Cause and effect is a huge basis for science. Remove cause and effect and you remove logic and continuity from our world.
Pretend you want to decide whether you want a Mac or a PC. A big part of your choice will be based on what the people around you say. If your entire family uses Macs, your entire community uses Macs and your entire city uses Macs, then you’re pushed towards Macs. Your brain looks at all these things and makes it’s choice.
Let’s say then, that you buy your Mac. Your city loves Macs because Mac did a great job advertising. The guy who invented computer programming language died the same year as the guy who got rich using it (and other things) and the world noticed Steve Jobs’ death. Dennis Ritchie probably didn’t have a great media team.
Mac had a great advertising campaign because of the huge amount of money and time put into the campaign. If you look farther back at the causes of a single action of yours, the explanations grow more and more complex. There are, effectively, an infinite amount of causes for any and every action. These infinite causes cause everything that happens in our world.
If you trace these causes back, then you reach the beginning of time. Let’s assume time started at that event and the universe is only affected by forces that came into existence at that point. (Sorry folks, this means no currently interacting God). We can then say that cause and effect took care of the rest. It would as if you hit a pool ball then simply watched as hit another ball and both these balls hit a few more- regardless of what the ball thinks or decides, it has already been put in motion. If you are any good at pool you’ve sunk a few balls. Obviously, this is a gross oversimplification as there are multiple balls and a pool table could never adequately describe the universe. The point is the system is contained and as something created and influenced in every way by the system, your free will is an illusion.
As an agent of fate, however, you still have responsibility. You have to make the best choices you can. The illusion of free will is still there- the infinite factors mean you have to make your best guess at which ones have the best outcome. But that leads into ethics (which outcome is the best? How best to achieve this outcome?)
