Reality is a package deal
Determinism, combined with the relevant physics, implies that the events in our world depend on one another to a striking extent. According to determinism, the same long-ago conditions that necessitated the emergence of humans also necessitated the terrible 2004 tsunami. Remove the tsunami, evolve that difference backward in time according to the laws of motion, and statistical mechanics tells us that the probability is basically zero that humans ever come to exist: less than 1 chance in 1 followed by one hundred septillion digits. That’s more digits than you could write if you wrote a million digits every second for a trillion years. The difference between that chance and zero chance is literally negligible.
Therefore, the only non-negligible options are humans plus the tsunami or no humans at all. If you want humans, then the tsunami ‒ and every historical calamity, caused by humans or not ‒ is the price. In future posts, I’ll discuss some consequences of this fact.
For now, let me emphasize one consequence it doesn’t have: It doesn’t exonerate God (if there is one). If God exists, then God could have created an entirely different collection of sentient beings all of whom are always happier than any of our world’s sentient beings ever are. Granted, we wouldn’t exist in such a world, but that fact clearly doesn’t excuse God for creating the world in which we do exist.
