Religion

Well, my intent started with belief, knowledge and information and how i would prefer that knowledge be differentiated from belief, however I don't necessarily denigrate belief or imagination in their own place, nor do I need to. This is a grand, diverse and multi-faceted Universe and just won't fit into our little boxes that we find comforting and meaningful. I agree with Shakespeare, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." That is the spirit that keeps science and innovation alive, open and fresh.

I did think of less wordy way to illustrate a bit of what I was getting at, most people won't effort to do it, but this is illustrative:

Lets call free will and determinism a dualism, a dichotomy. Now free will implies an agent that acts willingly and freely of its own accord, to put it simply. A decision an agent makes is not necessarily per-ordained or subject to any external, controlling factors. It can be a sudden choice and self-determination. Of course, there can be more definitions, but that will do.

Determinism does not have to be a reference to some divine being or force because you could attribute it to something like the billiard balls aspects of Newtonian physics, i.e., everything that happens from the Big Bang to now is simply a matter of a complex series of direct, cause and effect relationships of the constituents of matter. In that case, this, right now, could all be proved to be a result of the Big Bang in that framework if you could measure and account for every interaction along the way, although the Uncertainty Principle would put some sand in your gears in that case. You and everything and everyone else and the environment are a direct outcome of the initial start of everything as per the Big Bang. So it is, then, predetermined without any random input or variance at all.

Now, if you study all you can about both free will and determinism, (from various points of view and from ancient ideas to modern physics) you will come to a point where you could logically argue for both of them and even in great detail. A good logician can argue any subject to a successful conclusion in that way in many cases. At some point, I would suggest you will encounter both a relationship and a paradox involved, but the initial question is, can you come to a definitely conclusive proof for either and what happens if one is true but the other is not? Of course, like political and philosophical arguments about other dichotomies, this is the realm of reason, logic, knowledge, philosophy, epistemology, etc., not science, per se. There are many issues that are not at all relevant to the proof's of science, but rather, they are amenable to reason and logic, which in themselves, are not necessarily conclusive or definitive, but rather a formal structure of our semantics and thought and most certainly abstractions, i.e., never the thing itself.

That underscores some of my points and demonstrates and interesting aspect of the dualism of phenomena which then allows for an approach to a meta-system perspective, as per Einstein's point about the necessity for having one to understand and resolve the problems of any system--even physics, which is reaching a critical crux in many ways, but you have to dig into the current discussions about that in the field to see what I mean. The development of set theory reveals that in how it was used to make up for certain problems with the math in formulas.

Thanks for your time and feedback.