For one thing, free will is an oxymoron, as an action free of cause would logically be free of effect and the premise of will is to affect. We are a small part of nature's process of selection.

The flaw of determinism is that as these mobile organisms, our experience is a sequence of perceptions, arising from the need to navigate, so we process time as the point of the present, moving past to future and describe it narratively. So it would seem succeeding events are inherently determined by prior events.

The reality though, is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

So the process of determination can only occur as the present.

Is there an omniscient omniscience looking in and seeing all of space and time?

Consider that energy is "conserved," because it is the present. By being active, it creates time, as well as temperature, pressure color and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.

So as process and present, energy goes past to future, while the patterns it generates go future to past.

Energy drives the wave. The fluctuations rise and fall.

So energy and information go opposite directions of time.

Consider as well that consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past.

Which implies that consciousness functions as energy, which is causal.

Now it is the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, "feeding the flame," while the central nervous system sorts the infromation. Signals from the noise.

As such, we are driven by our desires and appetities, while the mind functions as more of a referee, sorting and judging among the myriad compulsions bubbling up, given that often various desires are incompatible and so decisions have to be made.

What was originally meant by will, as in willpower, was the ability of the mind to select fairly objectively among these desires and not just give into the more immediate ones.

One way to sustain this on a social scale was to propose some overarching, "father figure," which would know when we gave into the more base desires, but a spiritual absolute would be that very essence of sentience driving us, not some ideal of wisdom and judgement from which we fell. As the absolute is elemental, while the ideal is aspirational.