Everything Happens for a Reason and other Fairy Tales
Freedom is what you do with what has been done to you
~Jean Paul Sartre
Everything happens for a reason. Can there be any cliché more indicative of post modern spirituality than this? Certainly there exist causal relationships. Our reality or, at least, our perception of reality is based on the observation of causal relationships. A man smoking a cigar while standing in a puddle of gasoline can ignite it, which will result in a potential explosion or at least the engulfing in flames of objects nearby should he drop his stogie into the puddle (a great Hollywood device).
But, this is not what most people mean when they say, “Everything happens for a reason.” This statement is part of the fairy tales we tell ourselves to comfort us in times of trial and suffering. We chant this like a mantra along with its sister cliché, “Everything will work out in the end.” What we so often allude to with these statements is that our life is not subject to the whims of random circumstance. There is an intelligence beyond us - god, if you will, that has a master divine plan and this moment; this event is just a part of the plan. If we hang on and if we have faith everything will work out in the end. By working out we mean that we shall reap rewards - happiness, prosperity and the love of our life ad nauseum. And some of us really do experience this.
So what of the man standing in the puddle of gasoline? Perhaps, like an action hero in a movie, he deliberately drops his lighted cigar butt into the gas in order to take advantage of the explosive effect of the fuel. Maybe his enemies are on the opposite end of the puddle sitting in their getaway car and our hero decides this is the easiest way to dispatch them. Boom! The car explodes incinerating the bad guys.
There is a casual relationship between the explosion and the action hero. Open flames and gasoline equal explosion. Maybe our hero deliberately soaked the ground. Maybe, the ground got drenched following a shoot out between the hero and the bad guys. Our quick thinking hero didn’t necessarily plan for the gas to be present, but ever resourceful he takes advantage of the situation. This may well be the only “reason” these event occurred - someone taking advantage of circumstance and having work too their advantage.
On the other hand our cigar smoking man could just be careless. Maybe he is going about his business and didn’t notice that somehow the ground on which he is standing is soaked in gas. Unaware of the potential danger he drops his cigar and becomes engulfed in the flames, his lack of precaution causing him to be burned to a cinder.
Regardless of the situation the events have a causal relationship. Nature seems to work that way. But, to say there is a divine plan is simply silly. Scientists have worked out many so-called laws of the universe. The law of gravity and the laws of thermodynamics are two examples. What we call laws are simply human descriptions of observable natural events. It expresses what we presently understand about the world and the universe we live in. These laws often seem immutable and, indeed, some may prove to be so. But, this is always subject to new information as the boundaries of human knowledge expand in our quest “to know.”
We contract spiritual gonorrhea when we succumb to simplistic idioms such as ‘everything happens for a reason.’ We seek comfort when we come to the edge of the abyss - that being the limits of current human understanding. We don’t want the gaps. We want certainty.
The truly curious push on seeking understanding; they seek information to fill in the gaps between what they know and what they do not. The fearful turn toward religion and fairy tales to quiet their anxiety and the most deeply fearful will even deny the veracity of new information if it conflicts with their favored fairy tales.
We come into the world victim of circumstances beyond our control. Deep down most of us know this to be true. We have been told and we believe that there are no guarantees in life. We know of people who have totally been burned by circumstances no matter how hard they work to overcome the obstacles placed before them. We also know people who overcome obstacles. But, none of this is necessarily divinely ordained. It may simply be the effects of free will on circumstance.
An infant born into the world does not choose his or her parents. The infant doesn’t choose its genetic heritage or the environment it finds itself in, despite the New Age hogwash that begs to differ. These are things that are done to the child. How the child responds as it matures into adulthood is the result of many variables - natural intelligence, the ability to develop empathy, effective socialization and so much more.
As Sartre would say this child is condemned totally to be free and its freedom lies in what it can do with the circumstances it finds itself in. Each of us has free will, we can react anyway we choose. But, we will have to deal with the consequences of our actions. There will be a casual relationship between how we act and what we experience. This is the result of our individual will against circumstance or the will of those we oppose or stand against.
Drop a rock from the Empire State building and it will fall to the earth. If someone is standing underneath it they will be killed. This is a cause and effect relationship between the rock, gravity and the person who happens to be in the way. But, we cannot say this is part of god’s divine plan. The victim may just be passing by on his or her way from lunch. They are randomly in the right place at the right time or wrong place at the wrong time depending on perspective. God most certainly did not ordain that you or I drop a rock from the Empire State building at the exact moment the complete stranger to us below passes by.
This example is quite silly and insults the intelligence, but reason suggests that this hold true for all such situations that we take to be divinely ordained. We live in a casual universe where events can occur in such a way to produce certain results. Sometimes we can predict and even expect the results. At other times we are quite completely unaware.
There are many who seem to find the universe to be too precise, too well ordered to have occurred as the result of a random chance such as the big bang. Yet, isn’t it equally preposterous to assume that an infinite being existed when nothing else did and from that nothingness it created everything that exists? The god theory is simply an example of filling the gaps of our understanding with something -anything to explain away what boggles the mind and makes us uncomfortable.
And as for the universe being too well ordered and too precise any evolutionary biologist can tell you that there are way too many flaws in the design of the human body alone to be the result of a divine plan. It is more tenable to see modern human’s physiology as a series of trial and error - nature (for lack of a better word) using what works and discarding her failures than to assume we were created by a god for his own purposes.
Everything does happen for a reason. But, these are series of casual relationships that occur in the ordering of random circumstance and nothing to do with a quasi benevolent spiritual god or universe.