God has wonderful plan: $#!+ happens
by Tom Sullivan
Psychologists at the Yale Mind and Development Lab explore the human tendency to believe that "everything happens for a reason." Not just religious believers think this, either. They found many atheists believe it as well:
This tendency to see meaning in life events seems to reflect a more general aspect of human nature: our powerful drive to reason in psychological terms, to make sense of events and situations by appealing to goals, desires and intentions. This drive serves us well when we think about the actions of other people, who actually possess these psychological states, because it helps us figure out why people behave as they do and to respond appropriately. But it can lead us into error when we overextend it, causing us to infer psychological states even when none exist. This fosters the illusion that the world itself is full of purpose and design.
That maybe puts too fine a point on it. People don't just do this in relation to others and to events. Growing up, I heard the quote from Benjamin Franklin: “Man is a tool-making animal.” Man is also a pattern-seeking animal. We see faces in ink blots, madonnas in toast and in stains on buildings. We find animal shapes in the clouds and in the stars. We read messages in palms and tea leaves. And after a tragedy, we ask reflexively, "Why did this happen?" As if there is a why.
However, the human impulse to impose meaning on a chaotic world is both a blessing and a curse, the researchers find. It is comforting to believe there really are no accidents. But?
It tilts us toward the view that the world is a fundamentally fair place, where goodness is rewarded and badness punished. It can lead us to blame those who suffer from disease and who are victims of crimes, and it can motivate a reflexive bias in favor of the status quo — seeing poverty, inequality and oppression as reflecting the workings of a deep and meaningful plan.
Shit never just happens in this view. God has a wonderful plan for your life and financially blesses His elect, per the prosperity gospel. If you're poor? You didn't believe hard enough. Decades ago in Harpers, Peter Marin criticized the 1970s human potential movement for teaching that misfortune is a failure of consciousness:
... I listen for two hours in a graduate seminar to two women therapists explaining to me how we are all entirely responsible for our destinies, and how the Jews must have wanted to be burned by the Germans, and that those who starve in the Sahel must want it to happen, and when I ask them whether there is anything we owe to others, say, to a child starving in the desert, one of them snaps at me angrily: "What can I do if a child is determined to starve?"
Randians would feel right at home. The Yale researchers conclude:
If there is such a thing as divine justice or karmic retribution, the world we live in is not the place to find it. Instead, the events of human life unfold in a fair and just manner only when individuals and society work hard to make this happen.
Because sometimes the plan is, shit happens. End of sermon.