From the time of
Epicurus in the 4th century BCE, who first argued for the reality of some chance (
tyche) in the universe, until the early 20th century when
Albert Einstein found that chance must be involved in the interaction of matter and radiation, those arguing for chance faced powerful arguments against
ontological chance.
Critics said that chance was at best
epistemic, the result of human ignorance, for example, in physics, the impossibility of measurements accurate enough to
prove the deterministic laws of nature.
In the late 20th century, the development of chaos theory and complexity theories (including complex adaptive systems) was taken to prove that perfect predictability was practically impossible. These two theories were used to argue against the irreducible quantum uncertainty discovered by the founders of quantum mechanics about ten years after Einstein's independent discovery of quantum indeterminism.
Indeed, some of the founders criticized
Werner Heisenberg's use of the term "uncertainty" as implying human ignorance.