had Never…” game. That is, look at something important in your life. This can be a birth, meeting a friend or significant other, a death, an illness, or getting the job of your dreams. Look back at how you came to that point in your life, i.e. “If I had never told my husband that I wanted him to return to active duty in the Air Force, I would have never moved to Delaware. If I had never moved to Dover, I would have never met my friend Tina. If I had never met Tina, we would have never coordinated Dover’s first Pagan Pride Day. If I had never become involved with the Pagan Pride Project, I would have never been in contact with the director. If I had never been in contact with the director, I never would have begun writing for Pagan magazines.”

My friend Tina ultimately opened the door to several important things in my life, but writing was the biggest one for me. I had wanted to be a writer since I was 8 years old. Tina was the one who felt that writing about Paganism was my calling; that my niche was non-fiction. So I stopped writing fiction and focused on the non-fiction. There I found satisfaction with my art and the thing every writer dreams of – publication.

One could argue that this was fate, that it was “meant to be” and would have happened one way or another.

One could also argue that this was a complete coincidence, or that it was entirely controlled by my own choices, no deity or other outside influence. I made my own decisions about how to live my life. Hence, I was exercising my free will.

After all, did me moving to Delaware somehow make it inevitable that I would meet Tina, or that she would propose our involvement in the Pagan Pride Project? Did my decision create an inevitable situation, or did it all happen completely independent of prior decisions made?

Are “fate” and “coincidence” really so different? Let us see.

Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language (Students Edition, Collins, 1976) defines the two words as follows:

Fate:

1. The power that is supposed to settle ahead of time what will happen,
2. Something supposedly controlled by this power or a person’s lot or fortune,
3. The way things turn out in the end; final outcome,
4. Death; destruction.

Coincidence:

1. The fact or condition of coinciding,
2. An accidental and remarkable occurrence of events, ideas, etc. at the same time, without one seeming to cause the other.

Coincidence itself speaks of a “remarkable occurrence”, so even that implies something extraordinary. While coincidences can be rationalized away, there is still something uncommon in their happening.

Fate tends to be an emotional comfort and a spiritual belief, whereas coincidence appeals to the logical, rational side of human thinking. Yet humans are not purely emotional or purely logical. We are capable of both ideals. Even if we believe in fate 100%, we sometimes have our doubts. Even if we discount every single occurrence as nothing more than coincidences, we can not deny their impact on our hearts.

So once again we might ask ourselves if we believe in fate or if anything out of the ordinary is simply a coincidence. Then again, one might take a middle ground and think that, just as we create our own environment, we may also create our own destinies.
In the end, it seems that fate is a matter of faith (and that is a whole other topic!).