Belief and therefore faith in something requires free will, because it involves the choice between two or more possible alternatives.
For example if my wife is pregnant I can say “I believe the baby is a boy” because there is the possiblity that it could be a girl too. If we did an echo and the doctor determines that the sex of the baby is indeed male then I can no longer say “I believe the baby is a boy”, I would have to say “I know the baby is a boy”. There is no longer an element of free will in my statement.
Correct me if I am wrong but in the Christian faith, the faith one has in God must come from ones own free will. This means that the belief in God comes from the real possibility that God indeed does not exist. If a theist claims he knows that God exist then he is in fact commiting a sin by his own logic because he is not having faith in God at all! In fact the theist is having faith because he is going against his empirical knowledge and is even joyous of the idea that he is doing it because of his own free will to do so. Sort of like affirming his own free will. The atheist is in the opposite position. He is an atheist because there is no possibility in his mind that God exists, there is no choice in his belief and therefore becomes a lack of belief. It becomes knowledge.
In short theists are really hanging in their faith with a very fine string, once a single doubt creeps in they are in great danger of losing it.
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