There’s this thing deeply religious people do that always leaves me at a loss.

Their basic approach to any mystery that confronts them—and mystery here can mean anything from well-known facts that they as individuals somehow failed to pick up to the complex unknowns of the larger universe—is “If I can’t explain it, if you can’t explain it, it must be God.”

The thing that bugs me most about these people is that they’re so convinced of their one pat answer that they’re not interested in listening to any other or in questioning the matter further to discover still more possible answers.

They’re not curious about mysteries; they’re satisfied with them.

So here’s how I like to look at all those things I don’t understand right now:

Think about all the candy bars you’ve eaten in your lifetime—Snickers, Milky Way, Almond Joy, Mounds, PayDay, York Peppermint Patty, and all the rest.

If you’re like me, you’ve never been to a candy factory, and you really have no solid proof about how these things are put together. But you could probably figure out the basic scheme of each bar with little trouble.

You start with a sweet, thick ooze, mix it with a handful of peanuts, form it into little bars, dip those bars into molten milk chocolate, and then lay them out on a cool surface to harden. Instant Snickers.

Or you start with a bar of chewy-gooey caramel, roll it in lightly salted peanuts so you coat the entire outside, and then lay it out on a smooth countertop to harden. Voilà! PayDay.

You stamp out discs of peppermint dough, send them for a swim through dark chocolate, and then lay them out on a slick, flat surface to harden. Poof! York Peppermint Patty.

You take a short strip of candied coconut, drop a couple of almonds on top of it, dunk it in milk chocolate, and then lay it out on a slick conveyor belt to cool and harden. Bang! Almond Joy.

See? Nothing to it. No magic, no gods, no super-scientific alien civilizations required.

Ah, but think about M&Ms.

There’s this little button of chocolate in the middle, coated with a hard candy shell and then painted with candied color. Or there’s a peanut covered with chocolate, then the hard candy, then the color.

And it has no flat side.

There is never a time in an M&M’s life when it lies on a cool, smooth surface to harden.

How the heck do they do that?

If you’ve been through the M&Ms factory, you probably know the answer. But I don’t know the answer, and at any rate, I don’t want to know it. In this case, I’m happy with the mystery, content to let it serve as a little lesson about people who are convinced that anything you can’t explain must be due to the influence of this deity or that.

Because in this case, though I don’t know the answer, I’m sure I could find it out in about five minutes. I could find out just exactly how M&Ms are made.

They make them in the International Space Station, I’ll bet, and they spray on the candy coating and the color while they’re floating in microgravity. It solidifies in mid-air, and it has no flat spot because it never touches anything until it’s hardened.

Or they drop them from a tower a thousand feet high, and they get sprayed with the chocolate and candy and color as they float down. By the time they reach the bottom, they’re cool and solid and go right into the bags.

Or they form them like every other type of candy bar, but they then put them in a jeweler’s lapidary tumbler with a fine grit that, over a period of weeks, polishes off the flat side to a perfect roundness.

They grow them in the Andes Mountains on genetically engineered mutant chocolate plants, where they’re picked by child labor. Hundreds of old guys who look exactly like Juan Valdez carry them down the mountain with long strings of pack donkeys, and they take them to a factory where thousands of tiny Filipino women making eleven cents a day snip off the stems and paint over the scar with matching colored paint.

Well, it’s none of those things. You and I both know it. And those are all fairly mundane answers, with no magic or god power required.

I don’t know how the cheap earphones on my music player were made, but I know it wasn’t magic. They were put together by low-paid robots in a big industrial facility somewhere, and they work by simple principles of physics.

I don’t know how my computer was put together, but I know there’s no magical elf in the box, no telepathic alien. It’s basically a light switch on steroids, programmed by nerdy youngsters hopped up on Jolt Cola and strawberry Pop-Tarts until they’re so hyper they start to think in computer code.

I don’t know exactly how the supermarket door knows to open when I walk up to it, but I’m absolutely certain that it isn’t an invisible genie enslaved by sorcery. It’s hidden switches and motors and this infrared electric eye thingie that—because I’m on the short side—misses seeing me about half the time.

Physics. Electricity. Ordinary everyday stuff, with a lot of technical skill thrown in to make it jump through complex and useful hoops.

Just because I don’t know how these things work is not reason enough to leap at the Almighty Master of the Universe as the answer.

In this case, the answers to these mysteries, though they’re not known to me, are known to somebody. I just haven’t gotten around to looking into them myself.

As to other mysteries, it’s just darned amazing to me that a wound on your arm can heal back to be level with the rest of your skin, instead of healing into a ragged little canyon or bubbling up with new flesh until it forms a large irregular lump. It’s wild that there’s a totally invisible ray that can shine right through your flesh and bones and show doctors what you look like inside.

But it’s even more amazing, even more wonderful, that there are people—biologists, physicists, other scientists—who know a very great deal about the why and the how of it.

I think it’s cool as hell that the puzzle-piece way that Africa and South America seem to fit together is because they did once fit together and even cooler that there are knowledgeable people—geologists—who can tell us how and when it happened.

But even if the experts don’t know every little thing, is there reason to believe such things are magic? Reason to call on Holy God Jehovah as the One True Answer? Reason to stop looking for the real explanations because the fluffy mystical one seems good enough?

Nope. Just because you don’t know the answer does not mean that it’s evidence of a god or gods—or witches or demons or mind-reading aliens from Planet Z.

Out here in the real world, things just don’t work like that.

M&Ms are not made by God. They only taste that way.

Reprinted by permission from Hank Fox, Red Neck, Blue Collar, Atheist (Hank Fox Books, 2019).