“There are reverent minds who ceaselessly scan the fields of Nature and the books of Science in search of gaps,” wrote Henry Drummond, “gaps which they will fill up with God. As if God lived in gaps?”
In his Lowell Lectures on the Ascent of Man , Drummond continues:
When things are known, that is to say, we conceive them as natural, on Man’s level; when they are unknown, we call them divine—as if our ignorance of a thing were the stamp of its divinity. If God is only to be left to the gaps in our knowledge, where shall we be when these gaps are filled up? And if they are never to be filled up, is God only to be found in the dis-orders of the world? Those who yield to the temptation to reserve a point here and there for special divine interposition are apt to forget that this virtually excludes God from the rest of the process. If God appears periodically, He disappears periodically. If He comes upon the scene at special crises, He is absent from the scene in the intervals. Whether is all-God or occasional-God the nobler theory?
Drummond, a nineteenth century evangelical writer and lecturer, originated the term “God of the gaps” while chastising his fellow Christians for their unscriptural view of natural history. Unfortunately, this confusion about natural and supernatural continues today even though it is, as philosopher Alvin Plantinga explains “at best a kind of anemic and watered-down semideism” that “is worlds apart from serious Christian theism.” (As I’ve argued before, it might be time for Christians to discard the term supernatural in reference to most phenomena within Creation.)
For Christians, though, a natural process is just a normal-appearing process which remains the providential design and control of God. The difference between natural-appearing and miraculous-appearing processes is not whether God is acting—His action occurs in both processes—but the way in which He chooses to act.
So what then does “God of the gaps” mean? The phrase, according to chemist Craig Rusbult, actually encompasses four different views based on distinctions between a science gap (a gap in our current scientific knowledge) and a nature gap (a break in the continuous cause-effect chain of natural process) that may or may not be bridged by miraculous-appearing theistic action. The four views are:
An “always in the gaps” view — the claim that we should always assume that a science gap is a nature gap
An “only in the gaps” view — which implies that God works only in nature gaps, that God is not active in natural process and defines “natural” in a way that means “without God.”
A “gaps are possible” view — a humble claim that “maybe God exists, and maybe nature gaps exist”
A “gaps are impossible” view — a belief that: 1) God does not exist, so nature-gaps are physically impossible, or 2) God does exist, but a nature-gap is theologically impossible because God would never allow it.
Rusbult recommends discarding the confusing phrase. But, he suggests, when someone criticizes a theory by calling it a “God of the gaps” theory ask “What exactly do you mean by this?”
Does it refer to a “gaps are possible” view (this is theologically acceptable for a Christian theist) or a specific theory claiming “a gap did occur” (this should be evaluated using evidence and logic), or an “always in the gaps” habit (that is scientifically naive) or an “only in the gaps” view (that is theologically unacceptable and should be criticized)?
An “always in the gaps” view is scientifically naive while an “only in the gaps” view is theological unsound. Claiming that God does not exist, so nature-gaps are physically impossible, is also an unsophisticated and unsupportable claim. Saying that God does exist, but a nature-gap is impossible because God would never allow it, is theologically pretentious.
The most reasonable position is the view that “gaps are possible,” a broad spectrum that ranges from gaps are exceedingly likely to gaps are statistically improbable. Because this breadth allows for a significant amount of wiggle room, the view that gaps are possible isn’t very useless as a descriptive category. In fact, there is a large variance even among advocates of Intelligent Design (ID) theory.
Some ID theorists, for example, believe that simply finding evidence of intelligent agency is sufficient to explain gaps while others believe that such data is simply the starting point for postulating a more robust explanatory framework (which is the position I subscribe to). After all, the whole of creation—including all processes, all natural laws—are the actions of an intelligent agent: the divine Creator and Sustainer of the universe. The distinction between natural-appearing and miraculous-appearing is, again, a matter of which way He chooses to act. “Natural” laws that require low-information content are as much a product of intelligent design as the most complex processes.
There is also no reason to be concerned that scientific discoveries will relegate God to a secondary role. Closing science gaps almost always has the opposite effect. Science is an hydra-headed creature; with every science gap that is closed, two more rise up to replace the one that is bridged. For example, when evolution was first proposed by Darwin, there was no explanation for the mechanism of transmission of traits from one generation to the next. With the discovery of DNA, Watson and Crick closed that particular gap.
Yet, as physicist David Snoke notes, no one today has an adequate explanation for how this highly complicated molecule arose out of nowhere. Also, we do not have an adequate explanation within chemical evolutionary theory for the appearance of the mechanism that gives us a readout of the information, or for the appearance of methods that replicate information without error, or for the appearance of the delicate balance of repair and maintenance of the molecular systems that use the information stored in DNA.
God does not appear periodically in nature only to disappear again. He does not come upon the scene at special crises to fill in the ìgapsî in our knowledge, nor is He absent from the scene in the intervals. The God of Christianity is not a mere “god of the gaps” but is the ever present, always working, Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer of all creation.
January 7th, 2010 | 4:45 pm
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January 7th, 2010 | 5:25 pm
Amen Joe.
In the earlier thread I never meant to imply that God is anything less than the creator, sustainer and redeemer of all creation. In the comment thread to that post R. Hampton wrote “No miracle is necessary for protons, neutrons, and electrons to combine into the simplest of atoms / No miracle is necessary for great accumulations of those atoms to fall into a self-started gravity well, etc., etc.” How naive!
G.K. Chesterton wrote the best rebuttal to R. Hampton in his “The Ethics of Fairyland” section of Orthodoxy, in my view one of the most beautiful passages in all of literature. See here: http://www.cornerstonemag.com/imaginarium/inklinks/ink005.html
Here is a sample: BEGIN QUOTE: “There are certain sequences or developments (cases of one thing following another), which are, in the true sense of the word, reasonable. They are, in the true sense of the word, necessary. Such are mathematical and merely logical sequences. We in fairyland (who are the most reasonable of all creatures) admit that reason and that necessity. . . . But as I put my head over the hedge of the elves and began to take notice of the natural world, I observed an extraordinary thing. I observed that learned men in spectacles were talking of the actual things that happened — dawn and death and so on — as if THEY were rational and inevitable. They talked as if the fact that trees bear fruit were just as NECESSARY as the fact that two and one trees make three. But it is not. . . . they could not be got to see the distinction between a true law, a law of reason, and the mere fact of apples falling. If the apple hit Newton’s nose, Newton’s nose hit the apple. That is a true necessity: because we cannot conceive the one occurring without the other. But we can quite well conceive the apple not falling on his nose; we can fancy it flying ardently through the air to hit some other nose, of which it had a more definite dislike. We have always in our fairy tales kept this sharp distinction between the science of mental relations, in which there really are laws, and the science of physical facts, in which there are no laws, but only weird repetitions . . . When we are asked why eggs turn to birds or fruits fall in autumn, we must answer exactly as the fairy godmother would answer if Cinderella asked her why mice turned to horses or her clothes fell from her at twelve o’clock. We must answer that it is MAGIC. . . . All the terms used in the science books, “law,” “necessity,” “order,” “tendency,” and so on, are really unintellectual, because they assume an inner synthesis, which we do not possess. The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, “charm,” “spell,” “enchantment.” They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a MAGIC tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. . . .” END QUOTE
When he reads this I am sure Mr. Hampton will scoff indignantly, for he is just the sort of learned man in spectacles that Chesterton was talking about – a man who see a contingent event and blithely assumes it is a necessary event and cannot be made to see the difference.
January 7th, 2010 | 9:34 pm
Barry Arrington,
You can make the argument that everything we see, including ourselves, is supernatural, but then you have simply renamed the natural realm without changing any of the facts. A rose by any other name…
The things within the Universe are rational (natural) constructions formed from its fundamental laws/properties. So THE miracle is our a Universe that is logical and permits order to come from chaos, life to come from matter, and light to come from darkness.
January 7th, 2010 | 11:49 pm
What Barry is saying is that everything we know only includes what we see. For example, I don’t empirically observe the idea that ignorance is bad. Rather, I know that ignorance is bad because my intellect (an immaterial power) has the power to know the essence of the mind and thus its end. I don’t “see” it’s end with my eyes.
January 8th, 2010 | 3:11 pm
Christians in the creed recite that God is the creator of all “seen and unseen” – both the physical and spiritual states of being.
We also quote the scripture, especially Genesis which states rather unequivocally that God ’caused the ground to produce living things’.
Thus the physical world has an intrinsic potentiality towards organic life. No need for a ‘miracle’ or suspension of any universal laws at all. God made the universe such that life was able to be organized from the stuff of matter.
But life is not reducible to mere complexity of matter. Put it this way….spirit is not material any more than ORDER is material. In fact, spirit and order are rather closely related conceptually. Having a jumble of letters or an orderly course of them makes the difference between this and “tsih” or organic and inorganic. In this sense, it IS spirit that gives life and the flesh is useless.
But one cannot find spirit apart from the phenomena of life itself. It’s not a mechanistic part or element anymore than order exists independently of the things which are ordered.
January 8th, 2010 | 3:50 pm
Francis Beckwith,
But you have seen that ignorance is bad, that is how the thought formed in your brain, from sensing (seeing, hearing, etc) situations wherein ignorace led to bad outcomes. Of course you also observed situations of good fortune, where ignorance led to neutral or good outcomes. But on balance, your experience leads you to conclude that ignorance is bad.
Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” rests on the notion that a free market has more information, and a freer exchange thereof, than controlled economies and thus is superior in any number of ways (including personal freedom). In other words, a free market is less ignorant than other systems and therefore less bad.
Mathematicians have formalized such instincts with deep, logical proofs in areas like Game Theory.
January 11th, 2010 | 10:07 pm
What if in Truth and Reality there is no gap, or put in another way, not a jot of separation to be found any “where”.
Meaning that in Truth and Reality there is always only here, or the Indivisible Prior Unity
Any sense of a gap is a mind created presumption, which we all share, and which thus seems completely obvious to us–does it not.
All philosophy whether whether ancient or modern, secular or religious, or even Spiritual, is an attempt to come to terms with this presumed gap.
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