Agnostic.com

6 0

The urge to see a hidden purpose...

The greater the impact of events on our lives, the greater the drive to impose meaning on those events. Terrible, senseless accidents can never just be senseless accidents, our mind’s voice tells us.
When psychologist Jesse Bering and his students carried out interviews with atheists, it became clear that they often tacitly attribute purpose to significant or traumatic moments in their lives, as if some hidden agency were intervening to make it happen.
It seems that is just the way our brains are wired: Atheists can muzzle some if its expression, but even we cannot seem to completely stop it in ourselves.

Matias 8 July 17
Share

Enjoy being online again!

Welcome to the community of good people who base their values on evidence and appreciate civil discourse - the social network you will enjoy.

Create your free account

6 comments

Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.

0

Our brains are less like general purpose computers than sophisticated pattern matching engines. As such, we seek pattern matches at almost any cost. The need to "make sense" of the senseless or absurd is extremely primal. So it's no surprise that even atheists sometimes succumb to it.

0

I can see that if we were to have a sudden serious loss our subconscious minds might instantly react with fearful or guilty ideas, or refuse to accept the event as a random circumstance. If say, a limb fell on me, I’d be faced with the urgent question as to why, of all the places I could have been, I was exactly in that spot at that split second.

Hopefully our conscious self would immediately leap in and straighten things out. There are other options for discussion but they are far too woo-woo to present in a forum such as this. If you saw “Run Lola Run” you might get the idea.

1

I think our brains try to find meaning as a way to understand our lives. Being sentient beings, not only do we exist, but we are aware of our existence. I feel every experience has the potential to learn something from it, even if it's just to take in the experience, and some things are learned when we're not looking.

1

I think it's a result of the way our brain edits information and fills in gaps as a way to improve its own efficiency and recognizes patterns. When presented with a purely chaotic system, the brain will create order where there is none to facilitate conscious processing of the information.

I'm pretty sure either psychology or anthropology have a term for this kind of phenomenon, but I can't recall it offhand.

@Matias I would argue that in a universe which operates largely at random (along causal chains which are, to our limited perception, random) determining definitive cause is synonymous with attribution of order, and my initial response is well in-line as an addition to/agreement with yours.

0

A metaphysical or supernatural purpose, if you are agnostic, isn’t certain, but it could be entertained as part of one’s quest for truth, understanding and wisdom. And even if you eliminate any irrational forces ... it is still prudent to juxtapose this event and its meaning to your personal philosophy to find the lessons that refine that philosophy and your wisdom.

0

Shit happens there's no other bollox explanation

Simon1 Level 7 July 17, 2018
Write Comment
You can include a link to this post in your posts and comments by including the text q:133000
Agnostic does not evaluate or guarantee the accuracy of any content. Read full disclaimer.