Some of my own thoughts on various of the topics;
Logically a spiritual absolute/universal state would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement from which we fell.
The history of monotheism is deeply entwined with politics, so the ideal of a top down father figure lawgiver has served a powerful role in social control.
The problem though, is that ideals are not absolute and the consequence is a naturally conflicted culture, as the varied ideologies presume to treat their ideals as absolute/universal.
The issue of free will goes to time.
As these mobile organisms, the sentient interface between our body and its environment manifests as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our concept of time is as the point of the present moving past to future. Which physics codifies as measures of duration. As Einstein put it, Time is what a clock measures.
The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events rise and fall.
So the future is not pre-determined, because the act of determination can only occur as the present.
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.
Energy is conserved, because it manifests the present, creating time, as well as temperature, pressure, color and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.
Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but we don't refer to them as dimensions of space, even though they are as foundational to our emotions and bodily functions, as sequence is to thought.
Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism.
That society is about synchronizing behavior to following the same rules, using the same measures, etc, it might seem like there is a universal flow of time, but it's rabbit time, turtle time, etc. Nature is so diverse and so integrated, because everything doesn't all march to the beat of the same drummer.
Time is asymmetric, because it is a measure of action and action is inertial. The earth only turns one direction.
So energy, as the present, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. Energy drives the wave, while the fluctuations rise and fall.
Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Though it is the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the central nervous system sorts through the information precipitating out, signals from the noise. Consequently the tendency to focus on the patterns, rather than the processes generating them.
As for the question of purpose, that implies this top down, objective, essentially god-like cosmic point of view, which is an oxymoron. Perspective is subjective. We are the purposes we make and directions we take. The definitions emerging from our course in life.
One way to think about it is that life is like a sentence. The end is just punctuation. What matters is how well you tie the rest of the story together.
We are linear, goal oriented creatures in a cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated reality.
