Larry Sanger

facts about the species and about nesting patterns in this area and about that particular individual earlier in its life cycle, etc., then, you know, maybe not even the most brilliant biologists in the world, but like God, at least, would be able to explain

Why it had to happen, right?

That the bird flew by the window at that moment.

But then what we're saying is, we're saying that all of these things which are contingent, like...

birds flying by windows.

In other words, they don't have to be the case.

They actually do have to be the case if we take into account all the laws that govern reality and the initial conditions and perhaps scientific constants and things like that.

You put all of this background information together and all of the things in the universe then become necessary.

But individually, they're definitely not necessary.

Now, here's a question.

Because we can talk about different descriptions of reality at different levels.

arrangements of facts, like, for example, not just the bird flying by the window, but a species existing at all, or the bird's arrival in North America, or whatever, that sort of thing.

If we continue to go out from a particular continent to the planet, to the solar system, to the universe, so forth, and we continue to go back in time explaining things that happened before,

We can, as it were, zoom out, both in terms of time and in terms of space.

And we can ask of the totality of all of that, well, is that contingent or is it necessary?

And so the way that I set the argument up is I say that, well...

It certainly seems like individual laws, for example, could have been otherwise for all we know.

Certainly certain constants could have been otherwise, right?

So why would we say that the totality, even including the laws and the constants, et cetera, would be necessary?

There doesn't seem to be anything necessary about them.