Does Everything Happen for a Reason?

In this post, I contemplate a common refrain in Christian circles and ask, Does everything happen for a reason?

We have all heard the well-meaning cliché, “Everything happens for a reason.” But does everything happen for a reason? Do we take the time to appreciate the implications of that statement, and do we really put forward the effort to interpret the teachings of divine sovereignty we have received from those who have gone before us?

Consider the quotes below.

“Receive the accidents that befall thee as good, knowing that nothing happens without God.” — Didache 3:10

“If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will—that is, for making a real world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings—then we may take it it is worth paying.” — C.S. Lewis, The Case for Christianity

“God works in mysterious ways.” “God’s ways are not our ways.” “Everything happens for a reason.” Such platitudes stem from Christian attempts to explain tragedy, providing comfort in their ability to point beyond our suffering to a greater good.

Such assurances, however, undermine God’s holiness and love, crediting him as the author of all the world’s sin and pain. Are we to believe that wars and terrorism are part of a divine plan, a greater good? Are we to see in the abuse of children or the enslavement of young women in the sex trade the mysterious work of a loving God?

Surely suffering has redemptive qualities — the long tradition of the Church bears witness to this truth — but can we not distinguish divine discipline from genocide? Must all suffering come from the hand of God for him to utilize it for our betterment? Does everything happen for a reason?

Accepting simple answers to complex questions serves only to distort reality.

God’s Purpose?

Christians frequently speak of past trials as leading up to a present good. Whether that be the infertile couple who found their beautiful children through adoption or the humanitarian inspired to help the poor by a childhood marked by hunger, these stories provide comfort, pointing to a loving, sovereign God.

Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, “We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose” (Rom 8:28, RSV-CE).

I never understood, however, why so many insist that God’s use of tragedy for good requires that he be the source of that tragedy. God’s turning our lemons into lemonade does not mean he is cultivating the lemons.

Beyond Divine Determinism

We would do well simply to accept that we do not know why things happen. Some may contract cancer as part of a divine plan to bring about a greater good, while others acquire it through the natural operations of a fallen world.

It is natural to search for meaning in significant events, but as believers, we must not allow our discomfort with uncertainty to color our view of God. In attributing all things to a predetermined plan, we create the God we think we need, instead of accepting the God revealed in Jesus Christ.

Attempting to find simple explanations for every tragedy collapses the complexity of the world into a two-dimensional parody of itself. Worse still, it makes God the source of evil, a cold, distant entity willing to inflict horrible torture and death upon us “for his glory.”

The Catechism of the Catholic Church addresses this tension directly: “God is in no way, directly or indirectly, the cause of moral evil. He permits it, however, because he respects the freedom of his creatures and, mysteriously, knows how to derive good from it” (CCC 311). This distinction — between what God wills and what God permits — is essential to any mature understanding of the problem of evil.

Free Will and the Permissive Will of God

In creating autonomous creatures endowed with genuine freedom, God has established a world in which his will is not the only will at work. Catholic teaching affirms that “God created man a rational being, conferring on him the dignity of a person who can initiate and control his own actions” (CCC 1730). This freedom is not a defect in creation but its crown.

Saint Augustine, in his Enchiridion, rightly insisted that evil is not a substance but a privation—an absence of the good that ought to be present. Evil enters the world not because God creates it, but because free creatures turn away from the good. Where I differ from certain strands of the Augustinian tradition is not in this insight—which I affirm—but in the further claim that God directly ordains every particular event, including every evil act, as part of an exhaustive divine decree. The Catholic tradition permits a range of views here (including frameworks like open theism that emphasize creaturely freedom). What it does not permit is the claim that God is the author of sin.

We should accept that God, while omnipotent, exercises what theologians call his permissive will—allowing consequences of creaturely freedom that he does not directly intend but that he permits for the sake of a greater good: namely, the existence of genuinely free beings capable of love. As the Catechism teaches, “God would not allow an evil to exist unless he could draw a greater good from it” (cf. CCC 312, drawing on Augustine’s Enchiridion 11.3 and Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica I, q. 2, a. 3).

Consider an analogy. Suppose a married man who spent his single years carousing with friends responds to a party invitation with a simple, “I can’t. I’m married.” Does he mean that he is physically incapable of participating? Of course not.

Rather, he means that in entering into marriage he has voluntarily restricted what he will do because there are some things he cannot do without destroying the relationship with his wife. By making one choice, he has foreclosed his ability to make another. Only the truly powerful can restrain the exercise of their authority.

So it is with God. In granting us genuine freedom, God has chosen not to override our decisions at every turn—not because he lacks the power, but because doing so would destroy the very freedom he created us to have. He can and does intervene, but he does not unilaterally impose his will where it would negate the gift of human agency. This is not a limitation on God’s power; it is the fullest expression of it. As the philosopher Alvin Plantinga argued in God, Freedom, and Evil, it is logically possible that a world containing creatures who freely choose the good is more valuable than a world in which the good is merely programmed.

If we have free will, God must allow the ramifications of our decisions to play out. If we are free to act only when our actions bring about the divine will, then we are not really free. If we are free to choose between A and B, so long as we choose A, then our freedom is an illusion.

I am reminded of C.S. Lewis’s argument in The Problem of Pain,

If you choose to say, “God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,” you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words, “God can.”

Saying that God can both give us free will and ensure his will is always done is logically incoherent. We pray, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” precisely because, as the Catechism notes, “in heaven the will of God is always done”—the implication being that on earth, it often is not (cf. CCC 2822–2827).

Our Comforter

So, what is the appropriate response to tragedy? Does everything happen for a reason? How do we answer that question?

Simply put, we must accept that we have no answers to the “Why?” questions. We cannot always discern when events are part of a divine plan, the misuse of free will, or the mysterious interplay of natural processes within God’s providential governance of creation.

We do know, however, that God became a man in the person of Jesus Christ—as explored in the Christian teaching on divine revelation—that he walked among us, lived with us, and experienced our pain.

Our God knows what it means to suffer, not simply because he is omniscient, but because he has experienced it himself firsthand. Our God has mourned the loss of loved ones, experienced injustice, and endured the horrible pains of death.

God is not some far-off entity orchestrating tragedies for his own glorification. He is a God fighting against the evils of this world to bring about our eventual redemption and salvation. The world is not as it should be, but the story of Christianity—grounded in the inspiration of Scripture—is God’s work in correcting this state of affairs.

Whatever tragedies may befall us, we can take comfort in knowing that God is on our side. God is not the source of our pain; he is its solution. As the Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart wrote in The Doors of the Sea, God’s answer to evil is not an explanation but a victory—the promise that all things will be made new. In the meantime, as I discuss in another post, we must ultimately choose to believe in the goodness of God despite the suffering we witness.

If this post has given you a new way to think about suffering and God’s sovereignty, I explore these themes further in my review of Greg Boyd’s answer to the problem of suffering and in Faith and the Foundation of Belief.