Free will and unpredictability

So I'm reading this book "Chaos" by James Gleick about the choas theory. You're probably familiar with the Butterfly Effect - that if a butterfly flaps its wings in New York it changes the weather in, say Tokyo. The idea is that each tiny change in the world induces the whole system to function differently, in an entirely nonlinear fashion such that one small perturbation could have vast consequences. 

I want to combine this with the idea of nature and nurture influences on the self. Our bodies are just a biological consequence of our parents, informed and shaped by our parent and their friends and their community. We make decisions by the way our neurons fire in our brain, and our neurons fire in this way due to either our biology or our environment. I am going to argue that nature and nurture here are not important distinctions. What is important is that they are both ultimately out of our personal control. So, the first human born long ago would make decisions based on factors outside of his control and by doing so he/she directed our future by making small perturbations that would amplify to become the world we know. 

If our decisions truly rest in our genome and with our upbringing, then each decision is dependent on previous ones and if you trace this back to the conception of humanity, you get to a point where the first decision ever must have created all future possibilities. If you trace this idea into the future, you find that we are enmeshed in decisions we have to make because of who we are, and the idea of free will becomes pretty much impossible. 

Do you agree with my logic? Must there be a third influence on decisions in order to permit free will?

Uncertainty in death

Now lets talk about something pretty different - game theory. In game theory the optimum strategy is tit-for-tat: if someone is mean to you, you're mean to them in the subsequent round to punish them. The optimum strategy also includes some degree of forgiveness. Some biologists think that this is the foundation of social behavior - that we interact with those that are consistently nice, punish those who are not... But what I want to explore here is that this tit-for-tat strategy actually only works if you don't know how many rounds there are. That's pretty interesting to me - the game only works if we don't know when it ends. Does that have something to do with why we don't know when we die, otherwise life would breakdown because we wouldn't know how to live? 

So, as I see it there are fundamentally two possibilities. Here I will define God as any force of any type, perhaps purposeful and definitely knowing. Either there is a God and he's decided not to tell us what's up or there's not a God and we have to figure it out if we have any shot at it at all. If there were a God, he would have to have a reason not to want to tell us what's up. Perhaps this tit-for-tat idea of social interaction would break down if we knew. I am not sure if we need to be ignorant in order to want to live, but that's certainly another possibility. It seems possible though that the God has created a system for life that only works if we are ignorant.

Of course, the other God problem is that who created God if not God? But that's another whole topic.