Title: Determinism - By Branch / Doctrine - The Basics of Philosophy
Headings: 
Determinism
Content: According to the ancient Chinese "Yi Jing" (or "I Ching", the "Book of Changes" ), a kind of divine will sets the fundamental rules for the working out of the probabilities on which the universe operates, although human wills are also a factor in the ways in which we can deal with the real world situations we encounter. In the West, the Ancient Greek atomists Leucippus and Democritus were the first to anticipate Determinism when they theorized that all processes in the world were due to the mechanical interplay of atoms. With the advent of Newtonian physics, in the 17th Century, which depicts the physical matter of the universe as operating according to a set of fixed, knowable laws, it began to appear that, once the initial conditions of the universe have been established, then the rest of the history of the universe follows inevitably, (rather like billiard balls moving and striking each other in predictable ways to produce predictable results ). Any uncertainty was always a term that applied to the accuracy of human knowledge about causes and effects, and not to the causes and effects themselves. Since the beginning of the 20th Century, quantum mechanics has revealed previously concealed aspects of events, and Newtonian physics has been shown to be merely an approximation to the reality of quantum mechanics. At atomic scales, for instance, the paths of objects can only be predicted in a probabilistic way. Some argue that quantum mechanics is still essentially deterministic; some argue that it just has the appearance of being deterministic; some that quantum mechanics negates completely the determinism of classical Newtonian mechanics. Types of Determinism
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Causal Determinism (or Nomological Determinism) is the belief that future events are necessitated by past and present events combined with the laws of nature.