There may be freedom, but if so, certainly not in the way we understand it now, where I desire and/or think something, then do it, and that's freedom. The truth is that we don't know where our thoughts come from. Spinoza once said that freedom is simply a word we use to cover up the fact that we don't know the causes for any of our actions. I believe he was right.
For one, if we truly accept causality in a literal way, then every new moment and everything in it is the product of an immense causal chain that extends back into the past so far it's completely inconceivable to us, all the way to the beginning of the universe.
Second, and more important, we don't actually know the causes of our actions. We think that we have thoughts, and then these thoughts lead to actions, but truthfully, we don't know where those thoughts themselves come from. They certainly don't come from us in any simple sense where we freely make them happen. You can't be aware of a thought before you're already thinking it, so there's no way to know that you cause them in a free way, and that thoughts aren't merely reactions to stimuli that affect us on a pre-conscious, pre-awareness level. Thoughts happen to us- that's as far as our awareness can go.
That being said, predetermination can't be true, as physicists have shown beyond Einstein. He argued that "God doesn't play dice with the universe," but he was wrong. Every new moment is completely new with respect to the past, and so real contingency, unpredictability, etc, are most definitely a part of existence at every level.
So maybe there's no human freedom as we understand it, but there's no fate, either.
