Opinion: The God of the Gaps was invented by people who wanted to evade serious issues about the lack of fit between secularist and theistic evolutionist beliefs and the fundamental nature of the universe. – O’Leary for News
6 Replies to “Kirk Durston on science’s God of the Gaps”
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Many years ago I was debating an Atheist and he brought up the old “God of the Gaps” argument against me. I pointed out to him that he had a *NATURE of the Gaps* where his Nature amounted to a “god” – his “god”. In fact, that is exactly what they do – substitute God with nature..
In my view, the “God of the gaps” was more an observation than an argument. Basically, it noted that, as science was able to offer explanations of more and more of the natural world, so the gaps where God was the only available explanation got narrower and narrower. The implication was obviously that at eventually we would reach a point where we had no need of that hypothesis.
The God of the Gaps argument is a logical fallacy called begging the question. It basically eliminates an intelligence as an explanation. The intelligence should never be assumed but always considered as a possible explanation for certain natural phenomenon.
Is this true? When did this happen? I was under the understanding that it has been getting wider in certain areas. Read Stephen Blume’s books.
Seversky, states that “as science was able to offer explanations of more and more of the natural world, so the gaps where God was the only available explanation got narrower and narrower.”
Actually, the history of science is a bit more unflattering to Seversky’s version of things than Seversky would prefer to believe.
David Hume, a philosopher in the 1700’s, infamously stated that miracles were a violation of the laws of Nature.
Yet, David Hume, as an atheist, simply had no right whatsoever to presuppose that the laws of nature were ‘natural’ with no need of God to explain their existence. In fact, I hold that Hume was basically a two-bit ‘philosophical’ thief who stole the ‘miraculous’ laws of nature away from the Christian founders of modern science who first discovered them.
As C.S. Lewis stated, “Men became scientific because they expected law in nature, and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver.”
And unlike the Christian founders of modern science who, because of their Christian beliefs, presupposed and then found laws of nature, Atheists, with their random, bottom-up, materialistic explanations simply have no clue why there should even be laws of nature that govern the universe in the first place.
And as Paul Davies stated in 2007, “All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed.,,,
Over the years I have often asked my physicist colleagues why the laws of physics are what they are. The answers vary from “that’s not a scientific question” to “nobody knows.” The favorite reply is, “There is no reason they are what they are — they just are.” The idea that the laws exist reasonlessly is deeply anti-rational. After all, the very essence of a scientific explanation of some phenomenon is that the world is ordered logically and that there are reasons things are as they are. If one traces these reasons all the way down to the bedrock of reality — the laws of physics — only to find that reason then deserts us, it makes a mockery of science.,,,,
,,, the very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that God created the world and ordered it in a rational way. Christians envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe,”
So again, David Hume was basically a two-bit philosophical thief who stole away the ‘miraculous’ laws of nature away from the Christian founders of modern science, who, because of their Christian beliefs,
first discovered them, i.e. In spite of the fact that naturalistic presupposition had nothing whatsoever to do with the discovery of the laws of nature, Hume falsely claimed that the laws of nature were ‘natural’.
David Hume simply had no right whatsoever to presuppose that the ”miraculous’ laws of nature were ‘natural’. As Jorge pointed out in post 1, atheists have a very long history of disingenuously putting Nature in place of God. i.e. it has actually been a *NATURE of the Gaps* argument all along, not a “God of the gaps” argument as atheists have erroneously claimed.
The origin of the actual phrase “God of the gaps” can be traced back to atheist Friedrich Nietzsche and to theistic evolutionist Henry Drummond.
Nietzsche’s claim, “into every gap they put their delusion, their stopgap, which they called God”, was a very interesting claim for Nietzsche to make.
The reason why it is very interesting is that if God is not real, but is merely a delusion as atheists hold, then everything else becomes a delusion for the atheist.
Thus, although the Darwinian Atheist and/or Methodological Naturalist may firmly believe that he is on the terra firma of science (in his appeal, even demand, for naturalistic explanations over and above God as a viable explanation), the fact of the matter is that, when examining the details of his materialistic/naturalistic worldview, it is found that Darwinists/Atheists themselves are adrift in an ocean of fantasy and imagination with no discernible anchor for reality to grab on to.
It would be hard to fathom a worldview more antagonistic to modern science, indeed more antagonistic to reality itself, than Atheistic materialism and/or methodological naturalism have turned out to be.
In short, directly contrary to what Nietzsche believed, it is not belief in God that is a delusion, but it is the atheist’s belief that ‘nature’ can be substituted for God that is a delusion.
To rephrase Nietzsche’s ‘God of the gaps’ quote to more properly reflect what empirical science itself has now revealed to us, “into every gap atheists put their delusion, their stopgap, which they called “methodological naturalism”.
seversky:
In our view you are very biased and don’t seem to know much of anything. Arguments for Intelligent Design are based on our KNOWLEDGE of cause-and-effect relationships in accordance with science. The gaps are with naturalism.
Sev, ET is right. And BA77 has a serious point. KF