I guess the answer would depend on another question, what does 'truly free will' mean? So lets define some terms.
truly: in agreement with fact.
free: (1) not determined by anything beyond its own nature or being (2) having a scope not restricted by qualification (3) not obstructed, restricted, or impeded (4) not united with, attached to, combined with, or mixed with something else.
will: (1) used to express desire, choice, willingness, consent, or in negative constructions refusal (2) used to express determination, insistence, persistence, or willfulness
free will: : (1) voluntary choice or decision (2) freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention
To start with I think we can use the word 'actually' in place of truly since to define truly free will as a free will which agrees with fact while questioning whether such a will actually exists would seem strange. To that end I think instead I will say "actually free will", as in is the will of men actually free?
Then we get into the words 'free' and 'will' which is where the whole thing gets sticky. To start with, if we use the dictionary definition then we come up with (by combining) ideas such as; a desire determined by its own nature, or an unrestricted determination, or an unobstructed willingness, or even an unmixed persistence. So clearly the idea is somewhat vague. I think therefore we need to consider what free will is not before tangling what it is.
To begin with I do not think that we can define free will as an unrestricted, uninhibited, unattached volition because all of us have a preexisting determinate factor in the exercise of our free will, namely ourselves. All of us exercise our wills within the scope of our own experiences, memories, knowledge and desires and while these are universal in general they are not so in particular.
For example an adult which knows that the cooking surface on a griddle is hot is not the least bit curious to know exactly how hot said surface is, or at least is not open to testing the hotness of the cooking surface with the old bare hand on hot metal method. A child however, who may have never before applied the bare hand on hot metal method, may be curious to touch the surface and therefore will exercise his will in an entirely different direction from the adult. What is the difference? Knowledge. The Adult knows right well the surface is hot and therefore will not touch it, the child knows nothing of the sort, or at least does not understand experientially what "hot" means and therefore touches the cook surface. Once. Armed with this new knowledge the child will not soon exercise his will in that direction again.
If we accept this example, then I think it can be fairly asserted that the exercise of our will is affected by our knowledge and therefore knowledge acts as a determinate factor in how we exercise our will, and therefore our will is not truly free.
But one may argue the will is still free, as in the ability to decide is free, but knowledge helps to determine which course of action will be decided upon without actually affecting the faculty to choose.
I think that is true, but there are factors involved in the choosing as well. Our criminal system recognizes, for example, that certain people who commit crimes do not have equal liability with others who have committed the same crime because of metal faculties. The courts have recognized that the exercise of the will can be affected by the ability of the person to choose according to knowledge, experience etc. The same holds true in other ways. A small child who hits another small child will not be punished severely, but a teen who strikes a small child will have long ramifications to face for such an action. The culpability in exercising the will rests in the ability to understand consequences etc of making those decisions, and therefore the actual choosing itself, while free, is not free from the nature of the chooser.
I think this is a very important idea to grasp as it will color the discussion greatly (after all this is what I believe) that is the exercising of our will, even if the ability to decide is free, is not divorced from our natures. An aggressive person and a timid person will not react in identical fashions to similar situations. Neither will a brave man and a cowardly man react the same. The ingrained nature of a person will radically affect how that person will exercise their will, and while the decision making is free, the decisions being made do not simply appear out of the ether, but rather are the result of the nature, knowledge, etc of the one choosing the course of action.
But one may argue that the nature of a person may be formed of that person's past experience and thus it is not nature but nurture which leads to decisions 'x', 'y' or 'z'.
Again I think that is true in so far as it goes, and I also think it proves my point. First off I think we should be careful in ascribing causal power to nurture apart from nature. For example I have read various psychological profiles in self help books (btw most of these are hysterically funny) which argue that one sort of thing (like a distant uninvolved parent for example) leads to mutually exclusive behaviors in study subjects. The strange thing is that these authors are arguing that a distant parent causes both (again a non-specific example) promiscuous behavior as well as distant unattached marriage relationships between spouses, and to argue that one factor caused both contradictory behaviors is very problematic. Even in cases where nurture and nature being combined are supposed to indicate future behavior, such as alcoholic parents and the potential genetic predisposition to the children as a result, has been shown to produce both alcoholic children and children who never touch a drop. The difference is not found in the contributing nurture of the person, but in the exercise of the will and how that person chooses to live. The point is that observation of behavioral patterns can lead to contradictory findings because the natures of people are not identical and therefore the way which people respond to situations is not identical either. The contradiction is readily explained in that the childhood situation is not the cause of the behavior of the persons in question, but that the nature of the persons in question is the cause of how they have reacted to the situation.
How do I know? Because a single cause cannot produce contradictory effects. While it is true that various contributing factors in a causal chain may produce apparent contradictory effects, it is those factors which act in a causal fashion to produce the effects in question. For example, two men jump off of a cliff, one falls until achieving terminal velocity and meets the ground with a sudden bone shattering stop while the other floats off into the sky and disappears over the horizon. What is the difference? One man leaped from the edge without anything to arrest his fall and the other leaped with a hang glider. Did gravity produce apparently opposite results? No. Rather the contributing factors of hang glider and no hang glider affected the causal chain of gravity (what goes up will come down) to produce different results.
In the same way, while nurture does affect the fashion in which we exercise our wills, I think it is our nature which acts in a greater, and therefore determinative fashion.
For these reasons, I think that "free will" is actually nothing of the sort, and that one need not believe that we have puppet strings sticking out of the tops of our heads for this to be so. In fact I do not think one needs to assert the existence of a "god" at all for this to be so. One could argue that our free wills are determined by experience and chemical make up in our brains completely apart from any sort of belief in any sort of creator or endower of free will. Obviously I do believe in a Creator, but the mere existence of mental faculties is not a proof that such a Creator exists actually in any fashion whatever.
So, this one is getting long so I'll quit now, I do not think the will is free in the sense that it is divorced from any and all contributing factors to it. But rather that the exercising of our will is shaped and caused by our own experience, knowledge and inclinations/ natures, and as such cannot be said to be free in this sense.
However, I do believe the will, within our constituent natures, is free and I will try to explain why later.
Just Thinking.
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