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I don't see how materialists being a little too ahead of themselves 200 years ago should discredit materialism forever and ever. Do you also consider parachutes discredited because 500 years ago people tried them and crashed?
What is your model of a free will? Is it supposed to be outside of brain function? From where I'm looking, the thought, the choice and the effect of them on the body are all very much vulnerable to external influence, and your only recourse is that they are not yet influenceable with 100% precision.
In the first place, it's not "ahead of themselves 200 years ago", it's "ahead of themselves non-stop starting 200 years ago to 50 years ago, when they stopped making falsifiable predictions at all." If "the God of the gaps" is a reasonable criticism, "determinism of the gaps" should likewise be a reasonable criticism.
In the second place, this doesn't discredit Materialism, because Materialism, like non-Materialism, is an axiom. It is not adopted due to evidence, and so it cannot be refuted by evidence. Materialists are comfortable discounting evidence against materialism, because that is how axiomatic reasoning works: the axiom focuses your reason on a specific, collated portion of the data set, and you discount things that appear to lie outside it.
I have control over the actions I perform. I can think about what I want to do, choose between alternatives, arbitrarily rank preferences based on abstract reasons. I cannot be manipulated by others in the way that inanimate, mechanistic, or deterministic objects are readily manipulated. I submit that you and every other person in this forum, and indeed anywhere, understands this meaning on such a basic level that all communication we engage in employs it as common knowledge.
What percentage precision would you say I, or indeed the average person, would be influenceable at? What mechanisms of influence are you aware of that do not leverage the individual's own will, and what level of control do these mechanisms deliver?
For reference, the standard Materialist claims started at the infinite perfectibility of man, the creation of New Soviet Man, the predicted eradication of all poverty, crime, war and mental illness, universal peace and plenty, and the arbitrary, precision engineering of humans to fit their environment perfectly and seamlessly, through rudimentary manipulation of said environment. These results were supposed to be eminently achievable through the understanding their proponents had available to them at that moment.
Put more simply, if your claim is true, wouldn't it follow that the world we see around us is deliberately engineered to deliver roughly these results? Certainly our elites expend considerable effort and value attempting social engineering; to the exact degree that non-voluntary influence works, would it not stand to reason that the results we get match the intention of the influencers?
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