Why do bad things Happen in the Universe ?

Why do bad things Happen in the Universe ?

by : Aria Ratmandanu 

Why do bad things happen ? After a dreadful disaster such as an earthquake or a hurricane, you’ll hear people saying things like this :

‘It’s so unfair. What did those poor people ever do to deserve such a fate ?’

              It is hard to resist this feeling that, somehow, there ought to be a kind of natural justice. Good things should happen to good people. Bad things, if they must happen at all, should only happen to bad people. In Oscar Wilde’s delightful play The Importance of Being Earnest, an elderly governess called Miss Prism explains how, long ago, she wrote a novel. When she is asked whether it ended happily, she replies: ‘The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.’ Real life is different. Bad things do happen, and they happen to good people as well as bad. Why? Why is real life not like Miss Prism’s fiction? Why do bad things happen?

             There are lots of legends about how death came into the world. All over Africa, different tribes believe that the chameleon was given the news of everlasting life and told to carry it to humans. Unfortunately the chameleon walked so slowly that the news of death, carried by a nippier lizard (or other faster animal in other versions of the legend), arrived first. In one West African legend, the news of life was brought by a slow toad, unfortunately overtaken by a fast dog bringing the news of death. I must say I’m a bit puzzled why the order in which news arrives should matter so much. Bad news is still bad, whenever it arrives.

               Disease is a special kind of bad thing, and it has spawned plenty of myths of its own. One reason is that for a long time diseases were rather mysterious. Our ancestors faced other dangers – from lions and crocodiles, from enemy tribes, from the threat of starvation – but you could see them coming, and understand them. Smallpox, on the other hand, or the Black Death, or malaria, must have seemed to pounce from nowhere, without warning, and it wasn’t obvious how to guard against these assaults. It was a terrifying mystery. Where did diseases come from? What did we do to deserve this painful death, this agonizing toothache or these hideous spots? No wonder people resorted to superstition when desperately trying to understand disease, and even more desperately trying to protect themselves from it. In many African tribes, until quite recently, anybody who got ill, or had a sick child, would automatically look around for an evil magician or witch to blame.”

Why do bad things happen really ?

        Why does anything happen ? That’s a complicated question to answer, but it is a more sensible question than ‘Why do bad things happen?’ This is because there is no reason to single out bad things for special attention unless bad things happen more often than we would expect them to, by chance; or unless we think there should be a kind of natural justice, which would mean “that bad things should only happen to bad people.

        Do bad things happen more often than we ought to expect by chance alone? If so, then we really do have something to explain. You may have heard people refer jokingly to ‘Murphy’s Law’, sometimes called ‘Sod’s Law’. This states: ‘If you drop a piece of toast and marmalade on the floor, it always lands marmalade side down.’ Or, more generally: ‘If a thing can go wrong, it will.’ People often joke about this, but at times you get the feeling they think it is more than a joke. They really do seem to believe the world is out to get them.”

     “In the case of the toast, it wouldn’t be surprising to find that it really does fall marmalade side down more often than not, because tables are not very high, the toast starts marmalade side up and there is usually time for one half-rotation before it hits the ground. But the toast example is just a colourful way to express the gloomy idea that ‘if a thing can go wrong it will.’

       Perhaps this would be a better example of Sod’s Law: ‘When you toss a coin, the more strongly you want heads, the more likely it is to come up tails.’ That, at least, is the pessimistic view. There are optimists who think that the more you want heads, the more likely the coin is to come up heads. Perhaps we could call that ‘Pollyanna’s Law’ – the optimistic belief that things usually turn out for the good. Or it could be called ‘Pangloss’s Law’, after a character invented by the great French writer Voltaire. His ‘Dr Pangloss’ thought that ‘All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

   When you put it like that, you can quickly see that Sod’s Law and Pollyanna’s Law are both nonsense. Coins, and slices of toast, have no way of knowing the strength of your desires, and no desire of their own to thwart them – or fulfil them. Also, what is a bad thing for one person may be a good thing for another. Rival tennis players may both pray fervently for victory, but one has to lose! There is no special reason to ask, ‘Why do bad things happen?’ Or, for that matter, ‘Why do good things happen?’ The real question underlying both is the more general question: ‘Why does anything happen?”

Luck, chance and cause

             People sometimes say, ‘Everything happens for a reason.’ In one sense this is true. Everything does happen for a reason – which is to say that events have causes, and the cause always comes before the event. Tsunamis happen because of undersea earthquakes, and earthquakes happen because of shifts in the earth’s tectonic plates. That is the true sense in which ‘everything happens for a reason’, the sense in which ‘reason’ means ‘past cause’. But people sometimes use reason in a very different sense, to mean something like ‘purpose’. They will say something like "The reason for the tsunami was to destroy the clubs, discos and bars and other places.’ It is amazing how often people resort to this kind of nonsense.”

                    Maybe it is a hangover from childhood. Child psychologists have shown that very young children, when asked why certain rocks are pointy, reject scientific causes as an explanation and prefer the answer: ‘So that animals can scratch themselves when they get itchy.’ Most children grow out of that kind of explanation for the pointy rocks. But quite a lot of adults seem unable to shake off the same kind of explanation when it comes to major misfortunes like earthquakes, or good fortune such as lucky escapes from earthquakes.”

                 What about ‘bad luck’? Is there such a thing as bad luck, or indeed good luck? Are some people luckier than others ?. “People sometimes talk of a ‘run’ of bad luck. Or they will say, ‘So many bad things have happened to me lately, I’m due for a piece of really good luck.’ 

               I’m due for a piece of good luck’ is an example of a widespread misunderstanding of the ‘Law of Averages’. In the game of cricket, it often makes a big difference which team bats first. The two captains toss a coin to decide who gets the advantage, and each team’s supporters very much hope their captain will win the toss.”

            For just the same reason, it is complete nonsense to think you can improve your luck by wearing a lucky charm around your neck. Or by crossing your fingers behind your back. These things have no way of influencing what happens to you unless it is by some effect on how you feel: giving you added confidence that calms your nerves before a tennis serve, for example. But that is nothing to do with luck; that is psychology.”

             So, we have seen that bad things, like good things, don’t happen any more often than they ought to by chance. The universe has no personality, so it doesn’t do things in order to either hurt or please you. Bad things happen because things happen. Whether they are bad or good from our point of view doesn’t influence how likely it is that they will happen.