In your opinion what causes christians to believe in Jesus

[Alan V]

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.

Emergent materialists typically agree with this assessment, but with the qualification that free will is by no means absolute.  There is both top-down (free will) and bottom-up (material) causation, rather than everything being bottom-up (strict determinism).  That means there are limits to free will causation, and several of them are the constraints which conditioning, propaganda, and indoctrination place in our thinking until we actually do the work to sort them out.  This is different than the Christian conception of free will, as Grand Nudger pointed out.  Christians depend on word-magic, which doesn't work and so often leads to hypocrisy. I think there is plenty of room in modern psychology for the emergent materialist perspective, but not so much for the Christian message.

So are you a psychologist or a Christian, or are you trying to be both without success?