Rabbi Moshe Averick, author of The Confused World of Modern Atheism (Mosaica Press, 2016) addresses the “God of the Gaps” – the claim that the intersections between the material and the immaterial in nature are just “gaps” waiting to be filled in (with special reference to the origin of life):
The first thing I would bring to your attention – although not the essential point – is that when we discuss the Origin of Life we are not talking about a “gap” in scientific knowledge. A gap implies some acceptable and tolerable missing piece of the puzzle that we expect to fill in within some reasonable amount of time. What we actually see is more like the ocean between the coast of California and Japan which cannot be described as a “gap” by any stretch of the imagination; there is simply endless open space with nothing in between…
As world renowned chemist James Tour has put it: “When will the scientific community confess to the world that they are clueless on life’s origin, that the emperor has no clothes?” Microbiologist Dr. Milton Wainright: “Are we getting any closer to an understanding of the origin of life? It is not merely that biology is scratching the surface of this enigma; the reality is that we have yet to see the surface!” Geneticist Dr. Michael Denton: “Between a living cell and the most highly ordered non-biological system such as a crystal or snowflake there is a chasm as vast and as absolute as it is possible to conceive.” Moshe Averick, “God of the Gaps: Is there No End to the Foolishness?” at The Times of Israel
With respect to any gap. It might be helpful to ask, what does the witness think would close the gap? Suppose we want to know how we got from the Underwood to the laptop. We can fill in the gap via a history of successive inventions. If we ask, how did human beings gain the ability to process abstractions and eventually write them down, we are addressing an entirely different problem. It is not a gap; it is a preceding void.
And if we think that looking into the eyes of a chimpanzee is a way of filling that void, we are kidding ourselves.
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See also: Moshe Averick on origin of life as bringing out the illogic of naturalist atheists
Moshe Averick in USA Today on the confusion around origin of life
and
Rabbi Moshe Averick challenges physicist Paul Davies on origin of life