There are lots of scientists and philosophers and theologians who have good (though not compelling) reasons to believe that we don't have free will.
Pretty much everyone agrees that our free will is not absolute, i.e. that we are more likely to do things we will later wish we hadn't when we are tired, angry, amped up, etc.
Most people, liberals and conservatives, have inconsistent views with regard to free will. Free will is a very difficult topic that most people think is real easy.
It's similar to our naive view of reality. We all know that tables are solid. We can see with our own eyes that tables are solid. And by solid most people mean filled up with stuff. But it turns out that tables are mostly empty space, and they only appear solid due to the interactions of photons with the fields set up by the atomic nuclei and electrons.
What we see is not necessarily what we get. What makes "sense" is not necessarily what is the case.
If peoples' beliefs about free will affect their behavior then that seems like an interesting scientific fact in favor of there actually being free will. However, I think the best that can be argued for in that case is the sort of free will described by Dennett, i.e. we're adaptive robots.
Someone can "want" to quit smoking, and yet "want" another cigarette. Choices are sometimes difficult, and we make them moment by moment. We have competing urges and drives in us. Something in us decides moment by moment which way we will go. This might be a purely mechanical process, and if you are a materialist, you would have to expect it was. But the evidence weighs against this strongly I think. Neuroscience has progressed far, and yet can not explain the "hard problem of consciousness" even when it should have by now. Its not all there in our brains. For example, the visual processes have been mapped out...and yet there is no place in our brain where shapes and colors are combined into the concept of an object with both color and shape. Something beyond our brain seems to be doing it. Of course, this would mean something that is not material that can experience things. Which of course makes a lot of sense to people who believe in a spiritual world beyond the material one, or immortal soul. But these beliefs are much older than the research...which is just more conformation. The experience of what it is to be something that can experience, and the view of a universe of contingent things with an obvious missing first cause has convinced smart thinkers from ancient times until now that there are things beyond these contingent material, and even space and time. We now live in an age where these thinkers are shown to be right about much of this.
It's similar to our naive view of reality. We all know that tables are solid. We can see with our own eyes that tables are solid. And by solid most people mean filled up with stuff. But it turns out that tables are mostly empty space, and they only appear solid due to the interactions of photons with the fields set up by the atomic nuclei and electrons.
Yep, the simple view of reality that we project with our senses is not the real reality. My suspicion is though, it is why people who are materialists believe in materialism. Even as we think of the "solid" as being mostly empty, our instinct is to think in terms of smaller little pellets of "solid" matter floating about in some matrix..or some other mental picture that stops short of reality. It is this naive horse-sense I think that is at the core of materialist philosophy...that there is nothing beyond this "matter" picture. No spirit. No free-will. Nothing that can be outside of space itself. Nothing that can be outside of time itself. However science has not been friendly to such a picture of reality of late. Its something that our senses can not really grasp...that our picture thinking is not really good at understanding.
The reasons to believe in free-will I think has been helped by science of late. The main reason to doubt it I think was really just a bias toward the naive horse-sense materialist projection of our senses. The reasons had to do with something like "free-will" or a soul not being allowed because the idea was the universe and brain and all was just material and well understood and these things were beyond it. Without that bias, I can't find any reason to doubt free-will and that I am a soul. Certainly I can't accept that being something that can observe is an illusion...since an illusion is something that can fool an audience, not create an audience.
If peoples' beliefs about free will affect their behavior then that seems like an interesting scientific fact in favor of there actually being free will.
I don't think this necessarily follows. If there was a positive effect of believing in free-will from an evolutionary point of view, it would be at most weak evidence suggesting that free-will might just be a useful illusion rather than real. Although I suppose if believing in free-will had a negative evolutionary impact it might be weak evidence suggesting that its real thing that is perceived despite the fact that the perception is detrimental to evolutionary forces.
I’m not suggesting any kind of liberal conspiracy.
They are on auto-pilot.
They don’t actually know what they are advancing.
Relativism, starting with Multi-culturalism to today’s Political correctness gone mad.
Their efforts are in the destruction of logic whether they realize it or not.
Logic is immaterial and they are materialists.
It runs in any number of circles in American colleges and finds its way into virtually every aspect of their belief system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxz84kS8k4U