Below are three explanations of determinism. Let me know which, if either, corresponds to your beliefs about the universe. If neither, try to explain what you do believe, and why.
The second is Dennett's adaptation of a statement made by Pater van Inwagen:Pierre-Simon Laplace wrote:An intellect which knew at any given moment all the forces that animate Nature and the mutual positions of the beings that comprise it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit its data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom: for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain; and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.
The third is from Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow:Determinism is the thesis that "there is at any instant only one physically possible future.
But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do[/]. Things only happen.