What does faith necessarily have to do with freewill?
Some people believe in free will because (or perhaps primarily because) it is a component of their religious or spiritual faith. Others, however, do
not believe in free will because of their faith in some particular dogma, worldview, etc.
While an understanding of causation has certainly changed over the centuries, as have a myriad of other concepts, causal determinism (the idea that every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature) has always retained its identity. Or is it that everything old must be outdated? Please say "No."
First, this is just demonstrably false at the outset. Not only is the idea of "laws of nature" a fairly modern idea, entire philosophies (or at least worldviews) have been based around conceptions of reality antithetical to those grounded in causation.
Western philosophy, which heavily influenced the advent of science and its progress (i.e., a systematic investigation of phenomena based on the idea that a certain amount of order exists in the universe such that under the right circumstances, experimentation allows one to reveal underlying structures, laws, and properties of reality or components of it), rests mainly on the work of Aristotle. As Walter Ott points out (p. 21), causation had much more to do with intrinsic properties and conditions of phenomena, but "at no point in those conditions would we have to enter anything like '... and assuming the laws of nature remain the same. For the notion of a law in this contemporary sense is alien to the Aristotelian family of positions." (
Causation & Laws of Nature in Early Modern Philosophy; Oxford University Press, 2009).
Descartes was more or less behind the idea of "the laws of nature", but neither he nor those who followed understood causes and effects as encapsulating everything according to these laws. This is both because he specifically defined these "laws" in terms of the motion of material objects, and because he saw them as emanating from God (who created an "orderly" universe which entailed consistent rules governing certain types of material/object properties and dynamics).
Not only, then, do we not find this schema ("every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature") within Western philosophy even of the modern era (although parts of it are certainly found), even today both philosophical and (to the extent it exists) scientific discussions of cause/effect still employ reference to Cartesian dualism.
Finally, there is the issue of determinism vs. causation. As Mark Balaguer notes in his book
Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem (MIT Press, 2010), most philosophers/scientists before quantum mechanics generally held that determinism was at worst not an obstacle for free will, and at best required for it. However, the "emergence of QM undermined the traditional way of understanding the problem of free will by undermining our prima facia reasons
for believing determinism, and indeed, by revealing that determinism is not the sort of doctrine that can be motivated by prima facie, pretheoretic, armchair arguments. Rather, it is a controversial empirical thesis about the workings of the physical world..." (p. 8; emphasis added).
What, then, is the motivation for believing something like:
While an understanding of causation has certainly changed over the centuries, as have a myriad of other concepts, causal determinism (the idea that every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature) has always retained its identity. Or is it that everything old must be outdated? Please say "No."
It has no real historical reality, it is inconsistent with most pre-20th century approaches to both free will and to causation, and it is almost completely incompatible with current work in sciences relating to the mind, complex systems (and therefore determinism), and physics. Causes are "properties" inherent in reality only in some philosophical theories, not intrinsic properties of reality (same with effect).
A simple example will suffice: I open the door to the place where I store my food, looking for something to eat. I scan what is available, and see that I have two types of snack food: a healthy granola bar, and unhealthy cookies. I ponder a bit about the fact that I'm trying to be healthy, and I should really go with the healthy snack, but in the end I decide to have the cookies.
At the instant my choice is made, what caused it? I could say evolution, because I crave fats, salts, and sweets thanks to conditions of life thousands of years ago when food was hard to come by and an adaptive strategy (namely, favoring food rich in what my body needs most, like fats and sodium) has become maladaptive. Or I could say it was whatever company manufactured the food. Or I could say that it was my nervous system which "informed me" that I was hungry. Or I could go with all of these and more. The problem, though, even without getting into emergent properties, self-governing systems, etc., is mainly two-fold:
1) Even if I look at everything which led up to the moment I made my choice, at the moment I did make it, a number of processes are at play such that I can't seperate cause from effect. I can't choose the cookies without seeing them, and thus my eyes are clearly a cause. But my eyes simply relay "information" which is interpreted in various parts of my brain. So clearly I require an ability to interpret visual stimuli conceptually, which means that a semantic, distributed network of activity is clearly a cause as well. Yet my choice, the decision not to go with the healthy choice, is part of that conceptual network of neural activity. I can't "choose" as a result of understanding, because part of my choice includes this understanding.
2) Even worse, if we were to look within the various neural networks involved in this choice, from those which interpeted visual stimuli to those which were involved in understanding what "cookies" represent, there is no way determine causal order. In the instant of choice, my brain is active. An instant before, it was as well. But not all the changes are part of my choice. Nor can I identify a single neuron which I could say was a cause vs. an effect. Even if consciousness and choice are not emergent properties, or governed in part by quantum indeterminancy realized by my choice, and even if I were able to identify what each and every neuron was "doing" in terms of how it contributed to some thought or bodily state, the change from the instant of my choice from the instant before it involves neurons whose state can be said to be either cause or effect depending on whether or not I decide that
x groups were somehow more the "choice" part than
y groups.
Even within deterministic systems, causality can be an arbitrary attribution. This is because causes and effects were always attributed either to properties or to processes or to both, but were never akin to "laws of nature" because they exist only as linguistic terms whose conceptual basis is attributed to certain states based on (and inseperable from) the concepts themselves.
