I offer the hypothesis that both free will and time are illusions of consciousness. Consciousness could be a state of matter or it could be something quantum but at this point in time we don't fully understand it. What we know is energy (and information) cannot be created or destroyed. This means the universe itself while it is expanding, it's not going to have any more energy in it in 10 billion years than it had in the first seconds of the big bang.

So in order to answer whether or not free will exists you have to answer whether time itself exists. If time is an illusion which only exists because conscious entities exist in a particular universe, then free will might be part of the illusion. The universe itself as we know it has time because consciousness needs time to make sense of the universe, to have a concept of on and off, which is the core of logic, which is the core of mathematics.