Also is there a reason for everything.
What I really want to know is if anyone believes in these obscure, unprovable concepts.
No, many micro-scale events occur due to causeless quantum mechanical effects.
Everything happens for a reason.
It’s not always a *good *reason…
Nope. Sometimes stuff just happens.
Sometimes it happens to you.
No, but it’s very tempting pitfall; something of Descartes’ Achilles heel.
I must admit as I get older temptation to entertain such sentiment increases; if everything happens for reason = there’s a master plan/existence of God like being(s) then the chances of rebirth (of the new and improved version of myself having been taught and learned lessons) becomes more fathomable.
Kind of.
Nothing happens for a reason. Nothing at all. Which means, perversely, that we can give everything any meaning - any “reason” - we want. And finding out which reason or meaning we give to any situation or happening is a great way to learn about ourselves and what’s important to us.
For example, when I started noticing the synchronicity of events that kept bringing me in positions of caring for people medically, spending time in hospitals and bringing nurses into my life (both professionally and personally), I knew that something about that was important to me. Not because “the universe” or “god” put me into medical situations to teach me something, but because I thought of it that way. Since nothing *really *happens for a reason, it was obviously very important to my subconscious that I notice it. So I spent some time noticing it, giving it that reason for being, and ultimately decided to go to nursing school, which was one of the best three decisions in my life!
So did my daughter decide to enter this world 3 and a half months early so that I would become a nurse? No, probably not. But it might have well have happened for that reason, since the end result is the same. I don’t fault people in stressful situations from viewing them as “happening for a reason”. It’s as good a way to look at it as any, and the end result (a change in behavior or thought) is going to happen anyhow. The “reason” may be self-imposed, but it’s no less of a reason.
So more confirmation bias than anything.
It depends on what you mean by “reason.” If you mean “will I (or any one person) ever be able to understand why any given, seemingly meaninglessly destructive event happened?” then the answer is no.
I do believe that things fit together in some way. I believe there is meaning in events, and meaning in the overall Thing that is all-that-is. But since we are inside that system, we cannot see the whole picture. Things that feel random and meaningless, especially bad things, seem to have no reason. I believe that they do–ultimately–but that I can’t know that from my limited perspective. I also don’t need to know.
Because we are such creatures of meaning, I can’t accept that our desire to seek meaning (reasons) could have evolved within a system that *lacks *reason/meaning. But that’s as far as I can get from within the paradigm.
Seems like everything that happens is a result or reaction and I suppose that would be a reason.
Sometimes the result or reaction is unexpected but there’s a reason it happened the way it did, even if we don’t understand it.
I’m not meaning this in any supernatural “spiritual” way. There are just laws in nature. Usually the simplest explanation fits, and the problem comes when we go looking for special connections beyond reaction.
Cause and effect are among the first things we human beings learn. Put your hand on a hot stove, you get burned. Piss in your cereal, you’re going to get a spanking (these days probably more like a few hours without your X-Box). Most of our logical thinking is tied to isolating causes for the effects we encounter.
It’s only natural to suspect weird and random things that happen to (or because of) us had some cause or other. We’re conditioned to hunt for (maybe not too hard) explanations that “make sense” to us. In some cases, we regard those explanations as “science” and in other cases as “not science.” The more difficult the explanation becomes the more likely we are to write it off as a supernatural occurrence. The more people that have the same sort of supernatural explanation, the more likely that explanation becomes a myth, a religion, or at least a fun story.
But, bottom line, we human beings don’t adapt well to the lack of some explanation for things. We’ll make up stuff if we have to.
I’m kind of with WhyNot. It’s not that everything happens for a reason, as much as we create the meaning we need out of what we have. In many cases, this is functionally the same as everything having a meaning.
Take the woman who is emotionally immature. She is likely to keep getting herself in bad relationships, since emotionally immature people are going to gravitate towards the jerks and not have much to attract the good guys. After enough heartbreak, she’ll probably grow a bit emotionally. Suddenly, she will start seeing the good guys as attractive, and they will be attracted to her.
Did those bad relationships happen for a reason? No. But they did end up serving a purpose. Did the good guys show up at that time for a reason? No, but if Mr. Right had showed up earlier, she wouldn’t have been able to do anything with him. You tend to find what you need at the time.
Take the kid who flunks out of med school because he is unmotivated, hitchhikes across the US, and finds his true passion herding goats. You can’t say he flunked for a reason, but the reason was there- he didn’t want to be a doctor. And I bet if he really did want to be a doctor, he would have ended up becoming one once he came to terms with whatever was behind him dropping out of med school.
It is like tarot cards. Obviously they cannot predict the future. But when you read them and react to them, you learn a hell of a lot about what you think about the future through how you choose to interpret them. If you ask about your job and see the Tower (a card about destruction) as a sign you will get fired, then you are probably thinking that you might get fired. And if you are thinking you might get fired, you probably have som reason to think that. In fact, you might be already convinced you are going to get fired and slacking off. So yeah, you really might get fired.
If you saw the Tower as “I am getting promoted, so my previous position is getting destroyed,” it is probably going to be a totally different story.
Yes, this is backwards looking. Unles you believe in the supernatural, backward looking is literally the only way to be. Looking at our life (which is always in the past) and creating meaning from it is the only thing we do. It’s as close to “real” as we will ever get.
You guys really know how to make a person think.
Thanks. Off to ponder.
That settles it. I’m off to herd goats!
EDIT:
Also, this:
Cause and effect; action and consequence; stimulus and response. Otherwise, it’s all chaotic randomness.
Nonsense. Some things most certainly do happen for a reason. I went into the kitchen and ate a piece of cake a few minutes ago. That happened because I felt hungry. That is a reason.
If that is too trivial an example for you, consider that six million Jews died during the holocaust because Hitler thought exterminating the Jews would be a good thing. That is a reason.
On the other hand, events that are caused by something other than some person’s intentional actions do not happen for a reason (because “happened for a reason” just means “happened because someone intentionally made it happen”). People who say “all things happen for a reason” really mean that they think that all events are caused by the intentions of some person-like entity, such as God or “fate”.
That said, I think the rest of WhyNot’s answer is really quite insightful, provided we restrict it to events not caused by human (or, possibly, animal) intentions, and we reject the extravagant and sentimental idea of an invisible, all powerful God (or gods) that actively controls every detail of everything that happens that is not done for a reason by some person.
I think the ability to attribute meaning to events and integrate those into a narrative is at the root of what it means to be a conscious animal.
Of course, the reason everything occurs is mechanistic, basic cause and effect; the egg is broken because I dropped it. We accept that all those events occurred in just the exact way in the past to create what we think of as the present, but take some leap of faith that in the future anything can happen when in fact to some degree the future is just as well defined as the past. This egg I am dropping will break in the future. Maybe this temporal chauvinism is more an artifact of our consciousness, as opposed to a physical law.
…wait. What was the question?
Not exactly, but close. Someone dies from a lightning strike is cause and effect, but not of human origin. Someone gets cancer because a cell mutates. Why did the cell mutate? Now we’re more into randomness. Why did an asteroid smack into the earth long ago and obliterate most life? Chaos and randomness of the universe. On a macro scale (mankind and earth in general), most everything that happens does have a cause. The rest of it is random coincidence. The explanation of random coincidence is the basis of religion: the attempt to explain the inexplicable.
I have this friend who needs a goat suit…
Right, but:
It was clear to me that this was the definition of “reason” that the OP was inquiring about, and the answers about cause and effect are off topic (except the one that surmises that we attribute God or “fate” reasons to things because we observe cause and effect as driving everything and we transfer that concept to the mystical.)
Give it a Pooh capital, if you like. The OP isn’t asking if everything happens for a reason, but if everything happens for a Reason. 
I provided some illustrations for a book on goats. Does that help any?