When people have to cope with difficult situation in their lives, they sometimes reassure themselves by saying everything happens for a reason. For some people, thinking this way makes it easier to deal with their problems, relationship problems, financial crisis, disease, death, and even natural disaster such as earthquake. It can be distressing to think that bad things happen merely through chance or accident. But, they actually do.
The saying that everything happens for a reason is the modern, New Age version of the old religious saying: "It's God's will." The two sayings have the same problem - the complete lack of evidence that they're true. Not only there is no good evidence that God exists, we have no way of knowing what it is that s/he wanted to happen, other than that it actually did happen. Did God really will that hundreds of thousands of people die in an earthquake in one of the world's poorest countries? What could be the reason for this disaster and the ongoing suffering of million of people deprived of food, water and shelter? Why do people find it reassuring that the Haiti earthquake happened for a reason such the will of God, when such terrible events suggest a high degree of malevolence in the universe or its alleged creator? Fortunately, such events can alternatively - and with good evidence- be viewed as the result of accidents and possibly even of chance.
The idea that chance is an objective property of the universe was advocated in the nineteenth century by the great American philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce, who called this doctrine tychism, from the Greek word for chance. Scientific support for the doctrine came in the twentieth century with the development of quantum theory, which is often interpreted as implying that some events such radioactive decay are inherently unpredictable.
Even if events that affect human lives do not happen by quantum chance, many of them should be viewed as happening by accident, in the sense that they are the improbable result of the intersection of independent causal chains. The deaths in Haiti, for example, is the result of many causal chains, primarily the historical events that led to million of people living near Port-au-Prince, and the seismic events occurring in the tangle of tectonic faults near the intersection of two crustal plates. These deaths were accidental happened in the intersection of the unconnected causal chains and this was unpredictable. Neither history nor seismology are random, but their intersection often are so unforeseeable that we should call them accidental. These deaths were accidental in the intersection of the unconnected causal chains.
The doctrine that everything happens for a reason has intellectual variants. The German philosopher, Hegel; what is rational is real and what is real is rational. Similarly, before the recent meltdowns in the financial system, it was a dogma of economic theory that individuals and markets are inherently rational. Some naive evolutionary biologist and psychologist assume that all common traits and behaviors must have evolved from an optimizing process of natural selection. In history, economics, biology and psychology, we should always be willing to consider evidence for the alternative hypothesis that some events occur because of a combination of chance, accidents and human irrationality.
If the real isn't rational, how can we cope with life's disaster? Fortunately, even without religious or New Age illusions, people have many psychological resources for coping with the difficulties of life. These include cognitive strategies for generating explanations and problem solutions and emotional strategies for managing the fear, anxiety and anger that naturally accompany setbacks and threats. Psychological research has identified many ways to build resilience in individuals and groups, such as developing problem solving skills and strong social networks. Life can be highly meaningful even if some things that happen are just accident. Stuff happens and you deal with it.
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