illusion of free will?

[mr_whackamole]

God has given us free will, correct? Maybe not.
I had a quite philosophical discussion with my roommate the other day, and I felt like sharing it with all of you.

I was doing an English paper on how students navigate academic literacy and my original thesis was somewhere along the lines of "students navigate academic literacy through their own ambition" so i went on to describe ambition as being internal or inspired internally by outside sources. Then I realized they're the same.
Ambition is inspired within us by sources in our environment. A non-profit TV ad makes one realize that their smoking habit is slowly killing them. The ad inspires ambition. This is a simple example.
Frederic Douglass started his quest for knowledge when his master's wife began to teach him the alphabet. His master found out and told his wife to stop and discourage Douglass's further attempts to learn. It's like giving a toddler a cookie and then taking it away. Douglass then had a burning desire to learn to become literate. He didn't do this himself. Without his mistress, he probably would not have had the desire to learn, being ignorant to literacy. The influences from factors in our environment determine our choices, our paths, our futures. Even little choices and small opinions are formed along the way from influences for our years at home with our parents, our time "on our own" in school or the workforce, etc. Just like there isn't one gene for head size and shape, there are many. Many factors influence one trait.

So do we ever really have a choice? Or is it all predetermined before we're even born? I hope you see the correlation between ambition and the illusion of free will. I didn't really tie them together well.

perhaps this even goes as far to attempt to refute religion- if God said he gave us free will but he didn't...