It's not uncommon to hear someone say that 'everything happens for a reason' or that something that happened was 'meant to be.' Now, researchers reporting in Current Biology on Aug. 20 have found that this kind of teleological thinking is linked to two seemingly unrelated beliefs: creationism, the belief that life on Earth was created by a supernatural agent, and conspiracism, the tendency to explain events in terms of secret conspiracies or conspiracy theories.