God of the gaps

This article is about a theological perspective and type of philosophical argument. For the "gap" interpretation of the biblical creation account, see Gap creationism.

God of the gaps is a type of theological perspective in which gaps in scientific knowledge are taken to be evidence or proof of God's existence. The term was invented by Christian theologians not to discredit theism but rather to discourage reliance on teleological arguments for God's existence.

Origins of the term

The term goes back to Henry Drummond, a 19th century evangelist lecturer, from his Lowell Lectures on the Ascent of Man. He chastises those Christians who point to the things that science can not yet explain—"gaps which they will fill up with God"—and urges them to embrace all nature as God's, as the work of "... an immanent God, which is the God of Evolution, is infinitely grander than the occasional wonder-worker, who is the God of an old theology."

In the 20th century Dietrich Bonhoeffer expressed the concept in similar terminology in letters he wrote while in a Nazi prison during World War II, which were not made public until years later. Bonhoeffer wrote, for example: "...how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know."

The term gained some attention when it was used in the 1955 book Science and Christian Belief by Charles Alfred Coulson, where Coulson states: "There is no 'God of the gaps' to take over at those strategic places where science fails; and the reason is that gaps of this sort have the unpreventable habit of shrinking."

The term was used again in a 1971 book and a 1978 article, both by Richard Bube. He articulated the concept in greater detail in Man Come Of Age: Bonhoeffer’s Response To The God-Of-The-Gaps (1978). Bube attributed modern crises in religious faith in part to the inexorable shrinking of the God-of-the-gaps as scientific knowledge progressed. As humans progressively increased their understanding of nature, the previous "realm" of God seemed to many persons and religions to be getting smaller and smaller by comparison. Bube maintained that Darwin's Origin of Species was the "death knell" of the God-of-the-gaps. Bube also maintained that the God-of-the-gaps was not the same as the God of the Bible (that is, he was not making an argument against God per se, but rather asserting there was a fundamental problem with the perception of God as existing in the gaps of present-day knowledge).

General usage

The term "God of the gaps" is sometimes used in describing the perceived incremental retreat of religious explanations of physical phenomena in the face of increasingly comprehensive scientific explanations for those phenomena.

R. Laird Harris writes:

"The expression, "God of the Gaps," contains a real truth. It is erroneous if it is taken to mean that God is not immanent in natural law but is only to be observed in mysteries unexplained by law. No significant Christian group has believed this view. It is true, however, if it be taken to emphasize that God is not only immanent in natural law but also is active in the numerous phenomena associated with the supernatural and the spiritual. There are gaps in a physical-chemical explanation of this world, and there always will be. Because science has learned many marvelous secrets of nature, it cannot be concluded that it can explain all phenomena. Meaning, soul, spirits, and life are subjects incapable of physical-chemical explanation or formation."

Usage in referring to a type of argument

The term God-of-the-gaps argument can refer to a position that assumes an act of God as the explanation for an unknown phenomenon, which is a variant of an argument from ignorance. Such an argument is sometimes reduced to the following form:

• There is a gap in understanding of some aspect of the natural world.
• Therefore the cause must be supernatural.

One example of such an argument, which uses God as an explanation of one of the current gaps in biological science, is as follows: "Because current science can't figure out exactly how life started, it must be God who caused life to start." Critics of intelligent design creationism, for example, have accused proponents of using this basic type of argument.

God-of-the-gaps arguments have been asserted by theologians to have the effect of relegating God to the leftovers of science: as scientific knowledge increases, the dominion of God decreases.

Criticism

The God-of-the-gaps view has been criticized for implying that people perceive that God only acts in the gaps, and that God's activity is restricted to such "gaps". It has also been argued that the God-of-the-gaps view is predicated on the assumption that any event which can be explained by science automatically excludes God; that if God did not do something via direct action, God didn't do it at all. "God of the gaps" argument has been traditionally advanced by scholarly Christians, intended as a criticism against weak or tenuous faith, not as a statement against theism or belief in God.

According to John Habgood in The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology, the phrase is generally derogatory, and is inherently a direct criticism of a tendency to postulate acts of God to explain phenomena for which science has yet to give a satisfactory account. Habgood also states:

"It is theologically more satisfactory to look for evidence of God's actions within natural processes rather than apart from them, in much the same way that the meaning of a book transcends, but is not independent of, the paper and ink of which it is comprised."

God-of-the-gaps arguments have also been criticized for doubting that, in a world created by God, the mechanics of how things happen can always be described by science.

See also

• Argument from ignorance
• Watchmaker analogy
• Deism
• Faith and rationality
• Intelligent Design
• The Challenge of Creation

Bibliography

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997 (ISBN 978-0-684-83827-4) "Letter to Eberhard Bethge", 29 May 1944, pages 310–312.
• Richard H. Bube, "Man Come Of Age: Bonhoeffer's Response To The God-Of-The-Gaps," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, volume 14 fall (1971), pages 203–220.
• C. A. Coulson, Science and Christian Belief (The John Calvin McNair Lectures, 1954), London: Oxford University Press, 1955. Page 20, see also page 28.
• Henry Drummond, The Lowell Lectures on the Ascent of Man, Glasgow: Hodder and Stoughton, 1904 (Chapter 10, containing the relevant text).

External links

• Top 10 arguments for the existence of God from Freethoughtpedia.
• The Freethought Zone — God of the Gaps
• Miracles, Intelligent Design, and God-of-the-Gaps (PDF)
• Skeptical Christian: God of the Gaps?
• God of the Gaps: An Islamic Perspective