The god of the gaps argument is one used to contrast faith-based explanations for nature with those derived from science.
The term is used in a pejorative sense by those wishing to deride perceived religious retreat in the face of increasingly comprehensive scientific explanations of natural phenomena. The argument starts with the position that early religious descriptions of objects and events (e.g. sun, moon and stars; thunder and lightning) placed these in the realm of things created or controlled by a god or gods. As the scientific method came up with explanations for observations in the realms of astronomy, meteorology, geology, cosmology and biology, the 'need' for a god to explain phenomena was — and is being — reduced, and occupies smaller and smaller 'gaps' in knowledge. The argument suggests that since the domain of things controlled by God is shrinking, eventually science will remove the need for God to explain any natural phenomena.
Theories for the origin of life and the universe remain outstanding problems for which a scientific consensus has yet to form. The theistic position retains these within the domain of God. The God of the Gaps argument also asserts that defaulting to a supernatural explanation brings up more questions than answers and requires many a priori assumptions, and therefore fails by Occam's Razor.
Theist Rebuttal
Theists reject the principal claims of the God of the Gaps. Traditionally, proponents of teleology such as Aquinas, the author of Thomism, argued that attempts to explain nature in terms of nature alone are reductionism, because they apparently ignore the question of the final cause . Thus, those who confuse the "real cause" with the mechanism by which the real cause acts are required to hold out hope for greater and greater naturalistic explanations which will forever be beyond their reach, because the final cause is not nature but God. This type of argumentation is considered to be in stark contrast with the naturalists' idealizations of falsification and Ockham's razor, and they therefore reject the theistic interpretation of final cause.
Modern theists, particularly proponents of theistic realism, argue that many phenomena are outside the realm of empirical science not because they don't exist, but because we don't yet have the tools to investigate them. God is therefore a possible explanation, even if he cannot be scientifically observed. Theists believe that where natural phenomena cannot be explained by natural causes alone, a theistic cause is a just as reasonable if not a more reasonable assumption than an unknown natural cause. Some theists also argue that the progress of science continually uncovers more evidence of design, so that the evidence of a designer increases with progress, rather than decreasing. Much of the evidence that they point to is considered by the scientific community to be equivocal, controversial, or uncompelling.
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Last updated: 08-22-2005 18:18:09
