In his summa theologica, the dominican friar Thomas Aquinas wrote about if and how the human being would be under divine predestination, despite having a free will, which is given by God. Since God is the creator of all, evil acts and all other event must follow by essences of the things he created. The essence to think rational however was seen by Aquinas as exeptional, because it would enabled free actions. The outcome would be a product of the free agent himself and not that of God. As Saint Augustine of Hippo pointed out, evil is a free distantiation from God. God hiself is the highest good, the summum bonum.

The highly influential christian cleric Martin Luther (1483-1546) had an other interesting theory about predestination. The lutheran logic of predestination is to act, labour and work massivly not despite of destiny, but because there would a be a divine predestination. The destiny to be free was for G. W. F. Hegel the only destiny which avaits mankind. Hegel was raised in a lutheran convent, where he studied theology, philosophy and history. Karl Marx afterwards concluded similar to Hegel, that mankind would be destined to live free in a classless society. In that order of influences, according to Slavoj Zizek and other scholars of Hegel and Marx, we can aknowlege that theories of future prediction are even highly influential among freedom fighting materialist atheists.

(to be continued)

Julien Sita, July, 25th 2022.