This article isn’t proof or evidence that there is no God. I mean, it’s logically impossible to prove a negative anyway. But people that are skeptical about god claims at the very least have a pretty good track record.
I’m not discussing miracles here, I’m talking about day-to-day phenomenon that the religious of yesteryear (and sometimes still this year) believed was the direct result of a god doing something. So, just how good of a track record do the gods have? Well, let’s explore.
Thunder was once thought to be gods banging things in the sky. Nope, natural forces. It is the noise generated from lightning.
Lightning was thrown by the gods. Nope, natural forces. Lightning is static electricity, generated in clouds.
Strong waves. Nope, natural causes. Wind in the middle of a large body of water can make fairly large waves, and an underwater earthquake can generate massive waves.
Earthquakes. Nope, natural causes. Continental plates pushing by each other sometimes slip and release a lot of energy that transfers through the ground.
The sun was thought to move across the sky carried by a god. Nope, natural causes. The earth is actually a ball-shaped object that spins, giving us the illusion of movement.
Volcano eruptions. Nope, natural causes. At fractures in the continental crust, pressure can build and the liquid rock is ejected upward.
Red tides. Nope, natural phenomenon. It’s an algae bloom.
Bountiful harvest. Nope, natural phenomenon. Modern farmers use a variety of scientific advances to create optimal soil conditions, water conditions, innovative hybrid seeds, and to control pests and weeds.
Rain. Nope, natural causes. Same with snow and hail. Water vapor in the atmosphere collects as clouds, and when cooled returns to a liquid state and falls.
Seasons. Nope natural causes. Our planet leans relative to the plane of the sun, and the hemisphere tilted away receives less sun for that part of the year, making days shorter, and the atmosphere cooler. As we rotate around the sun, the hemisphere that got less sun now gets more, and the atmosphere warms up.
Mountains rising. Nope, natural causes. Tectonic plates running into each other push upward.
Elevation of leaders. Nope, natural causes. Leaders rise by cunning, intelligence, violence, or political maneuvering. What they tell their subjects is another thing.
Tornadoes. Nope, natural causes. Under certain conditions, hot and cold air masses meeting cause rapid circulation of air, with one end dropping due to the temperature variation.
Hurricanes. Nope, natural causes. Warm rising water vapor begins rotating as the earth spins under it.
Movement of the stars. Nope, natural causes. We are a ball going around a much bigger ball that is the sun, and the stars are all huge balls very, very far away. As we move, our perspective changes.
Disease caused by demons. Nope, natural causes. Bacteria, viruses, brain degradation, and other causes are to blame.
Retrograde motion of planets. Nope, natural causes. The planets appear to move backward at times, but this is because we’re going around the sun, not the sun around us, and as we move around the backside of the sun the more distant planets appear to move backward relative to us.
Arrow or bullet trajectory. Nope, natural causes. Arrows and bullets obey the law of gravity, and their trajectory can be determined with a high degree of precision.
Diversity of species. Nope, natural causes. Humans are evolved primates, and every living thing on the planet shares a common ancestor.
War success. Nope, natural causes. Military advantages include more troops, more war fighting platforms, more weapons, better technology, better intelligence, better terrain, better tactics, and responsive leaders. When an “inferior” force beats a “superior” force, it’s almost always because the inferior force has better intelligence.
Beginning of the universe. Nope, natural causes. The Big Bang started the entire universe moving and forming.
Formation of earth. Nope, natural causes. Gravity causes object in space to attract. Atoms combine to form specks, specks form dust clouds, dust clouds condense and form planets. Planets with certain elements become the firm planets.
Wind. Nope, natural causes. Air is a fluid, and as it warms it rises and descends as it cools.
Rainbows. Nope, natural causes. The moisture in the air acts as a prism and splits light into it’s wavelength colors.
Floods. Nope, natural causes. Heavy rains up river, or large storms offshore elevate the water level.
Tides. Nope, natural causes. The moon’s gravity causes the surface fluid of the earth (water) to oblongate slightly in relation to the crust.
Light and dark. Nope, natural causes, and they aren’t substances. Light rays travel in a straight line, and can be reflected off of objects. Dark is not a thing, it’s the absence of light.
Fire. Nope, natural causes. It’s a chemical reaction of a fuel source caused by heat.
Speaking and hearing. Nope, natural causes. Sound waves are produced by vibrating vocal chords, refined by the shape of the throat, tongue, and cheeks. The ear senses the vibration and translates them for our brain. There is no magic thing in our throat.
Sight. Nope, natural causes. Eyes are not literally windows, they are bundles of light receptors behind a lens, and connected to the brain via neurons. There is also no magic in our eyes.
Witches were responsible for plagues. Nope, natural causes. Preparing food separate from the toilet and hand washing prevent most, and a bit of vaccination takes care of the rest. Also, witches aren’t real.
This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, but I think I’ve made my point. So far, we’re at 0 for 31. The bible, by the way, is 0 for 19 on this list. This is an epic losing streak.
And you know, I hear all the religious folks doing their damndest to predict a win for their god soon. But let’s be real. I’m not saying your god won’t show up in the next big discovery. But I’m most definitely saying I won’t be holding my breath.
The Spartan Atheist
The Spartan Atheist 
Let’s not forget horrific terminal cancer in children- part of god’s divine plan according to their misguided parents
Miscarriages and stillbirths- All the abortions God carries out because the unborn wasn’t his plan for that grieving family
When you have good luck- God chose you, but let others suffer
You’re his children-but he parents by threats and ultimatums instead of unconditional love
And that’s the MORAL side of it, as well as the factual as you covered!
https://aladyofreason.wordpress.com/
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Hell, if I tried going through biblical moral failures, I’d still be writing this!
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Ha! True!!!
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Some christians,
When good things happen to you —- god is blessing you
When bad things happen to you —- you are suffering the consequences of your sins
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A valuable warning to those who cling to the few still-unexplained natural phenomena (such as human consciousness) as evidence for God. A reminder that the claim “science has no naturalistic explanation” has always, in practice, meant “science has no naturalistic explanation yet“. Eventually the explanation was found for all the items on your list, and in the future it will be found for those few things that remain unexplained at present. In any case, “we don’t know the explanation (yet)” doesn’t even remotely equate to “a supernatural being must have done it”.
These days they are often reduced to claiming, not that there is no natural explanation rendering God unnecessary, but that that explanation must be wrong because they personally don’t understand it. An example would be people who “just can’t believe” that evolution accounts for the extreme complexity of life as we know it — because they only have a vague idea of how evolution works (hint: if you use the word “random” to describe evolution, you don’t understand it). There is an abundance of information out there explaining how natural selection generates complex organic structures, but the believers refuse to study it — they’d rather cling to their ignorance, believing that as long as they can avoid having evolution make intuitive sense to them, it somehow isn’t true, or isn’t an adequate explanation. Not unlike the (apocryphal) ostrich imagining that as long as he can’t see his adversaries, they aren’t really there.
Also, of course, there’s no reason why reality has to make intuitive sense to humans. Relativity and quantum physics don’t make intuitive sense, but they’ve been verified by evidence.
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Yep anyone who says something on the lines of “how can something randomly come from nothing?” knows nothing about how either the Big Bang or Evolution works. To be fair, I don’t have a good understanding of the Big Bang either, but I trust the scientists that do.
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Oh dear!! To the thumpers, that means that you “Have Faith,’ and somehow, that brings you down to their level. 😯
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“It takes more faith to believe in a Big Bang than to believe in a God”, my churchie friends would say.
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“It takes more faith to believe in a Big Bang than to believe in a God”, my churchie friends would say.
Well, I could say “it takes more money to buy a candy bar than a house”, but the mere act of saying it doesn’t make the statement true or even worthy of serious consideration.
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Absolutely. Ironically it requires much more faith to believe in a God in my book, at least we have evidence there was a Big Bang. Outside of religion and superstitions, the notion of believing in something without evidence is ridiculous; why should religion be any exception?
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Many believers knowledge of evolution comes from the pulpit and apologist and not from evolutionary biologist
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“Mike” I am amazed at your ability to see the “natural order” of the world and yet not be able to marvel at the “order” that is so precise and amazing in itself.
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Randy, my name is The Spartan Atheist. Your inability to quit being a condescending dick is amazing.
And you obviously have no idea what I’m amazed at. The difference between you and I, as I have noted many times, is I want to know what’s actually going on, and you like a myth about a magical sky daddy.
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You’re probably right about me being condescending. I guess I didn’t think you would be able to recognize it, since you don’t see it in yourself.
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Oh, I’m aware. When I ask you simple yes or no questions, and you respond with woo-woo, it’s easy to determine who is on the side of real…
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Randy, this “natural order” you allude to is a product of purely material forces, operating under physical constraints and laws of nature. There’s no need to resort to supernatural agents to account for this.
The “order” you perceive is subjective, and quite likely relative, because we can also perceive corresponding disorder and chaos. Many of us have marveled at the beauties of a night sky, or landscape, or whatever, without feeling any need to attribute these material realities to an immaterial entity such as your god.
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Let’s also be careful not to subscribe to the fallacy of anthropomorphizing nature and what it “wants to do” or have the teleological thinking of a five year old! Natural processes run their course, but that also does NOT mean nature has some conscious desire to “want” to!
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“Gods” may well started out as a reification of the tendency of primitive people to attribute intentionality to natural events. Believing that the volcano erupted because Havohej the Volcano God got mad at us is just an abstraction of believing that the volcano itself got mad at us, and not much of an abstraction at that.
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Very good point! Didn’t even think of that 🙂
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Yes, it’s not that hard to see a “natural” progression from, say, animism through various polytheism’s up to relatively recent variations on monotheism; and now we- that’s to say, the West – seem to be in some sort of increasingly post-Christian period. No wonder theists are rattled!
And also, not coincidentally, probably why many adherents of the Abrahamic faiths try to re-write their past and origins into a more favorable light. So Judaism tries to “deny” its polytheistic roots ( gradually excising Asherah out of the OT, for example); and now the odd spectacle of alt-right Christians trying to sever their ties to the parent religion, as if Christianity simply sprang, fully formed and perfect, out of practically nowhere, with almost no antecedents.
It’s part of what, I think, is an inherently totalitarian impulse in the Abrahamic faiths, as if each one sees itself as some sort of ultimate endpoint, and not as as merely another variation in a long evolutionary process.
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What I find interesting is believers are selective. They recognize and accept some of the evidence you put forth yet still cling to others. The question then becomes … why? If they can move past the idea that gods were responsible for thunder and lightning, what stops them from accepting other “scientifically-proved” occurrences and facts? (Ex: the earth is flat!)
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Usually ignorance. I haven’t met a Christian yet that knows the biblical procedure for cleansing lepers..
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And let us not forget the diminution of the human in all of this: When you successfully navigate yourself out of a bad accident, you say, ‘”God took the wheel.” When you don’t, you say, “Satan pushed me.” Where in all of this, does the You come into it, and take responsiblity (or praise) for any of it.?
Believers are like the wife who has married a vicious (but loving o yes) man. On the good days she says, “This was a good day. He didn’t beat me. I love him so much” and on the bad days she says, “I deserved this. I burnt his toast this morning. “
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