Determinism In Avengers Endgame (SPOILERS)

      
     As of April 25, 2019, the final piece of Marvel’s current iteration of the MCU, Avengers Endgame has finally been released worldwide and is smashing the box office. The film is a sister movie to the previous Avengers Film: Infinity War, and deals with elements of time travel, second chances, and brushes against the concept of Determinism. After the events of IW, the titan Thanos used the power of the Infinity Stones to snap away half of all life in the galaxy, and the remaining heroes must band together to reverse the damage and save the universe. One of the Avengers, Antman has the ability to enter the Quantum Realm and suggests they use its powers to time travel to various points in the MCU to collect the Infinity Stones to undo the snap and save the world. This suggests that the fate of the world is not written in stone (no pun intended) and that one's fate can be altered through the existence and manipulation of multiple dimensions and timelines.
     Another of the Avengers, Doctor Strange, has the ability to look across millions of different timelines to predict the future, and tells Iron Man that of the millions of potential worlds he sees, that only one results in the Avengers ultimately beating Thanos. All other roads lead to permanent ruin. This fate is going to come about for our heroes because forces have been set in motion that cause them to occur. Basically cause leads to an effect, which creates another cause, and so on. Think of a baseball being hit for a home run. This was caused by the bat hitting it out of the park. The batter was predetermined to hit the ball, just as much as the pitcher was determined to throw it. This is an example of Determinism.
    Determinism is a theory that posits that all choices (even choices of morality) are predetermined by previously existing causes. This means that even though we perceive humans having free will, that all events are caused by a continuous domino effect that leads to a string of other events. Truly free actions then require options, which Determinism does not allow. For example, let's say I eat Bran Flakes for breakfast. One could make the argument that no outside forces lead to me choosing to eat Bran Flakes, that it was my free will that leads me to eat them, so free will is real. Hard Determinists would argue that you made the choice to eat Bran Flakes because you were predisposed to do it. You ran out of cereal at home so you decided to go out shopping. You bought that box of cereal at the grocery store, put it in your house, which caused you to want to eat it as to not want to waste the cereal you just purchased. You chose to buy Bran Flakes instead of Lucky Charms because that’s what your doctor recommended for you to do, and you were compelled to comply with her diagnosis. Cause and effect.
    With this in mind, we go back to Doctor Strange’s premonition. In order to create the one timeline in which the Avengers can beat Thanos, Strange realizes that certain events must occur in the precise order and be planned out just right. In a shocking moment in the film, Strange gives over the coveted Time Stone without a fight, shocking the rest of the team, but this event is the first link in the chain of events that leads to the titan's defeat in Endgame. By giving Thanos the stone. Tony Stark is kept alive for End Game, allowing for the Avengers to discover time travel, allowing the Avengers a second chance to undo the snap. Likewise, Strange helped the rest of the heroes just long enough before the snap could possibly kill Antman in the Quantum Realm (Set up in Antman and Wasp, the film directly after Infinity War), which leads to him being transported five years into the future to give Tony the idea to build a time machine using Pym Particles. This results in the Avengers coming up with a plan to get a new set of Infinity Stones to undo the snap, which they accomplish near the end of the film.
    Because Doctor Strange had knowledge of the past, present, and future via the Time Stone, he was able to create the exact correct conditions that allowed the Avengers to beat Thanos. In his 18th century thesis on the nature of Determinism, Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace wrote: “If a mind, at any given moment, could know all of the forces operating in nature and the respective positions of all its components, it would thereby know with certainty the future and the past of every entity, large or small.” Ironman may be the hero who makes the dramatic final sacrifice at the conclusion of Endgame, but Doctor Strange is ultimately the hero that saved the MCU from Thanos by perfectly setting the final stage for the other heroes to undo the snap, even if at the time he was a pile of ash on the ground. That and, hey, he basically gave everyone a lift to the final battle at Avengers Tower so.....basically everyone would’ve been screwed without him. Thanks, Benedict Cumberbatch.