This is a classic example of the overdetermined logic (constantly re-inscribing a basic metaphysical error that haunts the ideology of modern philosophy) that gives us the “univocity of being” problem as well.
The postulate here is “if humans are free [or, even more typically, if God is an active Creator], then covering causal laws cannot describe events seamlessly.”
When covering causal laws do seem to apply, at whatever level of precision we are able to muster, across what we perceive to be free and responsible events of choosing (or special Providences), then we are forced to either propound another hypothesis or conclude that freedom (or the activity of the Creator) is an illusion, a shorthand for our lack of knowledge. While our being forced to this point does demonstrate a lack in our faith, that is, a point in which modern ideology has blinded us to reality, it does not actually demonstrate what many are led to despair in thinking it demonstrates, that is, that the faith itself was in default.
When we moderns with defective metaphysics attempt to find another hypothesis to test, staving off despair for another day, we typically do so by stumbling into the error expressed in that last comment: we keep the idea that “if humans are free, then covering causal laws cannot describe events seamlessly” and suggest that what covering causal laws describe is “non-real,” that is, merely a product of useful perceptions. This is good brain candy at a certain phase of intellectual development–but like a lollipop from the dentist, it cannot be mistaken for the desired result without serious harm.
If the world in which we are creatures of the Creator has to be radically subjectivized in order for our creaturely being to have moral significance, then at what point in that perceptual field does moral significance attach? What is the moral significance of the Creator’s instruction concerning the conduct of some creatures within and among others, the rest of Creation? This approach, with the active connivance of many a Modernist, many a liberal, many a libertine, many an authoritarian personality, many a Romantic, many a self-aggrandizing charismatic visionary, leaves the faithful reft of concrete attachment points within the perceptual field for the moral significance of their decisions and the natural and divine law.
It is the serious obligation of Christian teachers to inculcate better metaphysics than this, so as to defend the faithful against the Satanic assault on their faith and hope that uses this metaphysical error as cover. (Sadly, few seem to be well-trained enough to do this job, even among the well-meaning and basically orthodox; even the better sort of homilies are rife with the cheap paradoxy of threadbare modern discourse–dualizing gestures–and rarely manage to make the integrality of the faith a top concern.)
So what is the solution? As is so often the case when you witness a regress or a pendulum-swing in the history of an idea, it is important to recognize that ideology (the tacit stock of “possibilities for thinking” we inherit from our formators and absorb from our milieu) often circumscribes both a proposition and its opposition. That is, both are agreeing on the error while disagreeing on a related system of assertions, many of which may be true or false independent of the organization proposed by any party to the dispute.
In this case, it is that first assertion that we must question in order to find a way forward. Let us examine that again: “if humans are free [or, even more typically, if God is an active Creator], then covering causal laws cannot describe events seamlessly.” Is that true? Is it necessarily true, or thoroughly evident, or well-attested by strong authority?
Well, uh, no. Why precisely should it be thought that an active Creator does not have a much larger and more complex set of “laws” that govern the relations of divine, angelic, and human persons to the heavens and earth, that is, to the whole Universe of which the cosmos–the terrestrial sphere and the “known universe” as described fairly well by what we know of matter/energy and space/time–is a significant subset. If the cosmos is a subset of the total Reality, then we might well expect that the “known universe” is less not only in scope but in complexity (and much less in apparent complexity, as basic information theory tells us that our most comprehensive descriptions must always be considerable reductions from the complexity of actual events).
There is, then, no warrant–there is an appalling lack of warrant, in fact–for the notion that (a) more thorough and accurate descriptions of physical phenomena call into question the reality of human freedom (or of the Creator’s activity) or (b) the only way to escape such question is to assert the “non-real[ity]” or ideality of either the observable cosmos or human freedom (and the Creator’s activity). This can only follow from an ideological assertion, without warrant, that reality is necessarily far less complex than even our own understanding of basic information theory predicts.
And, when examined, the “science” that leads to such claims almost always turns out to be seriously popularized–the claims have a “scienceyness” that we should be increasingly capable of distinguishing from “science” in either of its positive and useful senses.