There's an argument I've had so many times and I never can quite articulate my point.

My point is that "free will" does not exist. It's not an original idea -- plenty of famous scientists and philosophers have said the same thing. But it's the major reason I can't tolerate the logic of religion and I can't stand that I can't properly communicate what it is I mean by "free will" not existing.

Well, will exists -- but free? That's a misleading and misguided term, one that presupposes stuff we have absolutely no evidence of.

Human brains are complicated -- there is an array of emotions, neurological connections, genetics, memories, etc, that influence every single choice we make. Well, not influence, but form. Human brains are mysterious, but only because they are so fucking complicated; they've evolved to be that way.

If I'm ordering from a menu at a restaurant, I have a slew of options. But let's play around with just two, for simplicity's sake.

Do I want the pasta with chicken or just a plain hamburger? I'd probably pick the pasta. Is this because I have free will? No.

It's because factors A, B, C, D, E, and who knows what else caused me to "choose" the pasta. And of course, all these factors are then contingent upon how good my natural, reasoning abilities are, which is another factor all on its own.

But anyways, some of these factors might be obvious to us (and we can only really speculate about them anyways) -- my taste buds don't react as well to hamburgers as they do to pasta and chicken and so my reason says I should get the pasta and chicken. Other factors could be what kind of mood I happen to be in. Am I feeling experimental? Other factors could simply be memories of past experiences. Maybe I don't dig hamburgers that much, but perhaps I had pasta already last night and I remember this and am thus not as hungry for it; I've already had my fix. Maybe my body actually needs different kinds of carbs and I actually feel a natural appetite for hamburgers, over pasta, who knows? I could even be having a conversation about free will and just to prove to the person I'm conversing with that I can choose something random, I could point my finger to any random menu item and order that. Does that prove anything? No, it just proves the motivation to be random overrode motivation to eat something I know to be tasty.

Other factors, and there could be literally hundreds or millions more, we may not be sure about. They may involve complicated chemical reactions that go with every obvious factor we've just addressed.

But the fact of the matter is, from what I can tell, is that free will (or free choice) is only an illusion. Just because my body is physically capable of ingesting a hamburger, or my mouth and vocal cords are physically capable of ordering a hamburger, doesn't mean I actually had the choice to order it (if I did indeed order pasta instead, that is). Ordering pasta was merely an effect of various causes.

We look at many things in a purely scientific way. You see a game of basketball and you say the basketball has no free will, it's just at the whim of the players movements and the weather conditions and its basic makeup (how inflated is it?). But the players are similarly at the whim of their environment and biological and chemical processes of their body and brain, which are incredibly complicated, but no less determined by the rules of cause and effect, and ultimately pretty mechanic.

Just because you don't "know" all the causes that lead to the choices you make, doesn't mean they don't exist and didn't determine your choice.

A lot of people, once they get to this point, then say: Well, there's no such thing as morality and personal responsibility, then, if you say that! So I'm saying this because I was determined too, huh?

The answer is -- well just because we invented morality and personal responsibility doesn't mean those things exist on some higher plane and is the precondition for all that happens in the universe. It simply means all that happened in the universe and in human evolution led to humans inventing morality and personal responsibility. Those concepts won't go away, as we invented them for social purposes. They'll always be around (they're enduring), and anyways, because there is no free will, there is no harm in believing that it exists or doesn't exist, as we will believe whatever our brain allows us to believe, despite our own illusion that we have free choice in what we believe.

The reason I got inspired to write this is because I've always felt this way about free will and there was a youtuber who did a 30 minute piece (3 parts) about it. He articulated it so well. So if you're not really getting what I'm saying here, as I sometimes just can't find the words, give this a spin:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3