Fatalism is the doctrine that events are predetermined by forces that human beings cannot control and that every event must take place. The idea of free will would be an illusion as we have no choice in our actions and there are no alternatives in our futures if our futures have already been inexorably fixed. A fatalist therefore believes we are unable to change the future or past as it's already been set out for us.

Determinism, on the other hand, argues that events occur due to cause and effect. It disputes the claim that the future as we know it is fixed but it can be changed as a consequence of a set of causally related events.

With both fatalism and determinism, there are certain extremes. There are soft and hard types of fatalism as well as soft and hard types of determinism. Soft fatalism is the...