I certainly agree that a lot of the apparent causal chains that we take for granted are very suspect. But it's deeper than that. One can say "The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was the cause of WWI" and maybe that's true in a sense. But if Ferdinand had not been assassinated, would there still have been a great war in Europe? I think there are a lot of reasons to suspect so.. maybe it would have started a few months or years later, and maybe the details would have worked out different... who knows? That's the problem with history: by definition we only get access to one view of things.
Now, IF the universe truly is strictly deterministic and things can happen only one way, then I guess it's all a moot point. But I'm not sure I accept that.
> The immediate causes lay in decisions made by statesmen and generals during the July Crisis of 1914. This crisis was triggered by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by the Bosnian-Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip who had been supported by a nationalist organization in Serbia.
While in the example I gave, it's certain that defense of slavery was the primary reason for the US Civil War. Or, are you really not willing to accept even that?
Go back to retrocryptid's statement "There would be no interstate highway system, only a collection of toll roads that went between los angeles and new york"
We can look at the interstate system and see that "Some large sections of Interstate Highways that were planned or constructed before [the Federal Aid Highway Act of] 1956 are still operated as toll roads".
This lends support retrocryptid's statement, while you said there was little to no support for any of those statements.
I may assert that the US Civil War was due to slavery, and point to, for example, documents at the time which say that slavery was the reason for succession. Eg, https://portside.org/2013-11-04/absolute-proof-civil-war-was... .
But then you reply with "we don't know - and can't know - anything about counter-factuals." Who knows - perhaps the South would have succeeded anyway even if there hadn't been slavery.
I may assert that the Manhattan Project was a result of Einstein and Szilárd's letter to Roosevelt. You can reply with the same quote. Maybe someone else besides the most famous physicist in the world would have written a similar letter, and started the effort. You might be right, but the existing causal chain is pretty clear.
And so on, and so on, and so on.
Is there any description of likely historical causation which you cannot respond to with a claim that it's "a lot of speculation with little or nothing to support it"?