Keeps my feet on the ground

So yesterday I wound up with two philosophical questions running through my head.

The first was in a conversation with my father about whether or not it all "happens for a reason." On the religious side, if there is a God, an all powerful, all knowing, yadda yadda God, then he COULDN'T abandon us here on this cold, lonely rock. It just wouldn't make sense to create something and then "leave" it. Beyond that, if God is everywhere, he couldn't leave anyway. The absence of God would be a cruel irony about his LACK of omnipotence. And why would any being create something just to leave it? The point of creation/procreation is to pass oneself on. According to Christianity, man was made in the likeness of God, and we are often referred to as his "children." In which case, Christianity, at the very least, posits a God that wishes to see us grow. While he might not directly interact with us, he has set us down a particular path just by the very act of creation.

Read more secularly, we might say that "everything happens for a reason" because the world itself is not chaotic. It can't be. There are certain rules that govern who we are, how we grow, how we interact. Everything that happens to us has a series of events that preceded it, and a series of consequences for whatever choice we make. Therefore, everything that has happened has been that way for a particular reason.

Now none of this is to say that we can discern, predict, or understand the plan. Just that there is a plan for a reason. I suppose it's up to you to decide if plans tend towards the happy (whatever doesn't kill us, makes us stronger) or the unhappy (all life ends in death, thus life is meaningless). But at the very least it's comforting to think that there is something out there that governs us all, be it God or nature.