A science blog with Eric Berger







Holcomb. (UTHealth)


There are several options.






Categories: 11 for '12
Eric Berger

27 Responses

  1. El Burrito says:

    That is a great start to the series…thank you.

  2. Rich Abercrombie says:

    Eric I remember this series from last year, definitely an enjoyable read and I look forward to the rest of them. Happy holidays to you and everyone who comments here.

    I enjoy the comments almost as much as the content!

  3. Greg with Prep H Time says:

    Why do bad things happen to GOOD PEOPLE ?

    BECAUSE there is evil in the world.
    BECAUSE Good People make mistakes, when accidents hurt worse.

    God has tried to REVEAL the answer, the only answer.
    Why do people reject the answer REVEALED?

    They want another answer?
    LET Knowledge increase, the answer becomes MORE simple.

    Hard for the intellectual to believe the simple answer.

    • Lil ol me says:

      Greg gets it. Saved me a lot of typing on this iPhone, too.

    • Bruce R says:

      Greg, let me guess. You are not a medical researcher. But maybe you’re on to something. We might be able to cure cancer if only we could eradicate evil in this world. Not sure which is easier, curing cancer or eradicating evil.

    • IANVS says:

      Evil is a relatively fleeting notion of homo sapiens’ frightened mind, varying from age to age, culture to culture, disposition to disposition. Take slavery & the death penalty & the severing of a thief’s hands, for examples.

      When a coyote pack takes out your Maltese puppy for dinner, or a lion your toddler, is that evil?

  4. TruthSeeker says:

    This question is like ‘why does it rain?’, ‘why do we live?’… I don’t think the healthcare profession in this country has a heart, there is definite proof of that.

  5. HippieMike says:

    A good start, a thought-provoking response, but it doesn’t quite fit with your “Lightheartedly…” comment. Not a very “lighthearted” answer.

    Why do bad things happen to good people? To me the answer is that “things happen” and the cause-effect circumstances don’t first examine whether it is a “good” person. Do we celebrate when a “bad” person gets run down by a drunk driver, but mourn when it happens to a “good” person?

    I know some get hung up on “why would God allow bad things to happen?” For my own answer I relate it to a 1998 movie “Pleasantville.” The main thesis in that story is “Is it better to live in a society with strict rules to ensure absolute safety and happiness, but no choices, or is it ultimately better to have a free society which permits choices, and danger, which we have to learn to deal with, but which may ultimately make our lives more fulfilled?”

    So I will ask, “Would it really be better if our lives were perfectly safe, and there were no bad people, no arguments, no disagreements?” Or does having danger and free will ultimately make our lives actually worth living?

  6. JohnD says:

    Eric, I look forward to the rest of the series, as you always pick interesting people to discuss difficult questions. However, I do wish that you wouldn’t perpetuate the myth that there is any sort of “Mayan Apocalypse” impending.

    What will happen on December 21 next year is exactly the same thing that happens on December 31 each year in our calendar; one time period ends and a new one begins. For our calendar (inherited from the Sumerians, improved by Julius Caesar, fixed by pope Gregory), that time period happens to be a year. For the Mayan calendar (based on the Olmec), that period happens to be about 5,125 years. But both their calendars and their central religious doctrines hold that the end of the current baktun is nothing more than a flip of the calendar page.

    By giving even farcical support to the idea of an impending “Mayan Apocalypse”, you perpetuate the ignorance. And you have never been one to do so before. So please do not do so now.

    • HippieMike says:

      Seems like a gross over-reaction to an attempt to shed some humor on what most of us consider to be an irrational fear of the world ending in 2012. I suppose some very fast readers can miss the part where Eric wrote “lightheartedly”?

    • StanleyS says:

      JohnD, thanks for pointing out that the Mayans were not actually thinking about an “end of the world.” That fact is interesting as it relates to anthropology.

      But I would also like to say that, for dealing with the general public, it doesn’t matter what the Mayans were actually thinking. Because even if they had been thinking about an “end of the world” there’s no reason to think that they knew anything anyway.

    • Puck says:

      This is a very difficult question, Mike, and though of course I have to guess, I’d say JohnD is probably just reacting in much the same manner I did when I read this post this morning. I had a blurred combination in mind of a serious response and pointing out that Dr. Holcomb missed an important fourth option in response to badness, which is sarcasm (well, a lot of doctors and others do lean on it heavily).
      It reminded me of one year during my training that I found myself, as a Christian, wondering what you can give up for Lent if you already don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t do drugs, don’t have time for relationships and don’t do flings, and don’t eat meat (a rule I’ve since relaxed) or sweets (which is still going strong out of apathy). I thought to myself, good heavens, I’m the same base model as everybody else, surely there’s something I do that I shouldn’t because it feels good when I’m hurting…
      And then it dawned on me. Bad jokes. Oh my God, I was addicted to negative humor. And what’s worse, I got rewarded for it because people would always laugh and want more.
      So I attempted to give up sarcasm for Lent, which went very poorly; I broke the pledge multiple times per hour (and sometimes cussed on realization). A bad situation got worse when a kind Catholic friend told me, reassuringly, “I know that God knows you’re trying, and that matters to Him.” Seriously, I wish he had just put out a cigarette on my arm. I know what to do with that.
      Lord knows that addressing factual issues is a common response among us in science when we give up hope on the big ones. I’ve done it myself plenty of times.
      In short, I wouldn’t call a response an over-reaction if I didn’t know what someone might be reacting to.

    • IANVS says:

      re: “Mayan Apocalypse”

      Myth, we have with us always; cancer, we may someday cure.

    • JohnD says:

      An over-reaction would have involved “fear mongering”, “Katy”, and politics. Mine was a reasonably mild reminder that the “Mayan Apocalypse” is an invention of those who know essentially nothing about the Mayans or their calendrical system.

      As to Eric’s main question, I have some ideas about “good things” and “bad people”. They fall somewhere between “The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are.” (Karl Kraus) and “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.” (various)

  7. Grey says:

    It’s my experience that when bad things that happen to good people it almost always creates more good. It’s also my impression that when good things happen to bad people the opposite is usually true.

    btw, Merry Christmas! Happy Hanukkah! and a splendid winter solstice to all pagans, too.

  8. Jim says:

    To take a breath is a rite celebrating our first step out of the salty sea. The experience of land and air is a wonderful thing that gives us the chance to play the game. Sometimes we throw 7’s. Sometimes we get “snake-eyes.”
    It is not what happens. It is how we respond to it. Georgie Patton said, “It’s not how far you fall, it’s how high you bounce.”
    We can crawl into the caves. We can wear the coat of sadness. We can doubt, mourn and fear. But at some point we have to have enough internal awareness to come out, shed it and go on with life’s journey.

  9. craig says:

    If you do good things it makes you feel better and enriches the lives of those impacted by your actions but it is no guarantee that good things will happen to you. By doing good things you might, just might, increase the chance of good things coming back to you from others but happenings caused by nature forces have nothing at all to do with how good your are. Well that is my view of getting by in the predicament we all find ourselves in.

    A perfect example is a good friend who in the past year has experienced the loss of a loved one to cancer, was recently diagnosed with cancer and then developed life threatening medical complications following radiation and chemotherapy resulting in an over one month and counting hospital stay. It is still touch and go. And you would have a hard time finding a better person.

  10. Puck says:

    Lately, on the advice of my father (a Viet Nam vet who’s seen his share of misery) I’ve tried feeling grateful as often as possible. Strangely, this is much harder when bad things happen to other people than when they happen to me.
    I am forever humbled by the example of Corrie ten Boom, who wrote The Hiding Place. She came from a Dutch Christian family that hid Jews from the Nazis, and the entire family was arrested and sent to various concentration camps as a consequence. She was the only survivor.
    Until her sister succumbed to starvation and hard labor, they leaned on each other to maintain their faith, and they followed St. Paul’s exhortation to give thanks in all circumstances. They had somehow obtained some smuggled in copies of the Gospel, which they read to the other Christians imprisoned with them, and they actually gave thanks for the horrific overcrowding so that more people could hear God’s word and have hope to continue on.
    And one day as they helplessly watched a female Nazi prison guard beating a woman, Corrie remarked, “That poor woman,” and Betsy replied, “Yes, may God have mercy on her soul.” Fulfilling the teachings of Christ, Betsy was praying for their oppressor.
    It has been very difficult for me not to think that phrases such as “Let go and let God” are more than platitudes for the indifferent to recite, or that taking comfort in faith is anything but making up a story so that life isn’t really so awful. But it’s been a process of discarding successive ideas of what God is, and what faith is. It is right to discredit ideas about God we’re tempted to cling to because they represent certain ideas about ourselves that we think will validate us. One theory is that the suffering of life occurs in order to force us past such ideas, which are always tainted by selfishness and pride. Obviously, the worse the event the harder it is to see the idea of God that allows it, and while it is necessary in faith to surrender understanding, like a lot of people with science backgrounds I find that difficult to do. For a person who doesn’t just act out of his or her id all the time, it eventually means surrendering things that it doesn’t seem we should have to surrender– why shouldn’t efforts to save lives receive God’s blessing and succeed? Why do people have to die? Why do they have to die simply because of lack of societal willpower, when the knowledge and resources to save them exist?
    The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism answer all this a lot better than my meandering answer just did. I was fortunate to be raised in a family in which many philosophies and religions, and the absence of belief, were all treated as valid paths to God. I was taught to believe, and also to have a lot of respect for honest atheists trying to hew their path in life as the rest of us do in faith.
    I do love your blog, Eric. I’m usually a lot goofier than this (as you know), and all of us in science love the humor that goes along with the culture. But this was an important article, and I’m grateful for it. Thanks also to Dr. Holcomb.

  11. Someone says:

    Several reasons:

    1. Free will vs. predestination. Good people get caught in someonelse’s decision, or their own choices have unanticipated consequences.
    2. Stochastic results. If a bullet is fired in the air, a certain small percentage of the time it will come down and hit someone. A cell misses something during transcription and becomes cancerous. Best summarized by “S### Happens”
    3. Reporting bias. Thousands of boulders fall on roads each year and aren’t reported. The one that hits a Nissan Cube with a family of four, though…
    4. With 7 billion plus people in the world, bad things have to happen to some of us. Alternatively, this balances out the good that happens to others. That’s Karma.
    5. God hates us.
    6. The infernal being of your choice is using this to test our souls
    7. We are each born into sin and God is using it to test the righteous and punish the wicked.
    8. It’s a result of what we did in our past lives. The wheel turns…

    I prefer 1 to 3, with some of 4 thrown in for good measure. 5 to 8 are excuses for not thinking.

  12. Old Gringo Stan says:

    This pagan always thinks back to 6 million Jews murdered in German concentration camps…..all praying for help….how can a Jew still believe in god?
    Right now religious fascism is the worlds greatest evil… we lose thousands of soldiers to replace dictators…to what end? Much more misery lies ahead…….

    • StanleyS says:

      Stan, the dictator Saddam Hussein whom we got rid of was not a religious fascist. He was just an ordinary old-fashioned tyrant much like Josef Stalin. So, the soldiers we lost in getting rid of him were not lost because of religious fascism.

      Also, you might remember now and then to think of the French Revolutionary times, when it was the “enlightened, rational” people who were going around pronouncing that “we’re an enlightened society now and all of these unenlightened reactionaries need to be guillotined.”

      Through history, there has been plenty of mass murder committed for the sake of religion. But in the most recent centuries there has also been plenty of mass murder committed for the sake of atheism.

      Finally, we who are living in the present day are not personally culpable for the crimes of people long dead. I’m not personally culpable for the crimes of the Spanish Inquisition, and you’re not personally culpable for the crimes of the Lenin-Trotsky period. So let’s all of us just treat each other with courtesy and respect.

  13. glennkoks says:

    I think bad things happen to good people with the exact same frequency that bad things happen to bad people. Cancer, car crashes and other “bad” events occur at random to good and bad people. However, if you live a wholesome life, help others when they need it, foster friendships and love your much more likely to get it in return.

  14. supermonkey says:

    With all due respect to Dr. Holcomb, I disagree that his question – “Why do bad things happen to good people?” – is difficult, even in theological philosophy. It’s an old philosophical question, and theologians have been answering it forever.

    Theology aside, I also think the question is fairly easy in secular philosophy. Why do bad things happen to good people? We can turn the question around: Why do good things happen to bad people? Or, we can homogenize the question: Why do good things happen to good people, or why do bad things happen to bad people?

    In my opinion, the good and bad aspects are fairly irrelevant, and all of the questions can be simplified – Why do things happen?

    Consider all the people on this planet. Consider all of their collective experiences; all of their beliefs, desires, and impulses have unintended consequences. Consider also everything else that happens in the universe. Our planet may be small on a cosmic scale, but from a human scale it’s rather large, and so many untold things happen every day – things that affect trees, mountains, lakes, people, dogs, elk, etc. All of these things have been going on since the dawn of time, and they will continue to happen ad infinitum (or until the Mayan calendar ends, right JohnD?).

    Nature is amoral; she doesn’t care if an event is good or evil. In her eyes, things just happen. A boy scout was helping an old lady with her groceries during a rainstorm when all of a sudden he was struck by lightning. The boy died, but the old lady avoided the same fate. Her neighbor, and the other million people in her town, were likewise unaffected. At the same time, a mother gazelle stopped by a temporary pool of water to get a drink because she needed to produce milk for her offspring. Suddenly, a lioness pounced from the grass and killed her. It sucks for the gazelle, but the lioness got some meat for her young. As luck would have it, the other gazelles in the herd got away. It sucks for the young boy and the gazelle, but the world turns ever on and on.

    We had to put our dog down a week ago. It was sad, and we all cried. We did so because as good humans we anthropomorphized our dog until she was considered a member of the family. I can struggle for the rest of my life with why she got cancer. Maybe God punished her for soiling the carpet and stealing my dinner. Maybe the devil did it because he’s just bad and that’s what he does. Or, maybe it was a completely random event. Instead of agonizing about why she died, I can accept that it happened and appreciate the joy she brought our family while she was alive.