Trey Smith
All things within Nature -- that is, everything -- are invariably and necessarily determined by Nature. There is nothing that escapes Nature's laws; there are no exceptions to its ways. Whatever is, follows with an absolute necessity from Nature's necessary universal principles (God's attributes). There are those no purposes for Nature or within Nature. Nothing happens for any ultimate reason or to serve any goal or overarching plan. Whatever takes place does so only because it is brought about by the ordinary causal order of Nature.So much of what happens to each of us in our lives appears unexplainable. A seemingly robust and healthy person drops dead, while a sickly person lives to be 105. Good fortune drops into our lives by complete happenstance and yet others, who work tirelessly for success, seem to be hampered by one train wreck after another.
~ from A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age by Steven Nadler ~
Why do good things happen to bad people? Why do bad things happen to the best of us? In a plane crash or a fire at a movie theater, why does everyone in row six die, except the person in seat 6C?
These are the types of questions that have perplexed and bedeviled humans since the beginning of time. Since most people don't like to entertain the notion that life is random, at best, we create myths, legends, stories and religions to provide that sense of cause and reason that evades us. We develop mechanisms that seek to hold at bay the problem of the limitations of the human mind.
And so, some people hold onto the idea that a supernatural entity has "a plan" for their life. Of course, when their best laid plans go awry, about all they can come up with is, "God moves in mysterious ways!"
To my way of thinking, this is nothing more than a dressed up way of saying that shit happens!
We discussed something like this in my Philosophy class. The idea that God's reasoning for doing things we see as evil is beyond human comprehension. In other words, we see certain acts as bad from a mortal's perspective, but those same actions may have a higher meaning that humans cannot understand. It's the argument that God does not commit acts of evil nor good, good and evil are human fabrications.
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