Thanks Adolf!

I feel I owe a debt of gratitude to Adolf Hitler.

Not to say that I approve of the man and his works. One of leftist statism’s worst manifestations was National Socialism; I loathe it in all its forms, even the mild version that now labels itself progressivism.

Still, honesty requires that I acknowledge that I owe der Fuhrer my existence. If not for him, I would not be here. Of course, all he was after was Lebensraum in the lands to the east. Setting the stage for me was an unintended consequence.

The same is true for many persons of my generation and thus for our children and grandchildren. If Hitler had not ordered the invasion of Poland, and started the Second World War, the United States would not have eventually entered that war, my maternal grandfather would not have been transferred to Boston, his daughter would not have met my father to be, they would not have married and procreated, and I would not have existed. Of course, even if all of this had happened, but things had then gone just slightly differently in any number of ways, I still would not have existed.

Right from the start: Which spermatozoon reaches the ovum, and thus which of a large set of possible siblings comes into existence is, it appears, a matter of chance—the little swimmers buffeted by Brownian motion.

Wars set large numbers of people in motion, in which case people meet, marry, and reproduce, so over the course of human history many owe their existence to the evil men who start them.

Of the vast number of possible human beings, only a very few get to be actual. You and I are, let’s face it, astoundingly improbable. Getting to be actual depends on a very long sequence of contingent, improbable events. Suppose that your great, great, great maternal grandmother had not caught that gentleman’s eye…they would not have married and none of their descendants would have ever existed. Had they not met, probably many other persons who do not now, and never will, exist would have existed instead

Early modern science taught us to look out into the unimaginable vastness of space and contemplate how small we are in comparison. Contemporary science adds to this the realization that each of us, and all of us, and most everything actual, occupies a vanishingly small space in a vast space of possibilities.

Maybe, this drastic improbability is illusory: although it’s true that if things had gone a bit differently, then I would not exist, it’s also true that things could not have gone differently. Given the world’s laws and initial conditions, everything Adolf got up to in the middle of the 20th century was what had to happen, and all the effects of his aggression followed necessarily, so here I am. Given what happened 13.76 billion years ago, I was in the cards and eventually guaranteed to appear. This depends, though, on the laws of nature being deterministic, which at the very least is not obvious the still standard interpretation of quantum mechanics being that measurement collapses the wave function stochastically. Only the general shape of the development of the universe was more or less guaranteed, the specifics left to chance.

Even if determinism is true, contingency, and with it our fantastic improbability, is not easy to dispense with. We still ask why, of all the possible sets of laws and initial conditions, just these are the ones that are actual. If this, a universe guaranteed to produce you and me, is just one of some vast number of possible universes, then our existence remains wildly improbable.

Maybe, though, these are the only possible laws and initial conditions, this is the only possible world and, bizarre as it seems, “Don Wacome exists” is no more contingent than “2 + 2 = 4.” That’s at least as hard to grasp as my being contingent and astronomically improbable.

Maybe, instead, all the possible sets of laws and initial conditions are actual, and all possible universes exist. Thus all possible persons exist. Why, though, do all the possible universes, with all their possible inhabitants, exist? Is this, finally, a matter of necessity, or is it a contingent fact? (At this point, we might begin to see the wisdom of rejecting the application of necessity and contingency to things—de re modalities—rather than just to our thought and talk of things—de dicto modalites.)

As a Christian theist, I believe that God created me and the universe I live in. Because God’s aim in creating was the existence of persons truly distinct from himself, and thus capable of freely sharing his triune life, he most likely deployed indeterministic means to bring persons into existence, e.g., evolution by natural selection in a universe governed by indeterministic laws. The fact that the universe gives rise to persons of some sort or other is a more or less sure thing, but which species, and which individuals, actually come into existence is a matter of chance. Christians properly separate creation from design.

However, many theists believe otherwise. They think that from the set of possible persons, God selected who to make actual, either by creating a universe with initial conditions and deterministic laws guaranteed to actualize the chosen possibilities, or by miraculously intervening to bring the desired individuals into existence. Assuming that the persons God makes actual comprise a tiny subset of possible persons, the question is why God chose for us to exist. Did God choose arbitrarily? That just shifts our utter contingency from the creation to the mind of the creator: that you exist is a stroke of fantastic good luck. The alternative is that there is something about you that was, for God, a good reason to create you. This could be some inherent feature of you, or the fact that a world that includes you is the one that God chooses to make actual.