I Got Goosebumps

I'm sorry.
The fact that your body reacted to an unknown stimuli in some way does not mean that your god was there. When your dog barks at nothing you can detect, still no god or demon or ghost. When you hear a noise that you don't recognize, no spirits. When stuff feels haunted, coincidence, unexplained tactile experiences, good or bad luck, strange dreams, creepy-feeling things, all of these things that give us goosebumps.

What that is, actually, in insufficient curiosity or what some people call God of the Gaps. Your lack of knowledge or inability to understand or to find an explanation equals God. But, I'm sorry. No.


Have you ever been to the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs Colorado? Or to the Grand Canyon? Or to the Twelve Apostles in Southern  Australia? People, if you ever want to feel a sense of awe, visit one of these places. You will get goosebumps and you will find yourself speechless and your senses will not believe what you are seeing. Yet these places exist.

I did not take any of these pics, though I have pics of all of these places.
All pics here are stolen from the interwebs.

Your inability to believe it or to understand it does not prove anything supernatural. In fact, in all of the cases of the above natural sites, millions of years of natural processes (billions?) explain them completely. Sure, our entire species created thousands, probably millions, of religions and supernatural beliefs based on this kind of ignorance. There was a time when we did not understand physical or mental illnesses. Relief from these illnesses. Pregnancy or birth. Loneliness. Weather. Volcanic activity. Eclipses. Magnetism. Bad dreams. Our seasons. The night sky. Shooting stars. Good crops. Fire. Fossils. Location of food sources. Adequate shelter. All manner of natural phenomenon. Death. All of these phenomenon used to be attributed to the local god of the unknown.

As we, as a species, discovered more and more things, these gaps began to recede. Yes, in fact, even today some people believe in a god of this ever-receding gap between the known and the unknown.

People think that epilepsy is divine simply because they don't have any idea what causes epilepsy. But I believe that someday we will understand what causes epilepsy, and at that moment, we will cease to believe that it's divine. And so it is with everything in the universe.
—Hippocrates

Why am I blogging about something so seemingly obvious?
I recently had someone tell me a story of their unbelievable GOOSEBUMPS when hearing a sound from an unknown source.
Certainly, that was evidence of something supernatural!  😑
How dare I question that.

I understand it to a degree, this human propensity for magical thinking. Our brains are actually hard-wired to seek explanations for all things. Including things that we simply do not understand at the present so, therefore, our brains are responsible for the creation of supernatural beliefs. The same brain, in fact, that also does research, asks the questions, looks for answers, seeks viable solutions, and identifies this type of logical fallacy.
Same brain.

What I do not understand, or, indeed, forgive (much) is a person's unwillingness to go and find out. We are living in a world where information is available to us at an unprecedented level to nearly every human being living in a first-world country. I'm certain that fear of death is the number one fear, responsible for most religions in first-world countries. Muslims and Christian, in other words.

What I'm hoping for is for more people to get out there and debunk such sloppy and lazy claims of the supernatural. One doesn't not have to out one's self as an atheist to be more openly skeptical. Neither does one have to out one's self to ask for more evidence of such sloppy and ludicrous supernatural claims so many people out there are making. One simply has to ask for evidence.

Do you know who Victor Stenger was? In addition to being a particle physicist, he was an advocate for removing the influence of religion from scientific research, commercial activity, and the political decision process. In my day, back in the dark ages, he was one to publicly denounce the baloney of Uri Geller, the famous illusionist of the 1970s and self-proclaimed psychic. Stenger coined the phrase Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings. Stenger was the first skeptic that I ever knew.

The God of the gaps argument for God fails when a plausible scientific account for a gap in current knowledge can be given. I do not dispute that the exact nature of the origin of the universe remains a gap in scientific knowledge. But I deny that we are bereft of any conceivable way to account for that origin scientifically.
― Victor J. Stenger 

I'm calling on the my ethical readership to pick up the banner and to openly question any one claim. One, your choice. Go out and Stengerize stories. Use that opportunity to get more people questioning what they think they believe. Let's get out there!

  Do you get goosebumps? 

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You might also like:
Being an Atheist Isn't Enough
Indoctrination
The Virtue of Doubt