I think free-will is a concept of Christian (and maybe other) faith to get God out of a tight spot when things go wrong.
I'd say that it's the naturally intuitive view. As a very young kid, I had no ideas about religion, philosophy and causality. To me, if I tidied up my room it was because I chose to do so (or, more likely, my mum chose that I should do so!).
I get around the issue in a pragmatic way: it's expedient to make use of our apparent free will; it gives us a clear edge over anyone who would throw up their hands and not bother looking before they cross the road! At the same time, I have in the past taken the view that even my decision to adopt that approach is predetermined. Now that we know something about quantum events and the Uncertainty Principle, I'm not so...certain.
?To sum up, what I have been talking about, is whether the universe evolves in an arbitrary way, or whether it is deterministic. The classical view, put forward by Laplace, was that the future motion of particles was completely determined, if one knew their positions and speeds at one time. This view had to be modified, when Heisenberg put forward his Uncertainty Principle, which said that one could not know both the position, and the speed, accurately. However, it was still possible to predict one combination of position and speed. But even this limited predictability disappeared, when the effects of black holes were taken into account. The loss of particles and information down black holes meant that the particles that came out were random. One could calculate probabilities, but one could not make any definite predictions. Thus, the future of the universe is not completely determined by the laws of science, and its present state, as Laplace thought.?
S.W. Hawking
