Determinism argues that the state of a system at one moment gives rise to the state of that system in the following moment. Determinism should not be confused with fate, fatalism, cause-and-effect or predictability. Fate intrudes a metaphysics in which the entire history of a system, from which it is impossible to deviate, is laid down in advance. Fatalism is a resigned belief in this inescapable fate. Cause-and-effect is a narrative technique by which we make sense of the transition of a system from moment to moment. It is always a retrospective and partial account, an abstraction which marginalises or ignores the totality of the system. (It is, nonetheless, a useful tool for modelling the world and for telling it.) Predictability is the inverse of cause-and-effect. The ability to construct retrospective cause-and-effect chains implies that it should be possible to extend their construction into the future; this is an error based on forgetting that cause-and-effect is a retrospective abstraction. A determinist system does not require fate, inevitability, predictability or cause-and-effect. In the non-linear dynamics of complex systems, there is no necessary correspondence of magnitude between a microscopic fluctuation in a system and the macroscopic divergences it can produce in that system. This is not about a small cause having a large effect, but about the initial conditions of the entire system producing unforeseeable conditions in the entire system at a subsequent moment; it is about a sensitive dependence on initial conditions; it is about determinism without predictability. In complex systems, order can emerge from chaos, and chaos often contains deeply-encoded structures of order. (See Earman 1986, Hall 1992, Hayles 1990 and 1991, and Hoefer 2003.)
The point of all this will become clear.