Quote Originally Posted by thegnome54 View Post
I think this question is best worded with an analogy. How about this?

Say you are playing pool. You take a shot, and miss sinking the 5 ball you were aiming for. Now, if we were to theoretically rewind time and hit the cue ball again in the exact same manner, with the rest of the balls in the exact same positions, and the same room temperature and air pressure and friction on the table, etc. etc., why would the outcome of the shot ever change?

Unless there is some truly random factor involved, the shot should always end up the same way, right?
You're operating under the assumption of a closed system with a fixed field of variables--conditions that could, theoretically, be quantified and duplicated in every particular. We have no evidence that our universe is such a system, and the difficulty of creating even a simplistic, subatomic closed system within our universe suggests otherwise.

If you attempted to find all the causes of missing your ball in the world we inhabit--not simply to tell yourself a convincing story about why it happened, but to find every factor influencing the event--they would be literally infinite. The conditions and conditions conditioning the conditions, substructural quanta and cosmological context will grow more detailed and pervasive for as long as you are willing to look. That's the case with a past event, which decidedly is determined, having happened. In the present, at the perpetual event horizon we inhabit, everything manifests collaboratively in a manner that is by definition undetermined. Being unfixed is what distinguishes the present from the ground against which it occurs.