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Do things happen by chance or is there a grand plan?
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| Plan | 58% | 130 votes | Total: 223 votes | |
| Chance | 42% | 93 votes |
Plan
by Wayne Leon Learmond
Created on: January 14, 2011
Whichever way one looks at it, life seems to have a plan that we do not yet understand. It is beyond our reasoning and our way of thinking. Yet this plan is there, guiding us along the pathways of life. What plan is set out for us most of us do not know. Yet some of us have a very strong sense of 'meaning' of 'fate' and of knowing what it is that we must achieve.
Within nature, and indeed within our very lives, this plan is put into action time and again. One has to remember that things do not just happen by chance, but by grand design. What we may see as 'luck' was actually planned out for us right at the beginning, and was meant to happen.
To many people there is a fine line between fate and luck, to others they simply cannot comprehend life as having a plan for us. Which leaves the rest of us who believe that luck and luck alone is the only thing that plays a part within our lives. If we happen to be in the right place at the right time, then that it is luck. If we win the lottery, or come first in some event or other; or save a life; or lose our life in some way; or get that job; whatever it is many people would put all those things down to luck and not fate.
But it seems that there is more than luck that runs through life, and that has a hand in events that happen daily. Life is not run on luck alone - but by something else, a grand design for us all. As much as the stars and planets revolve around each other, like some giant cosmic clock {and there is a definite design and planning behind them,}so too does this plan and design act in our lives.
It guides us, and pushes us along in life, for the good or bad. Some may say that if there is a plan then why do some of us die in the most horrible way? Was it meant to be that way, that lives can be cut short? This is a question that cannot be answered, but it seems that some people are simply not meant to live beyond a certain year, a certain month, a certain day.
The good die young, so the saying goes, and it seems that way. But is that just the luck of the draw, or fate? There is more than luck that plays a part here. There seems to be some kind of grand plan or design that comes into action and affects our lives for the good or bad. If we happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or vice versa, than that is a plan that was meant to happen, and not purely because of luck.
If we work our way up in life, and doors open for us because of our determination to succeed and pull ourselves out of our poverty, then once again, it is more than luck that takes a hand to help us. If we succeed it is because we were meant to succeed in whatever it is that we choose to do.
Our lives are planned out for us from the moment we are born - whether for the good or bad. And if one looks on this theory closely, one could clearly see the plan behind someone like Adolf Hitler's life. His was a life of evil, and it was he alone that began one of the most bloody wars in all of human history.
Yet, on looking at the beginning of his life, one could see how fate, {planning} had brought him to the position of great power. It was simply meant to happen, and the way he died at the end...was meant to happen that way too. Hitler's life you could not put down to luck, there was an evil grand design behind his existence - as even his own S.S officers would testify time after time.
There was a presence about him that made even his own people fearful of being alone in the same room as him. A presence of evil? Undoubtedly yes. Hitler was meant to rise to power, as much as Martin Luther King was meant to guide the Civil Rights Movement in America. There is a presence behind people {for the good or bad} that others feel and know will lead that person on to great things...or not, as the case may be.
Life and people within life, are guided. As much as we may like to think that luck plays a part, it is down to fate shaping and planning of our lives. Many people do know what they are meant to do in life and act accordingly. However it is down to each one of us - through trial and error - to discover what life has in store for us in the end. There is a grand design in each of our lives, we just have to discover it.
Learn more about this author, Wayne Leon Learmond.
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Chance
by 'Rick Gray
Created on: August 10, 2010 Last Updated: January 20, 2011
In the end, there can be no answer to this question which does not rest upon one's personal assumptions about the world we live in, and what might lie beyond it.
To believe in some sort of master plan almost necessarily implies believing in a Planner – some sort of intelligence existing outside, behind, and prior to the known world. Without a god of some kind, how could there be a plan? Where would the plan originate?
Moreover, given the manifest injustice of the visible world – infants dying of starvation; honest, hard-working adults losing everything to vast, impersonal economic forces; people of all ages struck down by deadly or wasting diseases; cruel and selfish individuals living to enjoy the fruits of their misdeeds into ripe old age – a belief in some sort of master plan typically implies some sort of afterlife, in which the just and the unjust finally get what they deserve.
Thus, belief in a plan logically rests on the sort of assumptions we associate with religious belief.
On the other hand, believing that everything around us is essentially a matter of chance implies either the absence of any god, or the existence of a god who is either satisfied with injustice or unable to do anything about it. Since most of us are uncomfortable with the latter option – a cruel, indifferent or powerless god – the usual default position for those who believe in a universe governed by chance is to doubt or deny the existence of any god at all.
The difficulty, of course, is that we live in an age of unparalleled scientific discovery. And the more science discovers about the universe, the clearer it becomes that the best explanation of how things work involves ideas like “chaos theory”, in which patterns may exist, but not the sort of patterns we think of as a "plan".
Which leaves us with this unpleasant choice: Accepting that the universe operates largely by chance, must we give up our belief in the divine? Or should we to cling to a faith which seems to contradict the overwhelming evidence establishing such ideas as the theory of evolution by natural selection, the Big Bang theory, etc.?
For me, there is no necessity for such a binary choice. I can accept the evidence of science - and the apparent conclusion that the universe around us works on principles of chance. But but that does not automatically mean that there is no role for the divine.
Most of us continue to believe – and science has not yet disproved – that individuals have free will. In a world governed by chance, we still have choices. In a world without a plan, we can still plan. In a world with no discernible purpose, we have the freedom to choose our own purpose, and act accordingly.
And in seeking right choices, the right plan, the right purpose, there still remains (for those who choose to believe) a vital - if not all-powerful - role for the guidance, company, and consolation of the divine.
Learn more about this author, 'Rick Gray.
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