Ayn Rand, in The Virtues of Selfishness, triggered in me a flash about the nature of free will. Either implicitly or explicitly, she holds the wise, accurate account of free will for an intelligent species like humans, as based upon their evolutionary emergence from the ranks of other primates—the latter are without much free will, but whose wickedness and love of destruction is controlled by instinct, genetics and parental guidance.
The moment humans developed brains powerful enough to take their mental images of the given, the sense data, that reality provides for them, and then to abstract or form concepts about external objects and behaviors perceived, and then to wield language to capture—close enough if not perfectly—the essence of these concepts, at that point, free will is an existential condition for each agent to reckon with and get a grip on.
Now humans are still more beast than angel (basically flawed), so they will require moral values, childhood ethical training and introduction to maverizing, so that this minimally free, natural will can become a powerfully free and good will (one cannot be one without the other).
Adults of good will can serve God and run a civil and civilized society.
Humans are powerful, smart and dangerous if they have minimum free will but no moral code to help them learn to harness their inner bitterness and rage.
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