For many, the foundation of scientific inquiry rests on the axiom that neither physical events nor human choices are accidental or controllable, but rather the result of antecedent conditions, physical or psychological. Thus, for every event there is a cause. Free will is an illusion. In contrast to the atheism of science, religious predestination attributes fate to an all-powerful God.
John Calvin (1509-1564) was the second of the great Protestant reformers behind Martin Luther. He believed that events are preordained by God.
Marquis Pierre Simon de Laplace (1749-1827) was a French astronomer and mathematician who proposed that the universe was completely deterministic. He became professor of mathematics at the Ecole Militaire in Paris in 1767 and was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1785. Laplace established the solar system's stability in 1773 with the discovery of the invariability of the planetary mean motions. His discovery of the moon's acceleration being dependent on the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit was another contribution supporting stability.
Laplace believed in deterministic numerical forecasting. If all events arise from a prior cause, then there should be an intelligence for which "nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes." Given the initial conditions of a system and the rules for its behavior, it is possible to predict its future.
One consequence of this philosophy is the necessity of having a seminal event in the universe from which all other events follow. What caused the first event?
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