“We know free will does exist for many reasons. I’ll stay away from quantum mechanics for now and list three obvious reasons we know free will is a factual part of consciousness. 1. We directly experience it. I make choices all the time. I’m pretty sure you do too. You can decide to go for a ride or to lay out by the pool. You are not forced against your will to do these things. Materialist religion holds that intelligent agency does not exist, so this rather vocal minority of adherents will insist that when you think you are deciding things, it is just an “illusion”, they say.

Word to the wise: Always seriously question anybody who tells you evidence, logic and your own direct experience is an “illusion” and you are to align with their beliefs instead, because they said so.

2. It is mathematically insane. If anyone is seriously buying into the denial of free will, give some serious thought to the alternative. If free will does not really exist, even though it seems very much like it does, then our actions are not based on our intelligent decisions, but on the happenstance of, I suppose… chemistry, of all things. I don’t know what else UN-intelligent they could possibly be claiming, and they ARE materialists after all.

So these magical materials force us to do things, but they just happen to align with both our needs AND our wants, not because we chose them, goodness no, but because we got lucky in a cosmic dominoes game.

Just go ahead and try asking them what the odds of those constant, moment by moment lucky breaks are, but don’t expect a straight answer. The odds against any living thing accomplishing complex functional movement by chemical necessity rather than conscious volition is as close to zero as any odds that could ever be calculated and then some.
3. It fails to take into account how mental states work. In the materialist religion, all things mental are also an “illusion”, somehow magically caused by standard chemistry by constant extreme luck. Lets be clear here: If the brain was formed by random slop rather than intelligence, then the resultant mind would be incoherent noise with no relation whatsoever to reasoning or problem solving.

Fortunately, this isn’t a hopeless problem because we do know that the brain IS formed by our thoughts, not the other way around. In fact, it is repeatedly demonstrated that if you think a thought intensely enough or repetitively enough, neuroplasticity in the axons and dendrites will alter the neural pathways of your brain. This is known as Hebb’s Law and it is the very cornerstone of neuroscience.

Thoughts aren’t physical, but they can intelligently control the physical. Intelligent agency is a demonstrable reality. Free will is what agency does. When we make a decision, there are not-so-coincidentally chemo-electric data transmissions happening, even though these reactions weren’t happening when we didn’t need them somehow, and the neural pathways these reactions travel along form only when we choose for them to.

There aren’t nearly enough neural pathways in the brain to account for all types of thought or for that matter, even one aspect of thought, such as facial recognition. The brain is a tool used for reflexivity, standardization, speed and efficiency, recall (not memory!), perceptions and body control as directed by free will. The mind is the originator of all thought, reader of perceptions, rememberer, creator of all unique, abstract and moment by moment thought, subjective experiencer, chooser and user of the mind-brain partnership.

So…. the fact that it SEEMS like you have a free will is quite simply because you do.

When all else fails, and two sides are making contradictory claims, would the materialists in the room please try not to be offended if we use the scientific method? Lets test it out to see who is right. Make a choice. Yep go ahead… Decide to do something that you CAN do, if you choose to. Were you able to do it?

Yep, me too…..