God doesn’t play dice, he plays dominoes. The reason you chose to wear that shirt today is the same reason the sun hangs over us at just the perfect distance. It has nothing to do with choice, because choice is an illusion. It’s the byproduct of our advanced brain functions that wants to make sense out of a seemingly senseless, pointless existence.
No, your decision to wear that shirt and the sun’s position in the galaxy are both the result of an ancient, unknowably complex series of cosmic events on the subatomic scale that were set in motion at the beginning of everything. The computer you’re using is made of the same particles as the shirt you’re wearing and as the sun in the sky and as a billion stars and planets so far away that we’ll never even know they existed at all. It’s all part of the same fabric, all subject to the same fundamental force of Cause and Effect. The force that–if I may paraphrase–surrounds us and penetrates us and binds all things together–living and nonliving, because fundamentally there is no difference between the two.
The sand on the beach is subject to it the same as the man in the foxhole. The only meaningful distinction is that the sand has only one possible function, only one effect for the force to lead to. It’s like a single row of dominos from start to finish. The man, on the other hand, is like a million rows all branching off from a single starting point, in different directions and at different moments in time. He still has just as little choice in matters as the sand does, but the number of ways that the force of Cause and Effect plays out in his life is so unbelievably vast and varied that it only naturally creates the illusion in his mind that there was any other way things could’ve happened; and more insidiously, the illusion that he had any say in the matter whatsoever.
The Vulcan Buddha 