Free will

the other day in physiological psych my teacher began the introduction to the class with a very interesting discussion on our opinions on three assumptions. the first assumption was evolution vs creationism. he proclaimed that only if we agreed that evolution was true, it would make sense to study physiological psych, because in physiological psych they do lots of studies on animal brains and relate the information to human brains suggesting we all stemmed from the same original living organism. I had heard all this before but he soon moved into assumption 2 which i considered to be more interesting; determinism vs free will. this i found a little more complicated than the first. determinism suggests that everything we do was based on a casual event. In other words we never completely choose to do something, we are always persuaded by past experiences/environmental factors/ our personalities. He then suggested that if you beleive this than does it not make sense to say that if everything is caused by something else, then if we had a hypothetical super computer that could take into account every moving atom and every causal effect we could succesfully predict the future, predict your every move, because u only moved that way because of some long chain of events leading to that point. As much as i beleive this is hypothetically true, its so hard to accept the fact that i have no free wil, in other words i never completely make a choice based on only the here and now, i am always affected by something, i am only a product of environment. My teacher suggested my brain is nothing more than a set of mixing chemicals reacting, something that is a little hard to swallow. As people we always want to beleive that we are something more than just atoms just put together reacting to environment, that we have higher thought processes that allow us to make choices free from influence, however im not completely convinced its true. This also means that the world must be completely predetermined, predetermined from the first cause of events that created the world, just a chain of events leading us in the direction it always will. However, this too may not be completely true. There is the idea of emergent properties, wich are properties that are created when things mix that werent properties of the two things that made them up. for example, when hydrogen and oxygen mix they create water, wich isnt a gas, and has properties of a liquid such as surface tension. In other word a whole is greater than jsut the sum of its parts. This means that our brains could be capable of doing things that cant be defined by just chemicals and effects of our environments. This idea puts me at ease for now.