if you must obey that schedule then determinism is a fact. If you can do whatever you want with it - it's a prediction that may or may not be true, just someting that claims to be a prediction.

Well if something is predictable than it must be determinstic. At least if we want certainty in our predictions.

The other way around I agree with you on. Things can be determinstic without being predictable, but that seems to Labe the case in extreme cases such as Laplaces demon.

I agree with you on the following

* Our knowledge on laws of nature comes from observations of the past or present.

* If we are interested in knowing why things are the way the are at (i.e. how the became the way) current, we must study the past.

But given knowledge about laws of nature (regardless of how we got that knowledge) and given knowledge about the present state, we can predict the future - if laws or nature only gives one possible outcome.

Novelty is just an illusion in such a universe (I would say thats terrible spontaneously), it something that appears to be unpredictable but was bound to happen all the time. Was that your point too?

If there are any laws of nature for everything, then the knowledge about them - all of them - is enough. What preceeded them in another universe does not affect us today and is there for not of interest in order to predict things.

It's allready answered above, but I was not talking about observations but rather laws of nature. So if everything is determined from those laws of nature then at least an observer in another universe could calculate the future if our universe is some sort of predictable machine. I don't really see how the past is even necessary to know, if you know all objects, their current directions and all the laws the obey.

If the laws state the the objects given a situation can only end up one way, then that should be enough to predict the future.

Thank you m-theory. I suspected it was an old idea.

If such prediction is impossible however, than I would say let's live in the illusion of a non-deterministic world, regardless of wether we do or not.