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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am (marginally) Catholic.  I find it hard to believe that the whole world just appeared from nothing, and that no intelligence was necessary to create it.  I converted as an adult but have of late become a spiritual recidivist, backsliding into the agnosticism of my youth and early 20's as I cope with secondary infertility and a child with fairly severe ADHD.  I HATE when people say "God has a plan for you."  To my ears, it sounds like predeterminism and I firmly do not believe in that.  That has never been my conception of God.  When people to say this to me, I think they are nuts.  That kind of talk sounds like God decided to make me infertile and give me a child with special needs, while the drug addicts and child abusers in my area seem capable of procreating like rabbits based on all of the ads entreating people to foster this growing population of kids.  If God is really that involved in our lives, determining what will happen to each of us and when, why the hell would he do this?  It defies the intelligence and logic that I believe are a necessary component of creating a world like ours.

So I guess my question is, WHY do people believe in this "God has a plan" stuff?  What are they trying to convey when they say it?  IME, Catholics will say things like "look to God for strength and guidance," but not "God has a plan."  However these days neither camp is working for me.  Lately I'm more of the opinion that God exists but is a pure intelligence - a force of biological creation - that is indifferent to the fate of mankind.
  
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Platitudes like "God has a plan," "God won't throw more at you than He knows you can handle," "God works in mysterious ways," etc. are all intended to help people deal with the bad things that happen to them and in the world. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, then He must have some reason for causing/allowing such terrible things to happen. If that reason is not part of some benevolent, but ineffable, Plan, then God is a jerk, at best, because He knows something bad is going to happen, has the power to prevent or at least mitigate it, and chooses not to, or He's a sadist.

As the scale of our Universe (and numerous new theories proposing a "multiverse") becomes clearer, it becomes more and more difficult to consider that an entity responsible for creating all of it would even notice, let alone care about, some primitive, ape-descended life forms on an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet orbiting a small, unregarded yellow sun, far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy.

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