Interesting - I have sort of made that point on a few free will threads but have never gotten any feed back.

Generations A's - decisions are influenced by the decisions of prior generations and so on and so on. Is there a regression of these decisions by prior generations that ends at some - un influenced decision ?

There was nothing. — Wmhoerr2

Nope. Big bang cosmology says nothing about "beforehand", and it is likely the entirety of empirical science will never be capable of saying anything about "before the big bang" whatsoever.

Rather than asserting "there was nothing", it's closer to"everything we can observe was at one point condensed into an imperceptibly small space, and because we have no empirical access to that initial moment (the radiation we see only comes well after the big bang, and our theoretical models which infer what happens as we approach time-zero breakdown entirely when we actually get there) we can therefore say nothing about "before the big bang"..

If time as we know it did not exist prior to the big bag (if the statement "prior to the big bang" is incoherent), we can still imagine our universe as an effect situated within and caused by a greater universe, though, the nature of time, cause, and effect in such an inaccessible greater universe could be absolutely anything.

This is shadowy territory you're talking about. The Big Bang theory is itself just a simple backward tracing of what we see - an expanding universe. I believe the cosmic background radiation is proof of the Big Bang.

What is important though is to not to jump to any conclusion about the beginnings of the Big Bang. As VagabondSpectre said, there's not much we know thereof. Whether the Big Bang was caused or uncaused, this knowledge is likely to remain hidden from us for a long time or, may be, forever.

You actually don't need to go as far back as the Big Bang to entertain the possibility of free will. Quantum physics is supposedly indeterministic and so provides better grounds for freewill.