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Everything Happens for a Reason It is sometimes said that “Everything happens for a reason”. The cynic would remark that you could always find a reason afterwards. Even if that were true, it is the difference between the optimist and the pessimist. An optimistic outlook is to see the bright side of everything. So, if an apparently ‘bad’ event happens, the optimist says that good will come out of it. Conversely, the pessimist sees the bad in everything and if an apparently ‘bad’ event happens, the pessimist says ‘told you so’. It makes them happy to be proved right. If this were the only reason for having an attitude that “Everything happens for a reason” then this would be a good enough reason. After all, optimists live longer than pessimists and lead healthier lives. However, there is more to it than this. Having the attitude that “Everything happens for a reason” means that there are no regrets and recriminations and no getting annoyed with people. For instance, if you get held up in traffic because someone didn’t go when the lights turned green then instead of getting annoyed you simply say that “Everything happens for a reason”, and open your mind to seeing the infinite possibilities that life is offering you. I previously pointed out that the atheistic idea that that if there is a ‘good’ God then how is that ‘bad’ things happen, is simplistic. There are no ‘good and ‘bad’ events: there is simply life. What we call cause and effect are simplistic generalisations that can aid our path through life. It helps us to predict likely outcomes. However, most of life does not fit neatly into cause and effect, which is why science is usually useless in making decisions in our day-to-day world. There are so many apparently unrelated causes that it is impossible to make predictions using any kind of scientific model. Why did that person, at that time, choose to miss the light going green? They may have been on their mobile phone but why did it happen when I was behind them and at that particular time? Events aren’t random: they happen in order to produce an outcome. I wrote about this previously. The apparently random series of actions came about in order to produce the outcome that you were going to be stuck in traffic. If that sounds ridiculous, you can get some understand of the mechanism behind it here. Of course, the pessimist would say, "I told you so - life is conspiring against me"!