Monday, March 28, 2011

Is everything part of god's plan and what's the point.

If you believe in God then you believe in a being who both knows about every event that is going to happen and permits those events to happen, since He could act to prevent it, presumably, if he so chose. That is, allowing an event to occur that you have the power to stop is itself a moral action and makes one an accomplice in the action.

Therefore, when God believers see any particular event happen in the world, they must believe that it is because it is part of God's plan. Simply put, God wanted/needed it to happen for some perhaps inscrutable reason.

Now the question is, do you believe this? Do you believe that everything that happens really is part of an infinitely complex, incomprehensible plan, or do you think that sometimes things just happen and are not really part of any sentient plan at all? It think that it is easier to believe that sometimes things happen that are not part of anyone or anything's grand plan. Nobody wanted or needed certain things to happen. Nobody let it happen indirectly by refusing to intervene. It just happened and there was nobody at the switch to decide to cause or prevent it either way.

Theism commits itself to the notion that there are no truly "random" events. God is watching over everything and controlling whether it happens or does not happen according to his plan. Non-theism allows that random things can happen from time to time. This is not to say that the events were not caused by some physical mechanism.

Heat inside the Earth, for example, may eventually lead to the eruption of a volcano. However, the volcano was not part of any particular plan. The people who may have died were not targeted for death on purpose as part of a dark, sinister plan or because of sins they committed, or because of divine decree. Volcanos simply erupt from time to time and have no ability to know or care about what might be in their way when this happens.

Some people might look at such a situation and rail against the "pointlessless" for such a system, but the so-called "pointlessness" *is* "the point" here. It is a relief that there was no purpose behind the volcano erupting, and is simply blind, unthinking physical forces. If the volcano had been designed intentionally to kill people this would be some form of supernatural terrorism. It would be better to have a "pointless" volcanic eruption than one planned and executed on purpose.

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