Now, for the purposes of this argument, a few things must first be made clear. What has happened, what is happening, and what will happen, are to be referred to as the past, the present, and the future, respectively. There is a set of effects or an effect and a set of causes or a cause predicated of every event, or in other words, an event includes cause(s) and (an) effect(s).
For something to have happened, there must be a cause, or a reason for its happening. And everything that happens must affect the world in some way. This also means that a cause must also be an event. For something to have an effect, it must also cause something else to change, occur, or move.
What has happened, or the past, includes all events that have already been triggered. They are now a part of the cause or the reason for everything else to happen.
What is happening, or the present, includes all of those things that are currently in motion. These are those events being triggered at an instance in time. Time itself is a complex topic that you should pay no heed to. To think about time as something that is linear, that can be intersected at any given point, and changed, wouldn't help you follow what I'll be saying. And to believe that time can branch off, and new timelines can be formed, would result in the same way.
What will happen, or the future, includes all events that will be triggered in the future, as a result of all those that have been triggered or are being triggered now.
All things that will be, will be. The future is written in stone. For, all events have a cause or a set of causes. And all causes are the effects of prior events. It can be concluded that for an event to occur, it must have a cause, and here is where things begin to blur. So, before you assume I'm questioning any faith or belief in specific, I'm not.
What about the original event? What caused the first thing to have happened? That is a question you can answer yourself, as I won't be staining my clothes with the murky water.
But for all things that have happened since, if there be an origin, they were always going to happen. When one is hungry and "decides" to eat, and I use the word "decides" loosely, as what I am claiming would contradict the idea of free will, there are a set of causes. Perhaps this person has not eaten in a while, for whatever reason, and perhaps there is food available to eat. When one is hungry, they wish to eat, and eventually they will, if they are "sane". In order for one to eat, they must have food. The food came from somewhere, be it a market or a garden, and the food reached that market or grew out of that garden for a reason. Perhaps it was shipped to the markets from another's garden or farm. When a seed is planted, it will grow into a food bearing plant, if it is of the correct species. (Ignoring flowers and other plants that don't bear fruit).
As you can see, there is a long chain of events, and it can go further and further. For a plant to grow, it must have water, sunlight, and nutrients from the soil. And these things all come from somewhere else. In the end, this person eats, and the food will ultimately be broken down into nutrients, and then recycled eventually. The food was available to this person for a reason, and this was always going to be true, never false.
This concept is difficult to explain via example, because it requires a broad or general perspective. You must look at the whole picture in order to make sense of things. If I decide to say hello to a specific person when I pass them on the street, then there is a reason for it. Perhaps I know this person, or perhaps I wish to be friendly with this person. Whatever the reason, everything that lead up to that moment, and everything that was happening in the present, lead to the event of my saying hello to that passerby.
Every thought and every action is governed by the past and the present, and all thoughts and actions, or events, that have not yet occurred, will occur in the future. From this, we can conclude that all that will be, in the future, has been decided by the past of the future. If you wish to imagine this in terms of a graph of time, imagine a dot, a single point. You cannot change positions, you cannot intersect it at any one point in order to change its path or slope, it is not a line, but a point. It is one dimensional.
This dot includes all that will happen, from the origin. If you were to go to the beginning, then this dot would include the future, which includes all events, that now in our present say, have occurred, are occurring, or will occur. There is no way to change this course of events, for your efforts to change what will be, will be the very cause of what will be. If I attempted to avoid saying hello to a man walking past me, and I successfully do so, then I was always going to not say hello to that man.
What will be, will be, and what has been cannot be changed. This is how events relate to one another in terms of cause and effect.
[ Note: I may re-word this later if I can find a better way to both explain what I am talking about, and prove that what I say is true, however difficult. ]
Thanks!
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