When people have to cope with difficult situations in their lives, they sometimes

reassure themselves by saying that everything happens for a reason. For some
people, thinking this way makes it easier to deal with relationship problems,
financial crises, disease, death, and even natural disasters such as earthquakes. It
can be distressing to think that bad things happen merely through chance or
accident. But they do.

The saying that everything happens for a reason is the modern, New Age version of
the old religious saying: Its Gods will. The two sayings have the same problem
the complete lack of evidence that theyre true. Not only is there no good
evidence that God exists, we have no way of knowing what it is that he (or she)
wanted to happen, other than that it actually did happen. Did God really will that
hundreds of thousands of people die in an earthquake in one of the worlds poorest
countries? What could be the reason for this disaster and the ongoing suffering of
millions of people deprived of food, water, and shelter? Why do people find it
reassuring that the Haiti earthquake happened for a reason such as the will of God,
when such terrible events suggest a high degree of malevolence in the universe or
its alleged creator? Fortunately, such events can alternatively (and with good
evidence) be viewed as the result of accidents, and possibly even of chance.

The idea that chance is an objective property of the universe was advocated in the
nineteenth century by the great American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, who
called this doctrine tychism, from the Greek word for chance. Scientific support for
the doctrine came in the twentieth century with the development of quantum
theory, which is often interpreted as implying that some events such as radioactive
decay are inherently unpredictable.

Even if events that affect human lives do not happen by quantum chance, many of
them should be viewed as happening by accident, in the sense that they are the
improbable result of the intersection of independent causal chains. The deaths in
Haiti, for example, came about because of the results of many causal chains,
primarily (1) the historical events that led to millions of people living near Port-auPrince, and (2) the seismic events occurring in the tangle of tectonic faults near the
intersection of two crustal plates. These deaths were accidental in that the
intersection of the unconnected causal chains was unpredictable. Neither history
nor seismology are random, but their intersections often are so unforeseeable that
we should call them accidental.

The doctrine that everything happens for a reason has intellectual variants. The
German philosopher Hegel maintained that in historical development the real is
rational and the rational is real. Similarly, before the recent meltdowns in the
financial system, it was a dogma of economic theory that individuals and markets
are inherently rational. Some nave evolutionary biologists and psychologists
assume that all common traits and behaviors must have evolved from an optimizing
process of natural selection. In history, economics, biology, and psychology, we
should always be willing to consider evidence for the alternative hypothesis that
some events occur because of a combination of chance, accidents, and human
irrationality. For example, Keynes attributed financial crises in part to animal
spirits, by which he meant the emotional processes that can make people swing
between irrational exuberance and pessimistic despair.

But if the real isnt rational, how can we cope with lifes disasters? Fortunately,
even without religious or New Age illusions, people have many psychological
resources for coping with the difficulties of life. These include cognitive strategies
for generating explanations and problem solutions, and emotional strategies for
managing the fear, anxiety, and anger that naturally accompany setbacks and
threats. Psychological research has identified many ways to build resilience in
individuals and groups, such as developing problem solving skills and strong social
networks. Life can be highly meaningful even if some things that happen are just
accidents. Stuff happens and you deal with it.