Free Will

How do we hold the duellist notion of a mechanistic world, including the way our bodies work and the individualism of a mind. How do we, the person, recognise ourselves as separate from the mechanism of everything else. Why if we understand the irrational event of a sub atomic particle which is at the base of our understanding of the way things work do we contemplate a completely separate world of 'thought' specific to our own individual self. 
On the one hand everything is causal and in the non sub atomic sense, predictable but in some sort of ethereal way our minds have the freedom to act outside this conformity and with the concept of "free will", is unfettered by anything. 
The purpose of formal religion is to codify rules of behaviour and limit the human response to Free Will. That act, specified in the bible, of Adam temped by Eve, falling out of paradise to live in purgatory until the sins are forgiven by God, allowed in essence free reign to think and do what ever he or she wished. This thinking 'outside the box' brought mankind into a place where 'choice of action' is paramount and completely non mechanistic, if you discount cultural formalisation. 
So on the one hand we have a world governed by specific physical laws and on the other a human condition specified by the working of the mind which is arbitrary.
From Aristotle to Aquinas, interpretation of free will, the one interpreting man's ability through good works to find redemption the other convinced that it was only 'Gods forgiveness' and that 
there was nothing man could do to earn the right of absolution, which led  to Martin Luther's Reformation based on his repugnance of the Catholic Churches selling absolution as a fund raising exercise. He, never the less was iron bound in his belief that only God could remove the stain of this life when inevitably we depart it. 
For Aristotle to be moral rested on the part one played in ones community. For Thomas Aquinas moral law rested with God. 

The revolutionary suggestion that "humans could effect their moral condition" was argued on Continental Europe by Spinoza whilst in Britain a different branch, effected by a gentler Protestant persuasion in England was propounded by Hobbes who helped found a British tradition of moral philosophy. In his wake came Locke, Hume, Bentham and Mill whilst Spinoza founded the Continental tradition with thinkers as diverse as Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche. The ideas of Hobbes and Spinoza shaped the way the world approached the knotty problem of what constituted moral rules and behaviour.
Philosophy with its precepts based on morals and ethics has always vied with Physics as which was the senior calling. The argument of mind over matter is still as far from being resolved but it is fascinating to study and see how and why we have got to where we are !