Do things happen for a reason

By Wayne Brown
[From Yabberz Greatest Hits]

Perhaps right at the core of most religious thought is the idea that "things happen for a reason". In the Biblical tradition, this reason is in the Mind of God. His plan has a fundamentally moral aspect (it's good and merciful). Everyone outside of mental hospitals agrees that the "plan" is completely inscrutable.
Even when stripped of all the particulars of theology, many people cling to the last vestiges of this idea. They ask "why" a person is "taken away" in the prime of life or "why" innocent, good people are destroyed by random events like hurricanes and earthquakes. The question is always rhetorical. It's rude to attempt an answer. Even those who think there is no reason feel in their bones that there ought to be one.
I've often encountered people who earnestly believe in "fate", which is (to me) the silly idea that whatever happened was what somehow had to happen. This pulls away even the "moral" nature of the process but leaves its inevitability. Such beliefs are, of course "not even wrong". How could you disagree?
Well actually, you can.
Since the early 20th century, Science (specifically Quantum Mechanics) has been showing that things "just happen" for "reasons" that are fundamentally probabilistic. To put it another way, if you know everything there is to know about a system, there are things you cannot predict about what happens next. This has been reinforced by the advent of Chaos theory, which says pretty much the same thing but at a more familiar scale - the scale of the weather, for example.
To put it simply, there is no such thing as the "future". The Universe does not "unfold" according to any "plan", whether decreed by God or not. On a more subtle level, there isn't even such a thing as the "past", in the sense that the current state of affairs is not entirely due to a knowable state of affairs that existed at some previous time.
It takes time to get comfortable with the absence of purpose or even predictability in the Universe. For me, it comes back frequently in the realization that I am personally astronomically improbable. I can sit down and calculate the probability that I would be born and make the number come out as small as you like. Those of us who have taken Calculus means that this means the probability is equal to zero. I am impossible.
Even so, I'm happy to accept this. Is it then so hard that I will exit the world as a result of events that are equally improbable and meaningless?
This is not to say that life itself lacks meaning. It's just to say that the meaning, if any, must be found in our own lives, from the "inside" and not within the mysterious workings of the Universe.

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