 At first sight, of course, necessitism is a shocking philosophical doctrine. For, most compellingly, the urgent intuition of our own contingency—that at one time in the past we did not exist and that at another in the not too distant future we will forever cease to be—is a central element of our lived human experience. But by necessitism, not only have we always existed and will so continue forever into the future, we—no less than God and the number 17—could not have failed to be. The possibilist, however, will respond that the worry here has badly conflated existence in the sense of being, in the sense of mere identity with something, and existence in the sense of actuality. More specifically, the worry has confused two corresponding notions of contingency, viz., contingency as the possibility of absolute non-being, i.e.,