If we are at base nothing but matter (or a bundle of "natural" causes, posited by the believe "naturalism"), then we cannot freely will to do anything - but our everyday experience utterly contradicts this.
Our everyday experience does no such thing - it merely supports the hypothesis that we believe we have free will, not that we actually have it. An example of this kind of thing in action is the fact that our peripheral vision is not in colour. This assertion is utterly contradicted by our everyday experience because it really does seem like our peripheral vision is in colour - there is no part of our visual experience that is monochromatic (assuming normal function).
That said, we really shouldn't be arguing for or against Cartesian dualism and about philosophy of mind in a thread about the origins of the universe.
Let us assume that the origin of the universe is not physical so that physicalism is an inadequate position and we need to subscribe to some kind of dualism. The issue then becomes: Does this new realm have rules? How do we discover those rules? How does this realm interact with our own? How can we tell that this other realm exists? Do the principles of cause and effect operate there? If not, how can we possibly investigate it in any fashion?
For thousands of years people have postulated some other realm from whence this one has come - which seems to indicate that something in that realm caused this one to come into existence which would indicate cause and effect applies at least in part.
If so, surely we just need some method to access this realm and then we can perform experiments and make observations and basically try and uncover the rules of the new realm (or perhaps I should say the Preuniverse Realm). Maybe the existence of this preuniverse realm has left some evidence behind that we can hunt for, maybe not.
That is to say, we might simply extend the scientific method to the new realm. We'd have a whole new problem to work towards: Where did the preuniverse realm come from?
If the scientific method does not apply, then we need to explain how we can come know anything about this realm, how we can be sure it actually exists and so on and so forth. To do this we'd need to develop some concepts about the kind of realm under discussion and work from there to see what we'd expect to see result...
The first thing we have to do is maintain the three primary truths:
- The Fact of Our Existence {As per Descartes}
- The law of Non-Contradiction {Courtesy of Aristotle and many others}
- The capability of the mind to know truth
If we throw any of these things out - then investigating this realm is not going to be possible.
OK. So what next? Well we've decided on our metaphysics (dualism) so we have to decide our epistemology. How are we going to deduce that we have obtained knowledge about this realm?
Authority - Some people claim to be an authority in this other realm. We can ask them about it. Unfortunately there does seem to be a lot of contradictory statements made by professed experts so this leaves us with having to temporarily ignore this one (maybe later we can know who to trust, and who to ignore). In science there is some reliance on Authority (citing work done by others etc) we deal with the problem using peer review (having exams and qualifications and lots of people continuously checking that the work adheres to certain pre-agreed rules etc).
Coherence - Maybe we will decide that any set of true statements in this world must consistent or coherent with one another. We might even say that given two hypotheses about this realm, the one that is most coherent is more likely to be true. This is something we do in science for example.
Correspondence - does our belief about this realm, correspond with what is actually the case when we examine it. If we believe that gravity is as the result of a factory of pusher elves that exists in this realm, does such a factory exist? If we ignore correspondence investigation is surely going to be tricky. Science has developed quite an extensive and evolving collection of methodologies for exploring how well evidence corresponds with our ideas about the physical realm so we might use some or all of those.
Pragmatics - we might decide that any ideas about this realm which can be put to observable use might indicate that those ideas are true. To tie the philosophy of mind into things a little more tightly, perhaps some idea about this realm can be used to explain the decision making process of certain species of animals much more usefully or reliably than our present ideas about decision making. Likewise, if proposing this realm leads to understanding the details of the origins of the universe and thus how the fundamental forces of nature operate, it might open up new avenues of understanding in intergalactic travel, energy, and so on.
These are the big ones that science relies on as criterion from sorting out true propositions in our realm from false ones. They don't guarantee success, but they have lead to us ridding the world of small pox and developing the internet so we can't complain, eh?
Now - you propose a new paradigm is needed. Obviously you propose that a new metaphysical paradigm might be proposed (though dualism is an old paradigm, we'll ignore that). However do you want a new epistemological paradigm - or are you happy with the kind of paradigm I describe above? Do you instead want a methodological paradigm shift?
Finally, what other criteria do you think might be worth avenues of exploration for epistemology? Your argument that since we believe that we have free will, we must therefore have free will would seem to indicate the following might be of interest:
- Naive realism aka common sense realism (given your location perhaps you might like to look into the Scottish School of Common Sense)
- Intuition (the notion that if it feels true, it is true)
- Revelation (the notion that someone from the other realm periodically beams knowledge into our brains OR our minds that exist in this other realm periodically learn some information about it)
- Tradition - if it has been part of the culture or society for a long enough time, it contains truth, or is true.
- Popularity/Majority/Universal consensus - if lots or the majority or all people believe it is true, it is true.
Do you think any of those concepts should be included in this new paradigm of learning?
Summary
You need to decide on your metaphysics. Do you think that dualism would be in a better position than monism or physicalism to deal with the problems you believe exist?
Then you need to sort out some kind of epistemology, or at least decide what criteria will be used to discriminate between true and false statements (and indeed you'll need to decide what should happen when we can make no definite statement either way) when it comes to investigating the origins of the universe. Should we subscribe to ideas such as fallibilism (that any given proposition in the fashion of {x is true} might actually be incorrect) or infallibilism {once the epistemological model has determined x is true, x will always be considered true} and well, let us just say that there is a lot of groundwork to get done if we're going to start a revolution - a lot of it might have already been done but we're still going to have to sort through it and select what we want as well as possibly justifying why we have selected those and rejected those others and we may even need to do some original philosophy of our own.
This kind of philosophical groundwork is an essential step before you can begin your investigations into something as difficult as the origin of the universe. Once you've done that you then need to develop a methodology that might not be aligned with your philosophy, but is necessary for the purposes of investigation. For example, you might conclude that Dualism isn't the way forward but that pluralism was true - however for the purposes of investigating the origin of the universe you might decided to be methodologically dualist.
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