"I agree that two times two is four is an excellent thing;
But if we're going to start praising everything,
Then two times two is five
Is sometimes also a most charming little thing."

Is human free will dependant on the supernatural? Freedom and determinism are still at odds in many people’s minds. The argument behind the conflict is the notion of human license over liberty. Fyodor Dostoevsky once wrote, that, “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted.” Science dictates that since, “Every cause has an effect, therefore true free will is an impossibility in a deterministic universe," or in other words: Hume’s fork; either our actions are determined, in which case we are not responsible for them, or they are the result of random events, in which case we are not responsible for them, (Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy). Without religion we would go savage; with science we’re just automatons. Your alternatives are God or blind chance, however, there is another option, which is, “If someone rejected one sort of idea in the face of scientific evidence for another sort of idea, a rational process is the existent arbitrator in the dispute and produces concrete freedom to decide for or against one idea or another.”

People can make choices
even if the very concept of “choice”
doesn’t apply to the pieces of which they are made.

This is essentially about mind, and reason does not compel a person to decide, no matter how compelling the evidence. Or if you prefer the language of determinism: our liberty in choice comes with the determinism of our ownership of all that determines us, especially those determinates which originate inside us. If a chimpanzee,--our closest cousin in the animal world, -- could conceptually think and had real fundamental intellectual alternatives, it would have free choice in some areas of its life, and not be merely suffering from, “The illusion” of being free (as Sam Harris asserts in  The Moral Landscape). Consider for instance, if Sam Harris’ child continually lied to him as she grew up toward  adulthood, yet Sam Harris taught her to believe that free will was an “illusion”  – that self-regulation was only a habit forced upon a person by home, tribe and herd – and took no punitive action against her to change this nasty behavior. The likely result wouldn’t surprise any decent hard working honest person. We would consider him – in his role as a father – foolish, cowardly, and if he had no spouse to correct for his idiocy, even a failure.

In fact, let us suppose that we were all atheists and a group of philosophers, (let’s call them Positivists or Skinnerians), convinced us to believe that we were determined, that we had no real freedom of choice whatsoever. That factor alone would change everything which we do, and in a most unfortunate and drastic way. We’d stop taking responsibility for our decisions. We are subjective, determined and bracketed. Every intelligent person understands this.  We are not talking (in regards to free will) about a huge aspect of our lives. We are saying: If you know a thing is wrong, and you want to do it anyway; then, as your mature reflective self grows (as the years go by) you have a shot at saying, “No!”, of being in control, of having your “reasoning self” being the driver at the wheel. You can affect your moral character in an important way over time.  “We don’t have a ‘get out of evolution free’ card, but we are also not meat robots whose behavior is determined by the positions of a few knobs and switches, independent of any societal forces.” Indeed, the concept that if “theoretically” we could know everything globally that went into the creation of a human being then we could predict behaviours, is itself, an illusion. This is similar to the notion of a supernatural omnipotent overseer that we can picture in our heads, a being who knows "all". This very notion is verboten; it can’t exist hypothetically for the same reason that supernaturalism is surely false. We are always at the beginning of knowing, always in process, and ever will be, for infinity. So free will and determinism cannot be resolved in this manner anywhere into the future and this takes much of the sting out of the mechanicalist’s view of this philosophic maze.

Five ways that behaviorism, materialism and determinism are laced with carcinogenic sugary science:
1)    Behaviorism assumes with a faith unknown to sceptics,
That metaphysical conceptualism is a religious device.
2)    Consistent materialism, articulated to avoid Cartesian Dualism,
Is reduced to analytical rhetoric, so-called truisms.
3)    Determinism diminishes inner mental states to chimeras. 
4)    All three deny the essential triad of humanity: mind, self, will.
5)    Where behaviorism, materialism and determinism congregate, i.e., over-priced universities,
There is indoctrination, ad-hominen and small studies blown up from nothing into head-lines.

When Michel Onfray states, (In Defense of Atheism), “When a court functions without religious symbols, it nevertheless operates in accordance with . . . biblical metaphysics . . . The child-rapist is free; he has the choice of engaging in normal sexual  relationships with a consenting partner or of inflicting horrifying violence on a victim.  . . .” I assume this applies to thieves who refuse to work for a living and the junkies who rebuke the straight life with the needle?  This is a version of Sam Harris (The End of Faith), Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), and other Leftist atheists’ broken-circuit arguments. He, like all intellectuals who deny human freedom, want the argument both ways. Is a pedofile not free to choose? Then let’s uproot this monster before he again acts on his compulsion. Or is he really sick and has broken circuits? Then how can he be treated anymore than a healthy sexual appetite could? It is just a fact like a smoking gun! Some immutable disposition you’re born with. Onfray implies that the child-rapist shouldn’t rot in prison but be treated. After treatment, maybe we could resettle him in Onfray’s neighborhood. The pedofile will at any rate not be given the chance “to confront the disease he suffers from.” Excellent. He doesn’t suffer from a disease anymore than if he was a farm boy mating with ponies. It is learned behavior, that’s why in the history of pedofile crime we see not immediate compulsion but an escalating from fantasy to actual assault. Hyperbole argument to the pedofile example doesn’t change the fact that Onfray and his ilk’s obnoxious contention is that male rapists are sick and aren’t really committing a criminal act by stealing sex with power and brutality, that we’re either born lucky (mentally healthy) or unfortunate (mentally diseased),  and indeed, that all immoral behavior is mental disease. So, are you screwed by choice or by chance? If by choice, then punitive situations have moral meaning and can make sense. If by chance, that is, broken circuits and corrupted genes, then treatment is likely a waste of time. Either way, the thesis is incoherent. And besides, in some important sense we can all be psychopaths, can't we? The devout Catholic of the Dark Ages who boiled to death the Protestant in oil, and vice-versa after the Reformation with the Protestant doing like-tortures to Catholics, all the totalitarian autocrats who massacred innocents in the millions, the Islamists who murder gay people and stone women to death to this very day. See? Psychopaths are us? Belief and psychotic-sociopathic behaviors are far more connected to a conscious self-aware being as deceptive as us human beings than any neuroscientist will admit.

"The source of the confusion [about free will] is thinking that there are two alternatives: either we are external to nature or we are not free. Neither is true: we are part of nature, and we are free, because we deliberate and choose between alternatives. This is what it means to be free. What else could being free mean? Deliberating, choosing, is what happens in those situations in which we experience our freedom. If we consider ourselves to be outside nature, then we must believe that in order to choose, we must somehow violate the laws of nature. But it is the superstitious belief that we are outside nature that generates the error."

If you take some of the hard determinists' arguments such as in the work Incognito, D Eagleman, you see at once that biological reductionism is supported by some science and little philosophy. Human behavior has a marked, and sometimes, irresistible component when the physical brain is affected; however, trapped by their cause-effect dogma, human creativity and originality are dismissed as springing strictly from matter. Ideas, languages, creativity and concepts are believed to be hardwired; that is to say, they are the results of a super-sophisticated molecular machine, — us — and that the theory of mind and even mind itself is illusionary. Mind is brain-matter. Ideas, like rocks, sometimes roll down hill. Spinoza said the only difference between a human being and a stone rolling down a hill is that the human being thinks he is in charge of his own destiny -- huts, houses, skyscrapers and spaceships are in some sense like rocks. They have been put together by the universe with us as the mediator. Who would object to that? We’re mindless biological machines with no choice or creativity, especially, no self, only what the Big Bang dictated; that, and chance or fate as the singular puppet master.

The determinist's delusion is that Big Bang
Produced the very soul of every person ever born
Upon this good green (getting greener every year) earth.

Some people say that if God did not exist and everybody knew it; we'd go native; if we were all atheists, everything would be permitted, and the world would look like Las Vegas. However, look at it this way, if people know a stock will go up tomorrow . . . it will go up today. (Malkiel’s Law). Or look at it another way: if we all could get rich in the stock market, entertainment, horse racing or by using some other equally, exciting or easy techniques, then the slow tedious expensive method of accruing our economic future with higher education (human capital) would be for the most part, forsaken, and the result for humankind, would be a disaster. In other words, we all react to the information at our disposal. Students just stepping out into the world, especially so.

What does this say about free choice?
We want it thrust upon us no matter what the cost.
But do we really have it?

Ultimately freedom in humans is dependant on individual creativity. While every later act or thought is dependent upon former decisions or speculations, we create ideas and then act on these original self-created events. This way, bonafide freedom is achieved. This creativity–this value judgement–this focusing and weighing of evidence, (this carving of a rock into a wheel), this day to day practical reasoning, (or however you want to word it), is choosing between one thing or another with reason as the judge between right and wrong. This sets us free from many compelling determinative factors, or in other words: we are the cause of our own choices; we are the agent that decides internally and are not only choosing from external causes or cues. This deduction does not exactly falsify the Compatibilists’ faith in mechanicalism, nothing could—it is a religious tenet of the Left—but it sure takes the tarnish off their glossy absolutism.

Naom Chomsky (2022): "We just can't abandon believing it [free will]; 
It's our most immediate phenomenologically obvious impression, but we can't explain it."

Well, I'm explaining it: reason is the fundamental value in ethics. It is the arbitrator for harmony and cooperation of the emotions, passions, instincts, intuitions, impulses and whatever other states arise in people. Reason can resolve conflicts between these often chaotic aspects, and bring about the greatest satisfaction to a person, helping manage their lives in attaining personal happiness and building moral character so that they are not always reacting emotionally, (or out of control as it were). It gives us all a shot at our own unique self-criticism so we can adjust our behavior in the future; it gives us valuable bio-feedback. Volitional acts by long-standing habits of reason, -science, -creativity, -whatever, are indeed 'the libertarian illusion' that is all too real, [see endnote].

People can be creative and invent original ideas of their own –  rational or otherwise – they're abounding with hypotheses, theories and opinions, most of them wrong, but nonetheless, to a high degree, creative. Protagorean Man is the measure of all things. Rendering of much of the modern problems of subjectivity, moral relativity and scepticism are often patently impossible as so many logically necessary connections can demonstrate. We are subjective, that's a given, but with almost any effort, we can attain outside information, and change direction. Going with the flow is just a lazy inclination which at any rate is exposed to be a false one.

If we're all making a subjective egocentric movie,
Do you want to win an Academy Award or to be a fart in the wind?

Turns out that unless you lock yourself in a dark closet (or have one singular source of knowledge about everything), you are receiving and transmitting, therefore constantly changing, direction. The only question is, "Do you want to be a good driver or blind at the wheel?" Do you want to use reason, or the alternative, (feelings, faith, hunches and etc.,) to decide? It is about self-managing not about judging. You are free either to be a slave to your emotions or liberated by your powers of reasoning, but don't be misconceived, you are, as Jean-Paul Sartre long ago coined, "Condemned to be free," along with every other human being. "From the moment he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does."

Forms of human creation of any kind,
Are all a manner of constructions of self.

From Flow, 30 years ago: "The function of consciousness is to represent information about what is happening outside and inside the organism in such a way that it can be evaluated and acted upon by the body. In this sense, it functions as a clearinghouse for sensations, perceptions, feelings, and ideas, establishing priorities among all the diverse information. Without consciousness we would still 'know' what is going on, but we would have to react to it in a reflexive, instinctive way. With consciousness, we can deliberately weigh what the senses tell us, and respond accordingly. And we can also invent information that did not exist before: it is because we have consciousness that we can daydream, make up lies, and write beautiful poems and scientific theories." The trouble with the Foucault, Harris, Dawkins, Hawkins, Marx, neo-Marxists, and many Declinists' arguments on 'Free Will' is that people who don't believe in it behave completely differently than people who do. That doesn’t utterly nullify the nihilists denial of freedom but it knocks down all their supporting abstracts, that at heart, the nuts and bolts of it, as it were, that we are randomly assembled atoms and the abstract self can do nothing but watch helplessly as its elephant (the hapless self), roams the forests and streets.

Why the universe could be indeterminate has not been scientifically disproven.
Why there is every indication we have free will is the written code inside our DNA.
We create new ideas endlessly, often wrong, seldom rational, nonetheless creative,
Indeterminists are like the scientists debunking the current climate-crises myths,
They receive only ad hominem insults from other 'so-called' scientists,
Rational arguments are not used against them; the debate is closed.
Certainty and absolute knowledge have been acheived. LOL. 
Indeterminism is reinforced by the rules of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics.
The universe is not a predictable clockwork machine as determinists argue,
For example, if you know the exact position and momentum of every particle,
You can God-like perfectly predict the future.
This view is contradicted with Lorenz’s Butterfly Effect (Chaos Theory), 
Bell’s Theorem of non-locality,
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle
And Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation,
To say nothing of Prigogine’s Arrow of Time which leaves the future of the universe,
Wide open, and not closed;
To say nothing of Spontaneous Decay and Quantum Tunneling

As a scientist and atheist, you rejoin, 'If one is responsible for this certain thought, X, then this thought X must be anteceded by X1 + X2 and so forth.' Or so the theory goes. The process is determined and no thought is ex nihito (or comes about from spontaneous combustion as it were). Or if you perfer a more concise definition from Sean Carroll, an American theoretical physicist who specializes in quantum mechanics, gravity and cosmology and like Dennett is a compatibilist and believes my view of libertarian free-will is ultimately false: "The usual argument against free will is straightforward: We are made of atoms, and those atoms follow the patterns we refer to as the laws of physics. These laws serve to completely describe the evolution of a system, without any influences from outside the atomic description. If information is conserved through time, the entire future of the universe is already written, even if we don’t know it yet. Quantum mechanics predicts our future in terms of probabilities rather than certainties, but those probabilities themselves are absolutely fixed by the state of the universe right now".

It is in its simplest thought that all scientific explanation to everything,
Can be reduced to the atomic structure of all things;
That physical laws and natural marvels are the only account worthwhile considering;
I have no doubt this is a certain kind of blind faith.
Indeed, humans fundamental phenomenological grounding of free-will, agency and self,
Are referred to by reductionists & determinists as illusions.
We are not of a mind, just brains—flesh robots as it were.
The implausibility of this conclusion without any observable evidence never strikes them as odd.
Rational inquiries of what was before Big Bang or that something could come from nothing,
And that mind is not the teleological goal of the universe, are dismissed out of hand.
The call to absolute naturalism must be true, they insist, because it is the simplest solution:
Therefore, the atomic structure of things accounts for all the complicated edifices.
Pretty big assumptions from blind faith!

No such determination is made by volitional awareness which results in original creative thought, especially focused thinking determined and arbitrated by reasoning. It is a long process, the chronicle of which is the entire history of ideas, the evolution of mammalian life on earth and the unfolding of the cosmos. For instance, history isn’t determined by technology, ultimately, technology is invented by the human mind, nonetheless, in part, history is determined by technology. Free will is the event that is sometimes the deciding factor in a formula which includes, perhaps, 90 per cent physical (genetic, environmental and cultivated), and 10 per cent mental (i.e., it is up to you,); so you can make yourself freer than you are, and in part how you do that is by never thinking that you are robotically determined; you are not completely free, but certainly, no Calvinist slave. Or to reword this again: the co-existence of agency/free will with all the other very valid restrictions on our freedom to choose (i.e., brain damage and disease, social, cultural, civil and especially biological influences), all have great effect on our decisions. Here, then, what seems intuitive, is the rapid end of a process. What seems determined is also freedom to act on original ideas. What is a result of mystifying human behavior sometimes has an emergent prime mover, that is, you sometimes have freedom of choice based on your ability to decide among multiple options with your reasoning being the determining factor against your being completely determined into one specific choice. Reason is related to your power to produce ideas, in that, focused awareness (directing the will, mind, self on objects of some sort, etcetera, i.e., agency), is an ultimate choice; concentration creates ideas (i.e., creative alternatives). Your faculty of reasoning is the arbitrator. You are free to the extent that you are rational, analytic, thoughtful or whatever you would like to call it. Free will is mitigated, but it exists; it is very real (in potential). Moreover, free will is probably on a bell curve among the whole of humankind; a continuum if you’ll allow me, where some have a Churchillian will, with the centre fill with people like me, working to stronger agency as the years go by, and then, at the opposite end, those with diminished agency and with little actual free choice.

Consciousness is an elemental, essential, phenomenological fact of humanity; 
We’re self-aware and have potential agency and free-will;
And a sense of self with continuity through our years.
Like ground-being and observable-facts through the senses (i.e., reality);
Consciousness is tied to existence and the real world outside of us:
Reality is independent of our mind and we must volitionally focus to comprehend it;
It is hard work to be non-subjective (i.e., objective) and is ultimately unattainable;
However, with self-criticism, logical-epistemology and reason, there is hope,
And our moral obligation is to spare no effort to try and achieve some semblance of truth!

Einstein's Theory of Relativity was like a mystical event after years of super intensity in the dimension of focused awareness. Where is his freedom? Many Einstein-types like Heidegger at the time in Germany, with perhaps even greater IQs, joined The Nazi Party. (And Professor Peterson, with all due respect, let's be completely honest here, if Nietzsche had been alive, who do you really think he'd be backing as his uberman in Germany in the 1930s?)  So, what moral culpability did these two thinkers (Hitler and Einstein) have? On the one side is a Jew who is the exact epitome of a scapegoat, a pacifist-determinist. On the other, the dark movement clouded in blood instinct, uber's will to power and the crowd's angry roar. Notice Relativity and Nazism aren’t Spinoza's rocks rolling down the hill. They’re explanations and events caused by ideas. Einstein and Hitler originated and refined them. The one? The other? Neither really determined completely, nor free, but the result of the human mind in process and the history of a complicated event.

The Sam Harris Level of Delusion:
That He is in Charge of the Idiocracy.

So here in 2026, we must still clarify freedom: the creation of idea doesn’t guarantee morality, but only human freedom itself. Reason – the act of focusing on necessary connections – guarantees human free-action. Atheism and freedom are not incompatible. Science and free-choice are not at odds. The existence of free will is not a resounding fact to exclude all others, but a fact notwithstanding. So this is the science of free will: the more it is mastered, the greater the likeliness of self-control; the more you are resigned to the inevitability of fate, the lesser the likelihood that you’ll master your own fortune, thus caving into whims, even ones like serial murder, child-rape and democide. Sam Harris says in Free Will that choice made from something other than deterministic compulsion is an illusion. He like Brian Greene (and so many other soulless physicists) believe we aren't emergent, or have real agency, or free choice, that Big Bang made us meat robots and what came before it is most certainly nothing. What is their evidence? Nothing! No one knows what came before Big Bang. They believe it on faith. They are Religulous.  Anyone who has the point of view as such, that is, the physically coupled x + y = z type argument, especially the worn-out old one that ‘if all antecedent factors are accounted for, than the unique homo sapiens' ability of cognitive creativity is an illusion.’ And moreover, if free will is indeed an illusion, (that there is no seat in the brain for mind/self/soul), then there is also no moral culpability for homo sapiens' action. There is no real agency in us; there is no one driving; the self in itself is an illusion; in fact, it’s magic and Sam Harris has no rational opposition, only the religious miraculous one. How brave. He’s like an atheist in Iran. 

How Utterly Dishonest.
If some philosopher says, ‘There is no absolute knowledge! And that is the only thing we know for sure.” We see the perplexity of the situation and even a first year university student understands the complexity of outright Socratic skepticism. Marxism’s view of an inevitable calamity is another example of this sort of thing. If it is inevitable, why preach it, why promote violence to have it succeed? If we are determined, why write a book trying to get us to change our minds about free will? Why try to spread determinism like it was a religion? If it is really true, then no action is necessary. Like Karl Marx, Sam Harris wants the argument both ways,--help bring about the inevitable! He wants you to make a cognitive choice based on a reasonable argument that there is no free will by reading his book. If he is right and there is no free agency (no real independent self), then gathering information, discussing the subject and trying to change our minds is hopeless. So, why do it? Maybe to sneak a hidden notion into the discussion. Is he saying that you can make a real choice to change direction, but it is not really (really) free, but only really free (that is without compulsion). (But you can’t use your reason and change your mind because you are just fooling yourself based on the fact that there is no self). There is just so much irony in this position: every 'mismanaged' person would love moral permission to “Go with the flow!” And despite his claim to be in some ‘revolutionary’ minority, many people hold this undemanding position, including many religious people and certainly many Leftist intellectuals. His argument is laughable. “Mismanagers of the world unite and read this book. You have nothing to lose but your self-control!” Life without consequences, a (would-be) philosopher's wet dream.
Philosophers make the claim that the data we take in of the physical world,
(As though an unreliable, fog-filled digital process)
Is part of what is given by subjective observation alone,
And therefore, that the conclusions of science about the world,
Suffers from an assumption that this category of thought has priority over all others:
Thus, what it cannot be explained (such as free-will) is either not real,
Or is part of a magical mystery tour and can be dismissed Sam-Harris-style.
Empiricism is just plainly inadequate and always has been.
The historical problem of induction was solved by Karl Popper,
As understanding David Deutsch's ‘Better Explanations’ easily reveals.
Proper definitions of reason are given in my numerous articles on the subject.
Am I free to change my mind as he asks? Is my mind/body—as an integrated living biological organism which is spontaneously ordered by the whole being—allowed to change me? Are we binary or even multiple beings? Am I allowed to choose a philosophy or does my mind-body organism choose it for me. The self is maybe this in-house necessary myth of the organism incorporated for its survival and progress—to even pass along its genes and information—working in conjunction with the living creature which is me. But I choose to call it Edward A. St Amant. A strong will is a tactical maneuvering to contain all the competing priorities to acquire the things we need over a lifetime. You and me are whole persons whose interest are paramount no matter what name we are called and no matter how many internal voices are competing for control. I am pretty sure I at least have a seat at the board. How many other members are there? Well a few and I try to convince them to be rational, loving and kind in their dealings with other self delusional mind-bodies. But damn, if you are an evolutionist, atheist and libertarian, why the hell talk like this? For the Sam Harrises and neuroscientists of the world? I think a better idea would be to say I come from a long long lineage of self-aware organisms (Homo sapiens), and we have learned over some millenniums interesting facts about managing, creating and promoting our individual selves through our ideas, impulses and feelings, no matter where the expression of the self is manifest; as certain as I am that evolution is true, I am equally certain that Sam Harris is a Noam-Chomsky--Don Quixote, and as anti-free-market as Ché Guevara's very own Bernie Sanders, as well as being as religious as the Marxists: including, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Pot Pol, Ho Chi Min, Tito, Castro and all the fundamentalists in the fairy-tale world of their progressive Hegelian Lutheranism; what a nightmare. From Descarte's Error: "In using the notion of self, I am in no way suggesting that all the contents of our minds are inspected by a single central knower and owner, and even less that such an entity would reside in a single brain place. I am saying, though, that our experiences tend to have a consistent perspective, as if there were indeed an owner and knower for most, though not all, contents. I imagine this perspective to be rooted in a relatively stable, endlessly repeated biological state. The source of the stability is the predominantly invariant structure and operation of the organism, and the slowly evolving elements of autobiographical data."
Mind is the Emergent Property of Brains,
A Process not a Thing,
Not a Piece of (Extended) Matter.
Emergent properties such as hand signals preceding mumblings, free-hand gestures (due to upright posture and running capabilities) preceding weapons, names (grunts at first) for these weapons, visual objects (such as weapons) agreed upon unanimously within the tribe, speech which becomes more comprehensive over the milleniums, sexual etiquette which soon arose within all tribes (and many restrictions around sexual behavior that followed the many centuries), a common certainty humans were special & therefore must have had a creator of some sort, a constant belief that consciousness was miraculous and that that alone was proof of the gods or of a God, a belief in human agency, that the gods or God expect a certain morality from humanity and that all human outcomes have moral value, a nagging anxiety (in reason) that this might all be reduced to an illusion by Socratic dissenters, and finally, the threat was answered (also in reason, i.e., by formal monotheism) by a growing certainty (faith in God grew over time) that even if God had not intervened to create self-aware consciousness in humans, then some other unknown entity or process did (i.e., that nihilistic reductionism was absurd even for scientists, disbelievers & atheists).
The reason why human reason is not a mystery is self-evident:
This is so because the tools are pedestrian and everyone can learn & use them;
Well, maybe not academic philosophers; they are some of the most indoctrinated against it.
Reason is the art of philosophizing and grasping things that are logically joined,
Reason is the way of checking column A, the humanly observed, with column B, the really-real,
The tools include but are not limited to:
Science, falsifiability, induction, deduction, reduction, abduction (conjectures)
Empirical data collection, self-criticism, hypothesis, mathematics, language,
All the resources of comprehension which are available to us:
Such as testability, evidential support, precision, quantifiability, consistency,
Intersubjectivity, repeatability & universality. 
It is an open-ended combinatorial system, 
An engine for generating an unlimited number of new ideas.
When it is partnered with a ambitious sceptical self and a desire to talk to strangers,
It finds its own logic to impel it, and as the years go by,
It will respect the interests of ever-increasing numbers of outsiders. 
It also takes note of the shortcomings of previous exercises of reasoning,
It has bio-feed-backs, updates and improves itself.
If contradictions are noticed in any thesis, it allows criticisms and alternatives.
It is a God-given tool for human sight even if there is no god.
In philosophic lingo among the secular naturalists, my view on free will is derisively called contracausal as opposed to the compatabilist's view of freedom like Dennett's, choice based alone on the absence of coercion. The catastrophic consequences of being a compatibilist—for your own moral well being don’t be one!—are embedded in our human nature, and subsidized bad philosophers, have the nerve to call free will ‘illusionary’. The Stoics had it right in the first place about fate, emotions, & duties and individual personal responsibility in spite of and because of them. Everything in life has and gives value, especially economic choices; human beings create value in all things and in all choices and actions; Hume's guillotine (the thesis that an ethical or judgmental conclusion cannot be inferred based on purely descriptive factual statements) is the 'illusion' not free will, we need both the descriptive (science) and prescriptive (reason) for our ethical lives.
Some accuse realists & materialists of having a metaphysical view in a negative-manner, i.e., it denies all objective (moral) value as individual subjective, atomic, and even, nihilistic behavior. If you come across a stray dog, why not give it to Dr. Fauci and his ilk to torture for science? If your horse reaches your journey’s end, why not kill and eat it if you are hungry? If you hate your daughter’s house cat and it is in your care while she summers in the Riviera, why not let it wonder outdoors and disappear forever—she’d never know? Or even better, why not ignore a genocide, if you are a professed journalist and some organization is subsidizing you. The reason why we wouldn’t do any of these things is because they are reflective, i.e., they include moral judgements and reduces our self-worth, and most who, sincerely believe values not ungrounded but in fact, are found everywhere (especially in a spiritual element) and even if they can not explain it but only intuit its truth, understand that goodness is dependent on value and that if a human being does not have moral values they are in fact evil. 
We are the great self-aware morally-evolving creatures in the crux of evolution, and while our human nature is malleable in the grand flux of time, it can be treated as a permanent event because of the time frame (i.e., it takes perhaps thousands of years to make any significant change in our basic physical or moral structures); we culled the psychopath out of the primate in us with violence, but we were not 100 percent successful. It needs to be emphasized to all the self-less determinists and compatibilists everywhere (these two positions are mirror images of each other in every important way), but especially to scientists, and more especially to neuroscientists, that science is beholding to political freedom, free capital markets and free will. It is not the other way around. Science will not and cannot free us. It can surely cure us of disease and so forth but it can also curse us with universal enslavement; it is always a real and present danger in the collective progressive effort to take away our freedom and individuality. It is no coincidence that all the scientist-determinists are somewhere on the political socialist-welfare graph and are at heart both anti-libertarian and economic ignoramuses. No coincidence, but I am sure, also no surprise to any thoughtful libertarian. What is a human being but an ancient, accidently-made atomic apparatus that just hasn’t been fully explained and perfected yet by the dangerous automatons in white lab coats whose hearts are full of loving communism and who, like Francis Galton, are always trying to fix what isn't broken. Why we are always at the beginning of knowing (i.e., especially scientists) is that the universe is infinite in all directions as is space-time itself, as vast an ongoing organism as can be imagined, yet only diminished by the vastness of the interior of the human brain. Let them keep trying to jerry-rig the body to account for mind. It is exceedingly amusing. Knowledge is always partial and there is never an end to science. Given our history, it is laughably stupid to think otherwise. 
I am not categorically denying the fact that brain damage and disease doesn't alter human behaviour anymore than with mere self-control alone we always do the right thing: we are free agents up and to a point. Surely a man who has billions of sperm in his ejaculate instead of the average 100 to 300 million, might be more susceptible to fantasies of violence toward others to attain his desires, and eventually even rape a victim to acheive them, but should we ever sympathise with his action, especially given the fact that in a free society, he could have safely paid for it if he couldn't manage it any other way? The self is an illusion only in the sense that it is the construct of the biologic apparatus of our bodies and brains but make no doubt that it is an absolutely necessary reality: your General Paton may be all bluster and drag but you can’t unite, inspire and organize the troops without it. You face grave challenges in your life—including staring down death at every moment—and to over-surmount, you need an old battle weary commander, a stoic sage, a wise old mother and a kindly fool: ‘Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.’ *
If you are one of these evolutionary determinists—let’s straw-dog it and call them, idiot savants—and you say to yourself, “I’m not going to be fooled; I’m not taking the drastic step of blindly falling in love because of DNA replication pressures and you deprive yourself on principle of the single greatest human experience in life, then you’re as crazy as Nietzsche, as rigid as Kant, as authoritarian as Hegel and as hateful as Marx. I am begging you, find love and fall deep; that’s what reason demands—if you fully understand it—even if you are not guaranteed happiness, you should give it your best shot and if you would like it to last read Beyond Order. Evolution has equipped you with blind love of a (pretty) total stranger; use it in your own adventure, and to make your adventure "great", develop "strong" free will. Let’s say by genetic inheritance you are born “aimless, careless, conforming, impatient, narrow, rude, self-pitying, selfish, suspicious, uncooperative, and undependable” (this describes me as a youth) and as ill luck would have it—or genetic misfortune have it—your parents have the same genetic “disposition” and turn out to be dreadful care-givers (entirely not me). Well you have all these deficits. Should the world throw up its hands? Should you surrender to this disposition? After all, what chance do you have? Say someone like your local guidance councillor, inspiring neighbour, cousin, rabbi, aunt/uncle, pastor, imam, teacher, sage, guru or secular mentor (but I pray not a determinist) took you under their wings and taught you the development of free will as you grew, (i.e., moral control over your choices). Now do you think you have a fighting chance at push back against your genetic inheritance? Can you Horatio Alger yourself from allegorical rags to riches, be a stellar David Livingstone, go to all length of endurance to achieve reason, control over your choices, and some, if not all, of your dreams? We all know the answer to this rhetorical question.
I am not saying that I don’t like Dennett or Dawkins, (nor am I dismissing cultural evolution) but they’re not Hitchens. My atheism is like Democritus’. It’s philosophical. I think we create hypothesises (i.e., generate original ideas all the time), I didn’t need the specifics of natural selection to decide. I was an atheist long before the many books on The Theory of Evolution brought the irrefutable proof to my attention; thank you Richard Dawkins. I understand and am sympathetic  to Freeman Dyson’s point of view but really believe that in his Einsteinium wisdom he refutes and confutes atheists and believers alike because his belief is a faith in a romantic optimistic reality, a sort of hopeful teleological Christian-Hegelianism. I love the man; however, the supreme problem with faith is: “There is no supernatural reality!” That's all there is too it; join the working world of hard thinking and common-sense philosophy. If Dyson embraces an immanent Power, in Dyson's name, the idiot-winds of the world will justify a belief in Jesus-Mohammed-Marx-Hitler-Mosses-Ganesha-Buddha-Zarathustra-or-whatever and hound some apostate, middleman-minority trader, wealthy-innovator, gay, transgender or other poor outsiders. I mean we’re xenophobic and nationalistic enough without encouraging religion even if what you have in mind is the Quakers, (Notice that Nixon was a Quaker).
Most believers in the airy-fairy are looking for an escape hatch, the golden gate; they’re gutless romantics in the industrialized world concealing their cross-purposes in temple-senate-church-mosque-and-university. They often hate life outright! Always, they love another dimension and are not wholly committed to this one. To hell with them, except sometimes they’re really wonderful. I mean I sincerely like most of them and they may well be better people than me. Certainly I like Freeman Dyson, C S Lewis, Candice Owens and Turcker Carlson. What to do?  Maybe they’re right. It can’t be resolved. Damn, I have to get back to work. This coffee sucks! BTW: If there is a Christ, praise Allah and peace be upon him. Damn Salman Rushdie, just joking; actually John Le Carré's argument is almost fascist: freedom of speech isn't for people's views you like, it is for the ones you detest. And by the way, Buddha is always depicted as jelly belly don’t you think? Why didn’t he ever bring up anything about eating whole foods and exercising, or for that matter, why don't philosophers like Daniel Dennett do it? But what do I know? Christ never once mentioned the Chinese or Russians. What about dinosaurs and woolly mammoths? Isn’t it hilarious that Mohammed was illiterate? Who believes in this stuff? Anyway, determinism is like processed sugar which tastes great but is carcinogenic; it all sounds Spock-logical but actually causes Darth Vador syndrome: defeatism, depression, devaluing of man and many other “D” entities from the dark side. Here's a quote from Einstein: "The difference between genius and stupidity, is that genius has its limits.” Here's one from Hitler: “I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator by defending myself against the Jew." I'm not claiming like Dawkins that Einstein was an atheist, but those two quotes pretty much speak for themselves.
One of the funniest things I have read in this ongoing debate was Father Ian Markham’s book Against Atheism, a quirky attempt to refute Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris. In a Section about Nietzsche who he laughably calls the last real atheist—always easier arguing against a madman than scientists and rationalists—he makes this enormous admission: “This last question flows into the second challenge: surely an atheist should be a rational egoist. We shall define a rational egoist as a person who determines that all decisions about his or her actions should be made on the basis of a calculation – a calculation of what furthers one’s own self-interest.” That’s what I say: A true atheist should be a rational egoist, a libertarian and let science and reason arbitrate what we ethically should do, and further that all human action is moral, even economic ones. Saying this, I don’t want to insinuate that all Platonists are blind in the cave —or even ridiculous out of it— but the above citation articulates what we already know, doesn’t it? Agency, the self and free will, all rise or fall together, and today, all three are under severe strain from science. Here is a formula for all the leftist atheists floundering about in the cave without free will: genuine agnosticism equals rational egoism plus intellectual independence combined with sovereign individuality. 
* Rumi.

Endnote: Neurophilosophy of Free Will: “However, we should not wantonly reject the theory of autopoiesis (self-creation) from neurophilosophy solely because it is inherently self-refuting. The truly interesting aspect of radical constructivism is not that it is radical, but that it is constructivism. The theory of autopoiesis unfolds its relevance within a certain mixture of constructivistic and realistic elements. We do have access to objective reality, namely through the structural linking of our central nervous system to the environment via the receptors and effectors of our bodies. And we have a subjective phenomenal [Kantian] world that emerges from the operations of the brain itself. But we should not expect that our individual and subjective conception of the world, as we experience it through our senses, discloses nature to us as it really is. We should also not assume that inter-subjectivity is always possible, nor that we could think or imagine anything at all if we only had the appropriate information. My point is that the theory of autopoiesis offers us a well founded approach from biology for understanding how communication and language can evolve, although internally our brain is concerned with nothing more than the maintenance of its own states.”  This absolutely contemptible philosophic gobbledygook could only be made by a tenured academic philosopher; eight billion people on the planet, almost all hooked up to the internet (seven billion users) and Henrik Walter snidely assumes human beings don’t have the apparatuses in reason and science to get to objective reality. What a sad ignorant phenomenologist, ('ha!, see! we are blind because we have eyes!') hiding behind the foggy opaque philosophy which like religion, mysticism and Marxism, is the well documented enemy of reason. As for his representation of libertarian free-will, it is no more than camouflaged compatibilism.   “We have already mentioned that most people have the natural conviction that they possess free will. This conviction is due to certain experiences and enriched by our cultural values of freedom and self-determination. The least that neurophilosophy can try to do is to attempt to explain the experience of being able to do otherwise, intelligibility and agency-by using the means and insights of neuroscience itself. If we simultaneously keep our eye on the ongoing philosophical debate, we can explain some of these experiences naturally, without retrieving the concept of libertarian free will, which is incompatible with causal determinism. This would give us an argument for demonstrating that the assumption of a strong version of free will is superfluous, even though we have not, strictly speaking, refuted it. That is not the goal of a neurophilosophy of free will anyway. Our goal is to find out how we must alter the traditional libertarian concept of free will so that it is compatible with our knowledge about the brain.”

Heavens to Murgatroyd! As I have shown above, the traditional libertarian concept of mind and human freedom is in line with what we currently know about the brain and the self's agency.