Thursday, June 11, 2015

Why Things Happen, bad ones mostly?



Indeed, why do bad things happen?  Or, as expressed by a bit cruder philosophical theory – “_ _ _ _ happens!” What are we to make of this when the pages of history are not without bad things happening?  Yet, today the prospect of more of the same has not lessened and for many the future seems bleak.

Let’s see.  A lot of bad incidents did occur throughout history. Attila the Hun, Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot, just to name a few, happened. The Biblical story of Cain slaying Abel may have been the metaphor that it was meant to be to describe man’s inhumanity to man, man’s cruelty to another; and all other bad things in between – from the meanness of a simple gossip to a group’s hatred of another to all-out war of destruction, pillaging, enslavement and persecution.

Nature has not spared us of bad things either.  From earthquakes and tsunamis, global epidemic, incurable diseases, even the rare but deadly impacts from asteroids, to all kinds of weather driven forces like lightning strikes, tornadoes and hurricanes, our world had been host to all of these. The human drama of death and survival attest to the apparently random visitations by these calamities.  They were just bad things happening in different places, to different people.

“People” from the end of the last paragraph are what matters because we were here and are still here to observe and chronicle those disasters.  And even when we were not, we have the means to know about them from our knowledge of archeology and interpretation of left over evidence.  Of course, we found out too that natural disasters (or just events when we were not here to suffer from them) have been occurring for more than 99.9% of the time that earth had existed long before we got here to provide context, to contemplate, to complain and to be fearful. Whether we are here or not, natural things happen.  And a lot of other living creatures, 95 % of all species that had ever existed are no longer here for one natural reason or another.

Then there is the more crucial question.  Why then do we have inhumane behavior exacted among and between all of us – the dominant, most intelligent and most understanding of all living creatures?  If an extraterrestrial were to observe us or monitor news coverage from TV, radio and print media, their only conclusion is perhaps not to be anywhere near here because we are a violent, malevolent species.  Our only excuse for human behavior is that after all we are part of nature and nature has not exactly been free of disastrous behavior.  It is an excuse or an explanation dished out by psychologists and psychiatrists, telling us why Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, the Boston strangler, did what they did.  Even Hitler’s behavior had been explained.

Then there is the other crucial question.  Why do bad things happen to certain people?  Why do most serial killers victimize mostly women?  Why do innocent children have to suffer from abuses by adults? Why does a nation, a group of people or segment of a population suffer solely for attributes of being who they are?  Sadly, those are difficult questions to answer.  Victims of personal crimes and their families are a big number but in the context of our history victims of war were far greater.  In war, men, women, children have been indiscriminately eliminated in huge numbers.  And, sadly, the cruelty continues even today.

Furthermore, the question begins to be even more emotionally complex when we address a specific case, especially when it is about someone we know.  Why does it have to happen to him or her, or to a whole family?  Do things happen because they do have to happen?  That is not a fair question and although it is one to be asked, as some philosophers would have us believe, because the universe we live in is set in a “world of what happened and the probabilities of all kinds of events happening”.  Deep as this may seem, it is truly simple. Without having to go to the beginning – the creation if you will – and we pick up a point in history where we, as humans, have a hand in it, we see a pattern: if we collectively or individually cause something to occur, the effect is that of an event happening and that event is set to lay out many probable events into the future. Out of those probable outcomes one will prevail and it will in turn become the event and then cause other probabilities to produce an event, and so on and so forth. It is as if something is set in motion and the unwinding of it is governed by probabilities. “The genie is out of the bottle”.  But it is not all bad.  Read further below.

Everything that can possibly happen does come to fruition – both good and bad. It is from that truism that Murphy’s Law originates from, that if something can go wrong, it will.  What Murphy never talked about was that a lot of good things also actually happen.  They don’t get as much press as the bad ones because catastrophe makes better copy.  Actually, it is just that catastrophe gets hyped up more.  You see, if it were true that bad things happen most of the time, we will not have much of a civilization.  In reality a lot of good stuff happened over and over again throughout history.  More good things happen than bad ones.  Population growth, even at a time of inadequate prenatal care and pediatrics, infant mortality lags behind birth that resulted in children growing up and becoming adults despite the seemingly low odds of survival even in very inhospitable environments going back to ancient days.  Notice that while history is lined with one despot after another trying to do evil things, there were a lot more good guys around to put a stop to it.  In other words, for every bad deed there seems to be more good ones, by a huge margin, to quash it.

Astrophysicists tell us this.  At the beginning of creation, from the big explosion came out of nothing an unimaginable form of energy, from which material particles and anti-material particles were created.  Unfortunately, every anti-matter will destroy every matter particle it came in contact with.  However, as luck would have it, for every billion particles of anti-matter, there was a billion and one matter particle.  It was that imbalanced sheet that allowed for matter to prevail. That is how our present world came to be.  Believe that or not, the Genesis creation is not in conflict with that at all. To see everything that is all around us today, “Let there be light” had to have been a massive release of energy in an instant that can be explained by The Creator willing for it to happen. Both Genesis and the big bang theory are aligned along that analogy as to why we have more good things than bad ones – more matter than anti-matter.

We can perhaps take comfort that the only way for our world to exist as it does is for more good things to happen for every bad thing that occurs. 



  




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