Life in the casino

I know next to nothing about Jeffrey Epstein. He's one of many celebrities I make a point of knowing as little as possible. They don't interest me. But like it or not, some figures are thrust into our awareness. And this is an occasion to make a few existential observations:

Many men have sordid fantasies, but due to his wealth and connections, he was able to act on his fantasies. And that was his undoing. Despite his relentless and spectacularly successful efforts to worm his way into the ranks for the glitterati, he wasn't quite high enough on the pecking order to be untouchable. 

Life is unpredictable. If, as a rakish and ruthlessly ambitious twenty-something, he foresaw that he'd die in a prison cell in his mid-sixties, would he make the same choices?

Perhaps he'd just take greater precautions to cover his tracks. Or maybe not. That's one of the dilemmas of atheist. If this life is all you've got, should you play it safe or maximize intensity?

Be that as it may, many people would make different choices along the way if they foresaw where their choices were leading them. As I've remarked before, that's a problem for freewill theism. We're often in a situation where we have to make choices with irreversible consequences without knowing the consequences in advance. And once we find out, the hard way, it may be too late to back out. We were in no position to give informed consent. 

And not just for degenerates like Epstein, who's hardly a sympathetic figure. Many good, conscientious people find themselves in the same predicament. In a fallen world, we're forced to gamble on the future without knowing how the deck was shuffled. Without seeing the other player's hand. So we often lose the bet.