In creating a pie chart on the role of habit vs. free will in my life, I was tempted at first to assign 25% to habit and 75% to conscious choice. This is certainly the way I perceive life as it unfolds. There are some things, I clearly do out of habit. Often when I’m driving a familiar route, I don’t really pay attention to the directions I am taking. I know this because I sometimes find myself taking the wrong familiar route (ex. going to work when I am supposed to be going to a friend’s house) and don’t catch it until I am halfway there. However, I still consciously think about the choices I am making most of the time, hence the 75%. Yet, I decided to reverse these figures because, while the former may be my perception of my day, ultimately my upbringing and culture play a much bigger role than I consciously realize. In the book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell demonstrates how generational heritage can have a major influence on the decisions people make and accounts for a large part of the success of some people. While decisions may feel like “choice”, if they are determined by the values instilled in us by our upbringing, they are really still a form of habit. Now, I need to clarify that I don’t believe this chart is true for all people. Some people have no free will at all. Their actions are completely dictated by habit. We are only enabled to make choices in our lives when we encounter God and are given spiritual life. Even then, while we have the capability to choose, we are still greatly influenced by other factors, so “habit” still remains a predominant force in our lives.
Mary Ann (Nestmann) Lynch 
I find it interesting that you associate spirituality with the capacity for free will. On what basis to you make this assertion? Could we ever verify its validity? I wonder whether you think the converse can be true. Can an individual with a rich spiritual life live purely by habit? I’m scratching my head a bit on this one. Interesting.
Dr. Usher, I based my remarks on a spiritual component on things I’ve been taught regarding Biblical interpretation, particularly passages such as John 3:3-8, John 6:65, Ephesians 2:1-7, and Romans 3-8. I’ve been thinking about this question a lot because it is a difficult idea that can be viewed in many different ways. For me, though, it helps to consider how many people I know whose personalities have fundamentally changed. When I posed this question to my mother, she replied, “I can’t say that I know any.” Personally I can remember a girl in high school who was a different person after one summer. It was strange, and I immediately wondered what had happened to make her different. The interesting thing about major life changes is that not only are they rare, but when they happen, we naturally seek a cause for them. In the story you told about James, his experience of free will began with reading an article that affected him. Something came from outside of himself, and I think this is somewhat what I mean by spiritual enlightenment. I don’t think any of us just decide from within to change. Something must come to us from outside of ourselves. When it does, we have a choice, the first real choice that we have ever had in our lives. We can choose whether to keep doing and being what we have done and been or we can follow this new way. Another interesting thing about James encounter with free will was that it was ultimately tied to belief. More than an action, his free will was about what he believed.
You asked if someone could have a rich spiritual life by habit. I don’t think so. Spiritual disciplines don’t create spiritual life; encounters with a living God give us spiritual life, and like the transformation wrought in James’ life, this new spiritual existence gives us an ability to make choices between our natural selves and our spiritual selves. Herein lies the only free will we have.
Like me, James also contends that we may be one way naturally and another way spiritually: “I myself am disposed to think that the phenomena of association depend on our cerebral constitution, and are not immediate consequences of our being rational beings. In other words, when we have become disembodied spirits, it may be that our trains of consciousness will follow different laws” (James, 1962, p. 41).
As for verifying what I’m saying, I don’t think I could ever prove it using quantitative data. I could, however, demonstrate it using methods similar to those used by Piaget in developing his theories about the stages of development. Just as he wrote detailed, qualitative descriptions of children as they reasoned through tasks, I could interview believers and nonbelievers about the process they use in decision making. I could also ask believers to describe how their thinking had changed (if at all) since before they were believers. I’ve not undertaken such a task, but I think that is how I would approach it.
Thank you for causing me to think about this idea more and dig deeper.