My favourite lesson of the year is when I give my students an existential crisis by letting them know that all choice is an illusion. I spend the better part of the class dissecting why their lives are completely deterministic before ending with,

“You are nothing more than a predictable cog in the machine of the universe.”

Their reactions are something to behold.

I mean, last year, one of my students informed me that he didn’t sleep for three nights thinking about it. Not one wanting to cause harm to any student, I eventually land the plane where they start to think for themselves and have them play back at me.

Although the prevailing consensus right now really does suggest free will is an illusion, it’ll just take one more discovery before we pedal back and reconsider the whole argument.

It’s happened many times before and will happen many times again. After all, when it comes to understanding the universe, we are always at the beginning of infinity.
And when it comes to understanding God, we’re always further away than that.

There is a choice in all we do as long as we open ourselves to the possibility.