Ohh yay, thank you for prompting me! The thing is, even as things are now, there is no logically coherent argument for free will (that doesn’t require re-defining absolute free will to accommodate people who just really like the idea of free will). Digging deeper into biology, consciousness, neurology etc. consistently fails to find a mechanism for uncaused agency.

You literally don’t choose the next thought you have. You’ll have already thought it by the time you know what it was. This includes non-verbal thoughts, vibes, your feelings about matters. By the time you cognize any of them, they’ll have already happened. You can deliberate but you don’t choose if you do, you’ll only know after the fact if you did. This is just… plain as day once you are willing to face it.

Belief in free will is just a stubborn thing we have because A: we really just LIKE to think that we have it, and B: Christianity(/Abrahamic religions), in which western thought is rooted, specifically demands the existence of free will. Anyone’s belief in free will is just the result of not having one; they’ve been exposed to a lot of reinforcement of the belief so they take that as a fact.

Further, not having free will carries two implications that people really, really don’t like:

1. If people don’t have free will, they aren’t at “fault” for their “bad” behavior. People much prefer to be able to simply judge, rather than consider nuance. On this topic, it’s easier to say “fat people are just lazy gluttons”, instead of accounting for various mental health situations and environmental factors (upbringing, culture etc.). People who grew up with unhealthy habits often struggle to change them if that’s all they learned, and the body really likes to hang on to fat once it gets some. This often makes losing weight significantly harder than maintaining a healthy weight. That’s just some of the nuance for the topic, and there’s way more. Thinking about all that takes a measure of cognitive bandwidth which not everyone has so it’s simply more efficient to jump to a judgment (but as I see it, if they don’t have the bandwidth, it would be more intellectually honest if they didn’t weigh in on the matter at all). Plus getting to judge someone inherently puts one in a superior position in one’s own mind, which gets to the next point:

2. If people don’t have free will, any personal achievement anyone is proud of is just the result of “randomness”(except there’s no reason to think there’s true randomness in reality, any more than there is in computer RNG, it’s just complicated to the point that the concept of “random” remains useful in everyday language). They lose the superior position. This is often more significant to people than the much more positive implication that there is nothing inherently wrong with anyone (so people beating themselves up for all their perceived shortcomings are off the hook - however much they think they suck, the fact is that they are the perfectly natural, normal and expectable result of everything that ever was).

It’s a direct challenge to our moral intuitions and again, because people like to go for simplicity, they confuse trying to understand causes as excusing behavior. Which it isn’t. You don’t have to have free will to have consequences for undesirable behavior. But you can impose the consequences from an informed place that actually aims to reduce the undesired behavior. But we tend to prefer “eye for an eye” thinking, again because it’s simple and it caters to our base desires.

Add to this that people frequently confuse lack of free will (determinism) with fatalism ( https://breakingthefreewillillusion.com/wp-content/uploads/DETERMINISM-VS-FATALISM-infographic.png ), which leads to people arguing for free will because they think that the lack of it makes “trying to change things” pointless. Which is not an argument for free will, that’s just a problem in one’s understanding of the topic ( also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_consequences ).