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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