Fernando Kaskais posted: " Photo by Christopher Anderson/Magnum Life can be better appreciated when you remember how wonderfully and frighteningly unlikely it is that you exist at all Timm Triplett is associate professor in philosophy at the College of Liberal Arts, Universi" WebInvestigator.KK.org - by F. Kaskais
Family lore has it that my grandfather, having spent some time doing business in England and about to return to the United States, received an invitation to seek additional sales opportunities in Scotland. At the last minute, he cancelled the passage he had booked on the Titanic. If the story is true, then, but for a chance communication from a Scottish businessman, I would never have come into existence. And what led to that businessman learning about my grandfather? Perhaps it was a mere afterthought as someone was leaving a meeting in the purchasing office of a Glasgow manufacturer. Surely somewhere along the line there was something – many things – equally happenstance, without which the invitation to my grandfather would never have been made – without which, that is to say, I would never have been born.
In his bookThe View from Nowhere (1986), the American philosopher Thomas Nagel captures well the reaction that these sorts of reflections can generate:
We are here by luck, not by right or by necessity.
Rudimentary biology reveals how extreme the situation is. My existence depends on the birth of a particular organism that could have developed only from a particular sperm and egg, which in turn could have been produced only by the particular organisms that produced them, and so forth. In view of the typical sperm count, there was very little chance of my being born given the situation that obtained an hour before I was conceived, let alone a million years before …
If you concentrate hard on the thought that you might never have been born – the distinct possibility of your eternal and complete absence from this world – I believe you too will find that this perfectly clear and straightforward truth produces a positively uncanny sensation.
If an uncanny sensation indeed results from such reflections, it's something that just happens, like a shiver or a shudder. It can't be evaluated as reasonable or unreasonable. But emotions can be assessed in that way: hope may be misplaced, anger may be an overreaction, fear may be unwarranted. I want to focus, not on any sensation such as Nagel speaks of, but on the emotion of astonishment. I believe that, when one reflects on all the things that had to have happened exactly as they did in fact happen in order for one to be born, astonishment is a reasonable and appropriate emotion.
As with emotions like hope, anger and fear, the emotion of astonishment can be unreasonable if the associated beliefs or expectations are unjustified or unreasonable. One can be unreasonably astonished at flunking an exam, having taken too high an opinion of one's abilities and readiness.
Sometimes, of course, astonishment is warranted. Consider then what we should say about a young person who is told about the facts of reproduction Nagel refers to, or who learns about the chance events that led to her parents meeting, and realises that, but for those events, which could so easily have gone another way, she would not now, and never would, exist. For such a person, the emotion of deep astonishment at the very fact of her existence is, I would argue, the appropriate reaction.
But some might demur. A roll call of those who don't think their existence is very astonishing:
The weary parent: There's nothing astonishing about your being born. You came into existence in the ordinary way, for ordinary reasons, and in the ordinary course of events. I won't go into the details, but I can vouch for it. Calm down and finish your oatmeal.
The no-nonsense naturalist: The posterior probability of your having come into existence is one. The chain of events leading to your conception followed the laws of physics, chemistry and biology. If determinism is true, your existence was fully determined by prior conditions. Even if determinism is false, there was nothing extraordinary about the course of events leading to your conception and birth. Sorry, but no choir of angels announced your coming.
The theist: God has a plan for everyone. He created you for a reason, perhaps to be revealed in the course of your life. And, actually, there might have been a choir of angels singing in celebration of your coming to be. But that would be true for every person God chose to bring into this world. The naturalist is right that there's nothing cosmically special about you that wouldn't apply to everyone else created by God. But your existence is the result of the loving deliberation of God, not the indifferent forces of nature....
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