Perhaps this illustrates the problem as well.

Determinism and causation have never been "made into one", whatever that may mean. But as I have pointed out many times, what philosophers mean by "determinism" is that every event is subsumable under causal laws of nature so that the occurrence of the event follows from the applicable laws of nature together with the initial conditions. Look it up. Now, I have no idea whether that constitutes determinism and causation being "made into one" or not. But what does that matter? That is how determinism is understood by professional philosophers. It is either true, or it is false. The question is, what are the arguments, up or down?

Indeed, they have not. That is not what I meant.

When a body of theoretical knowledge has developed sufficiently, one may assume with some justification that its original, basic terms describe something which may be loosely and coversationally termed as 'really existing'. For example, the theory of evolution by natural selection and the genetic theory of inheritance have both progressed so far that we can take it for granted that the word 'gene' corresponds to something which 'really exists'.

Think about it for a minute, or two.

Don` t 2 follow 1 is the same as morning follows night? Is causality in the same was as 'follow'? What do we mean by 'follow'?

Indeed who has not what? And what did you mean?

What I meant is not that determinism and causality had been made into one, but that they should not be made into one.

First of all, night does not cause morning. But, to answer your question (if I understand it) there is the "follow" of logic, so that one proposition follows from another proposition. But when we say that an effect follows from a cause, that is not the logical "follow". It is the temporal "follow". It means that the effect occurs after the cause occurs.

The way the effect follows cause is not logical, and we know this from Hume.

It is not necessary the case that there is a temporal difference between cause, and effect. The cause, and effect may happen at the same time, or that there are different micro events between the conventional cause, and effect. There might not event be a cause, or effect. There might just be a continuous process that conserve matter, and energy according to one modern view.

I hesitate to repeat a point which I have already made in another thread, but part of the confusion arises from the fact that we instinctively like to think in terms like 'cause' and 'effect' (and 'determinism') which are borrowed from classical metaphysics and, except as a kind of conversational shorthand, have no meaning or application in modern science (least of all quantum mechanics).

It was David Hume in the 18th Century who first pointed out, I think, that no-one has ever seen a 'cause'. When we say that 'A causes B', we really mean that in every case where we observe A, we observe that B follows. We rationalise it by saying that A 'causes' B.

To go further and postulate 'cause' as some kind of mysterious third entity, perhaps a kind of logical necessity, perhaps a physical 'action at a distance', not immediately perceptible, is unwarranted; an Aristotelian hangover. It is merely a question of correlation. In science there are NO 'causes', only probabilities ranging between 0 and 1.

Excellent post! I agree. What is this ghost named Causality?

We do not observe causality, we infer it.
We mean that event A follows situation B, with regularity.

We do not observe any unifying prinicple or physical law, we infer them by their predictive power. The fact that we do not observe but infer them, does not imply that they do not "exist". In fact in any Platonic system of them unifying principle is more real than any perceptial or sensory phenomena.

Probablity does not defy causality, although it does defy determinism.