Many people love to debate the existence (or not) of something called "free will", are we in fact free to make whatever choices we like in life or are the choices pre-programmed by either Biology or some bearded man in the sky?
It's an interesting question and one that science is inching towards an answer for but as yet is inconclusive. Religions have, of course, had much to say (or guess) regarding this question, Christians of varying flavours claim that "free will" is the result of God allowing Humans to sin (or not) thereby providing some kind of "get out of jail" clause to their "problem of evil" a solution which isn't particularly convincing to most rationalists, being somewhat circular in nature.
Current Science seems to favour a lack of free will in Humans, brain studies using new fMRI scanners appear to show that decisions are made in the brain before the person becomes aware of them thereby suggesting that the decision itself is made subconsciously based upon nothing more than brain structure shaped by prior experience. This makes total sense to me, having worked a bit with neural net technology the mechanism for this kind of set-up would seem to be feasible, however, the killer evidence for this position has not yet been discovered and I'm sure (knowing how Biology works) things will turn out to be far more complex than this.
I'm reminded of a CEO who once decided that his "management team" would start every meeting with a can of red-bull (the energy drink) in order to show how hip and liberal they were, and also to provide the "energy" to have a productive meeting. Most people thought this was a cool idea, one person objected, saying that they disliked the taste of red-bull, that person was excluded from meetings. Such is the nature of free-will, as Hitch once put it, we have free-will, not because its a gift from God but because we have no choice.
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