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Hopefully, you'll have some patience for my ignnorance on this subject. I have no problem with future events being a byproduct of antecedent events. In fact, this makes perfect sense to me. But...

Are you saying that all is predetermined? Now THAT is something I can't seem to get my mind around. I guess what we're really talking about is free will here. Can you elaborate a little further on deterministic philosophy?

If I contend I can do something I don't want to do, will you contend it was inevitable I was going to do that anyway? And if I say, "AHA! I will now do what I intended to do in the first place", will you say, "See? I told you so!".

This becomes very much like the same circular reasoning used by theists. Free will can never be proven, because all one has to do is say, every event and human action was inevitable after the fact. I'm not sure this is your view, but I have problems anytime circular reasoning needs to be deployed.

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When I was in college, my philosophy professor provided the following analogy to explain determinism: Suppose you have a pool table set up in the manner necessary for a traditonal game of 8-ball. The appropriate player strikes the cue ball for the break. If you were able to measure with 100% accuracy every force involved in this system(the force of the strike, friction of the felt, resiliency of the table endges, friction from air, etc.) you could theoretically predict the exact location of every ball after the break. This is because the laws of physics are immutable and they govern where the balls go, depending on all of the other factors. Furthermore, even if you can't measure everything accurately enough to predict the outcome, there should be no doubt that the final outcome was the only possible one after the cue ball was struck, because everything else is just the resulting chain of events that are governed by unchanging physical laws.

Determinism would then argue that the physical world in general behaves in the same way. Starting at the big bang, clearly there were forces and physical particles interacting. These interactions were governed by the laws of physics. And they kept on interacting according to immutable laws until they got to the present state of the universe.

As it applies to free will, a determinist would argue that your brain governs your actions and decisions. But your brain, while highly complex, is still made up of physical components. Those components, like any others, have to obey the laws of physics. Thus, there is no room for an individual to have free will.

There is some research in quantum mechanics that seems to debunk determinism pretty convincingly. I don't understand the field with any significant depth, but apparently their studies show that subatomic particles can behave in genuinely random ways. And if anything in the universe can be shown to be genuinely random, then determinism cannot be true. However, even assuming that this is true, it doesn't really affect the argument against free will. It may suggest the possibility that your actions are not predetermined, but are in part genuinely random. I doubt that anyone would find much solace in that, though.