Pierre-Simon Laplace was a genius and philosopher who was also a tutor to Napoleon Bonaparte. One of his most famous ideas is appropriately titled Laplace's Demon. While tutoring Napoleon, Napoleon was confused as to why a lot of his ideas had no mention of a creator or of the mystical sort and he inquired in Napoleon that he does not need such a hypothesis. Later, however Laplace discovered that a supernatural intelligence would be required when looking into the nature of things such as free will and cause and affect. The figurative demon doesn't necessarily have a malevolent or grievous nature to it but simply meant a ghostly being from outside our current reality. A quote from Laplace states: "We may regard the present state of the Universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all the forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed; is this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the Universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain, and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes" Basically, in Layman's terms, if it were somehow possible to quantify all of the motion and behavior of everything in the universe, it would be possible to predict how everything were to act at every moment in the future. Without having to have created the universe the demon would become omniscient and all-knowing. Boëthius also pointed out that such an intellect could deprive us of our free-will. I have currently been reading on this subject and would like to hear the thoughts of others on the matter.