determinism the view that every event or state of affairs is brought about by antecedent events or states of affairs in accordance with universal causal laws that govern the world. Thus, the state of the world at any instant determines a unique future, and that knowledge of all the positions of things and the prevailing natural forces would permit an intelligence to predict the future state of the world with absolute precision. This view was advanced by Laplace in the early nineteenth century; he was inspired by Newton’s success at integrating our physical knowledge of the world. Contemporary determinists do not believe that Newtonian physics is the supreme theory. Some do not even believe that all theories will someday be integrated into a unified theory. They do believe that, for each event, no matter how precisely described, there is some theory or system of laws such that the occurrence of that event under that description is derivable from those laws together with information about the prior state of the system. Some determinists formulate the doctrine somewhat differently: (a) every event has a sufficient cause; (b) at any given time, given the past, only one future is possible; (c) given knowledge of all antecedent conditions and all laws of nature, an agent could predict at any given time the precise subsequent history of the universe. Thus, determinists deny the existence of chance, although they concede that our ignorance of the laws or all relevant antecedent conditions makes certain events unexpected and, therefore, apparently happen ‘by chance.’ The term ‘determinism’ is also used in a more general way as the name for any metaphysical doctrine implying that there is only one possible history of the world. The doctrine described above is really scientific or causal determinism, for it grounds this implication on a general fact about the natural order, namely, its governance by universal causal law. But there is also theological determinism, which holds that God determines everything that happens or that, since God has perfect knowledge about the universe, only the course of events that he knows will happen can happen. And there is logical determinism, which grounds the necessity of the historical order on the logical truth that all propositions, including ones about the future, are either true or false. Fatalism, the view that there are forces (e.g., the stars or the fates) that determine all outcomes independently of human efforts or wishes, is claimed by some to be a version of determinism. But others deny this on the ground that determinists do not reject the efficacy of human effort or desire; they simply believe that efforts and desires, which are sometimes effective, are themselves determined by antecedent factors (as in a causal chain of events). Since determinism is a universal doctrine, it embraces human actions and choices. But if actions and choices are determined, then some conclude that free will is an illusion. For the action or choice is an inevitable product of antecedent factors that rendered alternatives impossible, even if the agent had deliberated about options. An omniscient agent could have predicted the action or choice beforehand. This conflict generates the problem of free will and determinism. See also COMPUTER THEORY, FREE WILL PROBLEM , PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENC. B.B.