How much does a deterministic philosophy affect your view of the world?

In the early 1800s, Determinism was very popular, and came directly out of the Enlightnment where reason was the primary source of thinking. One example of this thinking was written by Laplace in 1814. He wrote:

“If an intelligence, at a given instant, knew all the forces that aniumate nature and the position of each constituant being; if, moreover, this intelligence were sufficiently great to submit these data to analysis…to this intelligence nothing would be uncertain, and the future, as the past, would be present to the eyes.” (quoted by Mlodinow in The Drunkards Walk).

In short, if you could know every possible variable down to the smallest atom, you could predict the future.

This philosophy has prevailed for almost 200 years. For example, it was the basis of Asimov’s Foundation trilogy.

In the 1960s, a meterologist, Edward Lorenz, tried to use primitive computer modeling to predict the weather. His thinking was that if he could predict every weather variable, he could predict future weather. His experiment failed because every time he ran his modeling, he got different results. The issue turned out to be that the computer would only accept data to a certain decimal point—beyond that it couldn’t compute it. So for example, 2.513378697 would really be 2.513. But even though he wasn’t able to reproduce the results, he discovered the “butterfly effect”, hypothetically, how the flap of a butterfly’s wings could affect weather halfway around the world.

So my question is, how do you feel about determinism? Do you ever think about how if you could control every variable in your life you could control your future? Or do you accept randomness as a part of your life?