I often hear it said that “everything happens for a reason.” Some people swear by this phrase but do you believe it?
I think that everything happens for a reason, but that many things are so complex or otherwise beyond one’s understanding that it’s convenient to pretend they don’t have a reason.
I don’t know. I’m not sure how to tackle this question exactly. Who controls the reason? Is it just that we realize that we learn from everything that happens, so then you can say, “Oh I got in that accident for a reason, it taught me not to run over people crossing in a crosswalk.”
I’m thinking more in terms of the idea that there is a master plan and everything that happens in this world has a purpose.
As you zoom in and zoom out looking at natural laws at different scales, it becomes true on some scales and less true or false on others.
In the end however, it requires an underlying philosophy to make it true or false. Some religions say that God controls the universe. That would mean that everything happens for a reason. Other religious views say that man has free will and the power to shape the world. That may mean that there isn’t always a reasons besides another person’s choice or simple bad luck.
Likewise, scientists once believed that everything could be predicted if you knew all the variables involved in something even if it is as complex as the human mind. That would mean that everything happened for a reason even if it is just physics. The reason was all the things that happened before it. Now quantum mechanics dictates that the most fundamental particles of the universe are completely unpredictable under many circumstances and this underlies and influences what we see making it fundamentally unpredictable as well. If there is a reason for anything at all, we can’t predict it at even the most fundamental level.
Yes, of course everything happens for a reason! However, that doesn’t mean the hand of God is behind it, nor does it mean that the reason is necessarily important, nor does it mean that every occurrence has profound repercussions.
There is no Master Plan. Things happenn for various materialistic reasons, but there is also a randomness that stops things from being purely deterministic.
There is no empirical reason to believe that anything (beyond short-term, goal motivated animal behavior) happens for a “reason.”
Not only is the statement “everything happens for a reason” false (always false, in fact, with the exception of the goal oriented behaviours to which DtC refers), it is IMO one of the more cruel and pernicious doctrines around. Would you tell a holocaust survivor that their suffering happened for a reason? A parent of a murdered child, a person suffering from a fatal congenital defect? EHFAR is the epitome of glurge, the seemingly uplifting treacle which conceals a darker world view.
I went to a funeral many years back where a friend of our family was burying their murdered son. One thing I’ll always admire the minister for was stating very forcefully that this crime was not God’s will, that this was the senseless act of an evil man. This served the family far better than being insulted by meaningless tripe in their darkest hour.
Everything happens because of a reason but I’ve never seen any evidence that anything happens for a reason.
Everything does happen for a reason. Usually the reason is in the realm of physics or psychology.
I think a better question is, does everything happen for a greater reason. And in that case, unless you’re a strict Calvinist, the answer is no.
I’m scratching my nose right now. Is there a greater reason in that?
Living creatures *with intent * have reasons to act as they do.
All those intents, together with coincidence, and blind natural forces, result in X.
If you look long enough, X will seem to fit one or more of the intentions we started out with. And if it doesn’t… well, human beings are just built to want to perceive meaning. Even where there are only incredible complex patterns interacting, and to a large extent random, events.
Yup, I’m an atheist.
In Quantum Physics, not everything happens for a reason, unless that reason happens to be ‘sometimes, things just happen for no reason’.
Does everything happen for a reason?
As a practical matter, yes. I’m having GI problems because I exercised too much last night; had I not done so, I should feel perfectly fine this morning. If you want to get to a lower level, you may look to biology, or further down to physics; while it’s true that we cannot predict things at the quantum level, on a larger scale one might say that things are determined by what happens there. This is a layman’s understanding, of course. And this is a specious answer to your question.
Philosophically, does everything happen for a reason? I happen to be a hard determinist and an absolute idealist: everything happens for a reason, and that reason just is the state of the entire universe leading up to the instant that the thing happens. Further, that something happens has a reason is built up in the definition of it happening in the first place. But I think this, again, isn’t the sort of answer you’re looking for.
Do I think that there is a purpose to each thing that happens, as directed by some intelligence? Not in the sense that you’re looking for. I do believe that the entire universe can be conceived as a physical representation of some ultimate intelligence, in the sense that both are the same thing, conceived differently. In that sense everything has been driven by an intelligence.
But what I think you mean is: Does everything happen for a reason, such that each thing contributes to a goal of some divine intelligence, to help or hinder humankind? Well … then I say “no”. Aside from having no proof for such an assertion, it seems false on its face; too many bad things happen to good people. Might God have had a reason for the current war in Iraq? Whether or not you think it’s justified, I don’t think anyone would think that a state of affairs where there is a war is better than a state of affairs where no war happens or is necessary.
If there is an intelligent God, in the judeo-christian sense, it seems patently obvious to me that he does not direct what happens on earth.
Does everything happen for a reason?
As a practical matter, yes. I’m having GI problems because I exercised too much last night; had I not done so, I should feel perfectly fine this morning. If you want to get to a lower level, you may look to biology, or further down to physics; while it’s true that we cannot predict things at the quantum level, on a larger scale one might say that things are determined by what happens there. This is a layman’s understanding, of course. And this is a specious answer to your question.
Philosophically, does everything happen for a reason? I happen to be a hard determinist and an absolute idealist: everything happens for a reason, and that reason just is the state of the entire universe leading up to the instant that the thing happens. Further, that something happens has a reason is built up in the definition of it happening in the first place. But I think this, again, isn’t the sort of answer you’re looking for.
Do I think that there is a purpose to each thing that happens, as directed by some intelligence? Not in the sense that you’re looking for. I do believe that the entire universe can be conceived as a physical representation of some ultimate intelligence, in the sense that both are the same thing, conceived differently. In that sense everything has been driven by an intelligence.
But what I think you mean is: Does everything happen for a reason, such that each thing contributes to a goal of some divine intelligence, to help or hinder humankind? Well … then I say “no”. Aside from having no proof for such an assertion, it seems false on its face; too many bad things happen to good people. Might God have had a reason for the current war in Iraq? Whether or not you think it’s justified, I don’t think anyone would think that a state of affairs where there is a war is better than a state of affairs where no war happens or is necessary.
If there is an intelligent God, in the judeo-christian sense, it seems patently obvious to me that he does not direct what happens on earth.
Apologies for the double post. If someone could report it, I’d be grateful.
I’d leave it, it most likely happened for a reason.
Orderly connections drawn from phenomena to phenomena, or from phenomena to concepts, become a “reason” when a human mind does the ordering within its own mental filing system. “Reason” is a phenomenon of the human mind, and I don’t see much point in looking for “reason” outside of the human mind – unless it’s another intelligence which is seen as analogous to a human mind, like a deity.
What do you call it in philosophy to consider nature as just itself, without assigning human interpretations like “reason” to it?
Scientific explanations connect phenomena in an orderly way by taking data from nature. The scientific method is to keep the explanation rigorously tied to nature’s data themselves. Mythological, magical, or religious explanations take in a wider variety of data for their explanations, which are more loosely connected to natural data and blend in plenty of human emotions, hopes, fears. Each has its own way of ordering the data, and calls the results its reasons.
Blaise Pascal said "Le cœur a ses raisons dont la raison ne connaît rien" or something like that. The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. I think Pascal was just contrasting these two different systems of ordering data, and enjoying a little ironic wordplay by setting two different meanings of “reason” within this contrast.
Have the Dadaists, Surrealists, and other irrationalists or anti-rationalists been exploring the crack between the two spheres of thought?
What do you mean by “reason”? Everything happens from a cause. Not everything happens for a purpose.
Except maybe that isn’t even true; uncaused effects are bread and butter in some interpretations of quantum mechanics.