Denying certain occasions where freewill does not exist does not debunk freewill in general. It takes only one single act of freewill to crumble the entire glass house of determinism. Determinism must prove all things are determined. Freewill requires only one event in which it occurs.
So under determinism all actuals and potentials must be covered as determined. Simply freely choosing between Coke and Pepsi, and having freely chosen one and having had the option to choose the other causes determinism to fall apart. To be a deterministic is difficult. The burden of proof is immense.
Ah, so theistic arguments are good if the person putting forth the argument considers the premises more plausible than their denial, but I need to conclusively prove to uncharitable listeners every detail of the entire history of the universe and beyond.
Sorry, but don't be silly. I might equally say to you that until you can point to some event within a human brain/body which is not a matter of physics, determinism is established.
The fact is, the large majority of professional philosophers reject the existence of libertarian free will. Your suggestion that demonstrating LFW to serious thinkers is a trivial matter is very much mistaken.
Further, the action or defense of determinism must necessarily assume freewill exists which is both ironic and contradictory. For if all is determined, so is determined our belief in freewill.
That may very well be it's undoing. The action of convincing somebody of a position assumes they have the will to choose what to believe.
No Pat, it is not assuming LFW exists, to understand that physically causal processes can result in a person coming to have a different point of view than they previously had. You are simply engaging in bad psychology/mind reading when you purport to know the thought processes of people with views much different than your own.
If we are determined to believe in freewill it's futile to make arguments to convince somebody who does not have a choice in their beliefs. The action is a contradiction in itself.
Does it not seem weird to try and convince somebody of something they had no choice but to believe in?
This seems like a theistic notion of determinism, along the lines of the Greek Fates having determined everything that would happen. With respect to a modern scientific view of causality it is a straw man.
No, it doesn't seem weird to educate a person, who through no fault of their own, has a mistaken point of view. It would seem more hopeless if people simply chose what they believed. On a deterministic view, it is understandable why the weight of evidence can result in people's perspective changing. (Even changing to believing something they would prefer not to believe.)
As an engineer, I am convinced of things I don't choose to believe, on a near daily basis. And it is a good thing that I am, or the quality of my work would be pretty poor.