This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Causation gathers six positions on whether events, and especially human choices, are fixed by prior causes, spanning ancient physics, Buddhist and Hindu teaching, and early modern theology.
Determinism holds that a complete description of the world at any moment, together with the laws governing it, fixes exactly one future; Laplace's imagined calculating intelligence is its most famous image. Libertarian Free Will denies this, holding that at least some choices genuinely originate with the agent, tracing back to Epicurus's unpredictable swerve in the path of atoms. Compatibilism argues both can be true at once, since freedom was never a matter of being uncaused but of acting from one's own reasons without coercion, the position most legal systems quietly assume.
Karma As Causal Law treats moral action the way physics treats motion, an impersonal built-in feature of the cosmos rather than a judge's reward or punishment, with the Bhagavad Gita tying it to action itself and Buddhist teaching tying it specifically to intention. Dependent Origination is the Buddhist claim that every phenomenon arises only in dependence on prior conditions and passes away when they cease, with nothing existing independently, a chain Nagarjuna later identified with emptiness itself.
Occasionalism denies that any created thing ever truly causes anything else, holding instead that God directly produces each apparent effect on the occasion of its apparent cause, a position Malebranche developed to solve Descartes's mind-body problem and that Ash'ari theologians such as Al-Ghazali reached independently to defend God's unlimited power.