Thanks Bernhard, but Parfit’s answer appears to me to be a dodge. Of course one can assume eternal existence as a sort of just so story. That’s what Sean Carroll and Laurence Krauss do in order to evade the evidence for intention. It just looks to me like underlying this is a basic assumption fir which there is no effort to prove and belief that no proof is needed. There are two assumptions that trouble me: first is existence, and second is the “program” that just is.