Let me begin by telling a familiar story. The God of traditional Western theism, creator of the universe, is an altogether perfect being. This is simply to say that this being is, at the very least, incredibly wise, overwhelmingly powerful, and overarchingly good. Given some reflection on these divine attributes, it is commonplace to suggest that God had a plan, a model, a paradigm of some sort in accordance with which he created the universe; in other words, he doesn’t just make it up as he goes along. God is the ultimate Craftsman, and like any architect worth his salt, God chose a framework for his creative act; and, in some important sense, this framework was in competition with many other frameworks. In the philosophical parlance, one may say that God chose to create one possible world from an infinite number of other possible world options. Out of the many frameworks or worlds at his disposal, God chose to create this framework, the actual world in which we find ourselves.