Certain of the things that have happened to me in my thirtysomething years seem, when I look back on them, impossibly fortunate. Not “almost impossibly fortunate,” as I almost wrote, but, literally, impossibly fortunate. I shake my head, and suppose they can only be explained in religious terms: I received a special blessing from God.
Then, when I finish shaking my head, I suppose I am not the only person who has thoughts like this. And I wonder how it came to pass that God, who didn’t stop this or that genocide, that God, who didn’t stop Lenin on his way to the Finland Station, decided to perform such and such miracle for me that night in Montana in July of 2000.
Caveat lector: I am, at least to a modest degree, inclined to be philosophical, but I am not inclined to read or study philosophy. And thus I do not have any idea how this question has played out in great minds through the ages. I can only give the conclusions I inevitably come to when my mind wanders this way. On the question of God, I conceive the following possibilities:
1. There is no God.
2. God is not good.
3. God is not competent.
4. God’s principles are similar to those of the Chicago economists.
And that thing that happened in Montana? Was it just good luck?
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