Does Everything Happen for a Reason?

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I recently read a review in America Magazine of the new book, My Beloved World, by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. I haven’t read the book itself, though it looks interesting. It’s about Justice Sotomayor’s childhood and the influences in her life.

What I liked in the review was the line, “What distinguishes this book is that Sotomayor does not claim to be self-made.” Unlike many others who have found “success,” she recognizes that many people had a hand in making her the woman she is today. Although she obviously put in a lot of hard work and was persistent, she peddles none of this “I pulled myself up by my bootstraps” stuff.

She had plenty of “failure” on the road to success, too. She contended with her own early diabetes, a drinking father and aloof mother who nonetheless provided her with lots of human resources, and a childhood in Bronx public housing. With this meager stake, she won a scholarship to Princeton, graduated with highest honors and attended Yale Law School. The rest, as they say, is history. She goes on to be the country's first Hispanic and only the third female justice.

This blog, however, is not about persistence or overcoming life’s obstacles. My question is whether everything leading up to Justice Sotomayor’s success, or all that happens in our lives, occurs for a reason. It’s a common view among believers, and maybe some unbelievers. After all, we humans want everything to be orderly and rational. We can’t accept that events may happen randomly and that results are unpredictable.

Let’s face it, for every Sotomayor there may be hundreds or thousands of people who have worked as hard, been as persistent, intelligent and resourceful as Sotomayor and are in ordinary jobs or even living on the street.

So, to be a believer, is it necessary to hold that everything happens for a reason, specifically, that every detail in life is planned in advance by God? Not in my view.

I’m not sure about the origin of this idea, but I suspect that one source is the Bible, including the Christian Bible, in which Jesus says things like, “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.”

Over the centuries, many Christians have seen God’s hand in everything that happens. The topic was covered in the Catholic Church’s First Vatican Council (1869-1870) in reference to “Divine Providence,” defining it as God's plan for the universe and execution of the plan by his/her governance.

I see a couple of problems with this view. First, regarding Jesus’ words, the “Father’s care” is one thing, his control over details of our lives is another. God evidently chose to create through evolution, an unfathomably slow process that is random and that includes many “false starts” littered with species that didn’t make it. For me, that’s a clue to how God operates. 

Another problem with the “everything-happens-for-a-purpose“ view is the implication for human freedom. If God has his/her hand in everything I do, how am I free to choose or reject him/her? And that freedom, in my view, is at the heart of the human-divine relationship.

So what about miracles, whose variations range from Jesus turning water into wine; whatever did or didn’t happen at places like Lourdes and Fatima; and the everyday “miracles” you read about in the paper or see on the news – such as a blind person who climbs Mount Kilimanjaro? I believe skepticism is called for in all three variations. Some biblical miracles or those at the famous shrines may have happened; some may not have. The point of the stories is God’s love and care for us. The mountain climbing is a “miracle” only in the sense that something unexpected, and perhaps heroic, occurred.

Personally, I believe miracles – God’s intervention in human activities – can happen, but seldom do. To say they couldn’t happen is limiting what I’ve come to believe is a God who, in human terms, is unlimited. But to ascribe all our actions and events to God’s intervention is a contradiction to the God of evolution and the God who allows us to utterly reject him/her.

One thing to keep in mind in all of this, of course, is that we simply don’t know how God operates, let alone what God is really like.

Tomas Halik, whom I’ve quoted before, in his book, Night of the Confessor: Christian Faith in an Age of Uncertainty, reminds us that “all attempts to speak about God rely on images and metaphors.”

OMG, you might say, if everything about God is that nebulous, why waste time searching for him/her? Because his/hers is the only game in town; because the alternative is a view of human life that is intolerable, the view that no one is in charge, that “random” is all there is. And because there are good reasons to believe that such a search is warranted, that this God has revealed him/herself enough to encourage the search but allow us our freedom.

So did God align the events and people in Justice Sotomayor’s life in such a way that resulted in her historic appointment to the Supreme Court? We simply don’t know. Either way, Sotomayor’s life – and that of all humans whose lives are inspiring – can move us toward God.