Where is the history of causal determinism?

Hello friends:


Causal determinism is at the heart of all of our sciences.





Don't you find it very odd that no beginning can be found?


Who wrote these ideas originally?


What was the propose of this writing?





Don't you find it odd that there is no history?





Did the dilemma of free will erase all that led up to this


dilemma?





Here then is the story of cause and effect,


yet it has no cause.





So then it must be the only effect that has no cause.


Look and see. There is nothing.


I hope to be proved wrong.





John.


|||Yes?|||Sorry, you are not wrong.





Brief description %26amp; history of determinism:


The idea of a physically determined universe is associated with Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727). This is sometimes called the billiard ball view of nature: A billiard ball will only move when acted on by another force such as another billiard ball hitting it. If we could measure the exact velocity and angle of the first billiard ball, we could predict the movement of the second.





The philosophical problem comes with human beings. If we were to accept the empirical view that human beings are organized systems of matter and that our minds are formed as a result of experiences then we may want to explain human behavior in terms of cause and effect.





If we knew enough about the biological make up of an individual, his early childhood experiences and the social and historical circumstances he was born into, then perhaps we could predict all of his actions. From this point of view the idea of free will (the ability to choose) is simply the result of or ignorance of all of the causal factors.|||The doctrine of scientific determinism can be traced back as far as the Presocratic Atomists (5th cent. BCE). The idea of determinism is ancient, but first became subject to clarification and mathematical analysis in the eighteenth century. As to cause and effect, all events that actually occur are unavoidable, proven by the fact that these events do occur (what came first the chicken or the egg? The egg of course鈥veryone knows that retiles were here before the Archaeopteryx) Indeed this is a conundrum.