The turn of phrase is probably bad, but determinism can exist even in a fundamentally undeterministic universe. All that is required for the universe to be undetermimistic is for SOME events to lack a cause. For example, a universe in which once every billion years a particle appears out of thin air somewhere in the universe and flies off in a random direction is, on the whole, non-deterministic, even if every other interaction works according to simple mechanistic rules.