The Gap in the God of the Gaps
The “God of the Gaps” idea is fundamentally wrong and absurd. Men did not invent God as a scientific theory to explain the motions of stars or the source of lightning.
Men had mechanical explanations for nature since Anaxagoras. Nor does any evidence for or against God increase or decrease if any scientific theory is more complete or less complete in codifying these mechanical explanations.
Ptolemy and Galileo, Brahe and Copernicus all believed divine forces made the heavens, but thought they were made in an orderly fashion, and could be described mathematically. Newton’s breakthrough was to show the local motions on earth were governed by the same three laws, from which Kepler’s could be deduced.
Then Newton wrote on Biblical prophecy.
The “God of the Gaps” exists nowhere but in the imagination of crackpots like Voltaire, who cannot argue against religion as it actually is, and so must stuff a silly strawman version of religion to act as a whipping dummy, one with no power to fight back.
Darwin proposed a farfetched (and unscientific) theory to explain that man arise by unintentional natural process out of apes, and apes out of earlier, simpler mammals, who arose from simpler forms yet. But even those who claim an amoeba is the father of all life cannot explain how elements in the sea leaped together to form the genetic machinery more complex than a space shuttle.
Nor can they explain how one species gives rise to another while keeping all the changed genes and organs in coherent harmony with all the unchanged genes and organs, without any directing plan, process, or rational scheme. Merely saying it takes a long time means nothing.
The idea that “God in the Gaps” only exists before people read Darwin is silly — only those who flee the Church and read the Bible with leaden literalness insist that Adam rose from the dust on a Friday, rather than over aeons with many intermediate steps.
The miracle and wonder is not one whit less, whether one says Adam rose from the dust directly, or indirectly.
The point of the passage is that we return to dust when we die. On that point, science has nothing to say.
Or is this whole argument an argument that some passages of the Bible are to be read literally, and others figuratively? We always knew that. Unless you think God is a physical person who sits atop the sky-dome and has nostrils, wings, hand and ear, and so on, you know passages of the scripture are sacramental, visible signs of invisible reality.
Oh, indeed, there are people who might lose their faith if they discover God is more mysterious and complex in His craftsmanship than He said to Moses, and His world more filled with wonders.
They are people who are too easily deceived, and too lazy to study the catechism. It is not as if the Church has not answered questions like this since the reign of Augustus.
Are we astonished God did not put the periodic table of elements into the Ten Commandments, or the proof for Fermat’s Last Theorem? Truly, I tell you, that if He had done so, the atheist would dismiss it as a manmade writing, just as the dismiss the Ten Commandments as manmade.
When things that no human could possibly know are in fact revealed in the scripture, such as a the council of divine beings reported in the Book of Job, and the answer, or at least the questions, no merely human mind can comprehend unaided, these they likewise dismiss as manmade, and, worse, call them fictions, or say such things are written for sinister purposes: the Golden Rule is the Opiate of the masses , or somesuch nonsense.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
