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Oedipus and Antigone: Is Fate Determined?
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Is everything determined? This question has caused fierce debate and has plagued both the science and literary worlds. Fate and Prophecy have both appeared in literature, most notably in Ancient Greek and Roman plays. Two plays that stand out as being based on prophecy are Oedipus Rex and Antigone, both written by Sophocles. Sophocles may have eggagerated certain aspects of fate, but he had many correct observations concerning fate and destiny. I think that everything is determined because free will is just an illusion, time travel depends on it, probability dictates it.
In the play Julius Caesar, Cassius tells Brutus, “Men at some times are masters of their fate.” But is this true? Can we do anything we chose or is the universe’s fate fixed? The answers to these questions we may never know. But we can guess. In Antigone, Creon is faced with a decision. Should he condemn Antigone to death or should he let her get away with a crime? He feels as if he has a choice between the two. But, he doesn’t. It was determined that he would put Antigone in a cave and try to get her out after contemplating it carefully. No matter what he did, he could not have defied this. He had the choice between the two, but it was determined that no matter what advice he received from Haemon and Tieresius, he would inevitably choose to put her in the cave. As Oedipus portrayed, you cannot escape fate no matter how you try.
The prospect of time travel depends on and proves that everything is determined. If you go back and find out you should have turned left when you turned right and change it, then you may think you have defied fate. But, you are utterly wrong. Most likely, like Oedipus, you will do exactly what was determined, and step right into the prophecy. Doing this will, in fact, create an alternate quantum reality in which it was fixed to happed that way! (If you want to understand this fully, read about Feynman’s Sum Over Histories in any of Stephen Hawking’s books). The prophet who had spoken to Oedipus about his fate knew what was predestined. If Oedipus had gone forward in time and seen what he had done, he would have tried to avoid that fate.
