In your opinion what causes christians to believe in Jesus

[John 6IX Breezy]

@John:

This is rather off-topic, but I'm curious what your views on free will are?

I began studying psychology around the time when Sam Harris was popularizing his free will arguments. So, his arguments were my first steps into the field. Looking back, I think very few things about the mind make sense in the absence of free will. You have to lean heavily into the idea that half of your experience is an illusion in order to reject free will.

Your brain is at least set up as if it needed an internal free agent to make choices. We use terms for it like the central executive, selective attention, awareness, arousal, all of which are connected to conscious experience itself, as if consciousness was a key ingredient in the choice making and decision process. In graduate school we read Libet's paper (also popularized by Sam Harris) in a human cognition class. The conversations we were having about it at the time leaned towards something like "free won't" meaning that the brain had many competing subsystems that present decisions to the central executive, and the executive simply has a kind of veto power to inhibit impulse rather than create them. So there's many ways to think about it.

So in conclusion, I think most of the philosophical arguments against free will are too simplistic, and don't actually explain much of what's actually observed. We have to imagine that what we're seeing isn't actually what we're seeing and that anything that seems like free will is actually an illusion, or worse, a delusion. And that's just scientifically problematic.