Brief Defence of god-of-the-gaps.

It's still valid

“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.”

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The so-called “God of the Gaps” objection is popular among atheists, especially the so-called “New Atheists.” It’s also quite popular in general with normies who want to get one up on their extremely conservative religious uncle during family gatherings.

For those who don’t know, the God of the Gaps fallacy occurs when an unexplained (usually natural) phenomenon is explained away by the postulation of a divine entity or interference.

It has a long history, dating back to when humans first acquired the ability to reason and detect agency. However, our cognitive faculties were hypersensitive to the point that we saw agency where there wasn’t any—especially in natural phenomena. Combine that with our ability to reason, and what we have here is the use of ideas about agency to explain seemingly mysterious events and the formation of rich stories.

If you’re being slightly pretentious, this is what’s referred to in the cognitive science literature, as hyperactive agency detection device (HADD) and it’s quite common amongst children, and in individuals high in schziotypy traits.

When I was a child, at least, I remember associating agency with everything. For instance, I would look away from my PC when it was lagging, expecting it to load faster, or believe that bad things were happening to me because I had done something wrong. Thankfully, we all grow up and replace those intuitions with more sophisticated, less childish methods of attributing agency—mostly through religion.

This can be seen throughout history, and we still see it today amongst religious people of all kinds.

Take, for instance, Europe between 1346 and 1353—the time when the Bubonic Plague had a chokehold on the continent. Infamously referred to as the Black Death, it ravaged Europe with no clear explanation. Back then, people had no idea what the fuck was going on, so rulers sought guidance from scholars. As a result, in October 1348, King Philip VI of France commissioned the University of Paris Medical Faculty to figure out what the fuck was going on.

Now, their explaination was, ummm astrology, and the alignment of planets caused “corrupted air” which turns out to be poisionous when people inhaled it.

“The mortality in question was caused by the configuration of the heavens… when in 1345, on the 20th of March, there was a conjunction of three higher planets in Aquarius.”

They also believed that it was god who allowed these “evil influences”

“The mortality in question was caused by the configuration of the heavens… God allows evil influences to cause these corruptions of the air.”

Another more popular example was illustrated by neil degrasse tyson when he went on the piers morgan show. Towards the end of the episode as tyson was asked about god’s existence, peirs mogan pointed to the fact since we don’t know how something came from nothing, that therefore implies the existence of a divine entity of sorts. Tyson objected with an example from history;

Claudias Ptolemy, an Alexandrian mathematician and polymath, wrote in the margins of one of his greatest works. He said, after looking at the planets, going back and forth, not fully understanding why they did this, and he writes: "When I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch earth with my feet. I stand in the presence of Zeus himself."

I expect that I have raised some eyebrows of theists—especially the philbro type— upon the invokation of neil degrasse tyson. As he, and this argument is often grouped together with the ignorance of philosophy that most “reddit new atheists” had.

It’s often painted, by theists, as a thought-terminating cliche. Namely, some, like bentham’s bulldog, like to argue that atheists are dissmissing a perfectly reasonable method of evidence, namely inference to the best explanation.

Any time we ever believe in anything rationally, we do so because there is some kind of "gap" in our understanding of how the universe works, which is filled by postulating the existence of that thing.

-God of the Gaps

Atheists don’t deny the utility of a method like inference to the best explanation. They simply argue that postulating God in place of an explanation for natural phenomena has had a uniquely high failure rate. On the contrary, the materialist research project of explaining phenomena in terms of physical causes and properties has been remarkably successful. This gives us good reason, prima facie, to be skeptical of arguments that invoke God in an attempt to explain naturalistic phenomena.

If I were to flip a coin an indefinite number of times, with two people betting—one on heads and the other on tails—and the coin was supposedly fair (i.e., the prior probability of both outcomes was equal), but every single flip resulted in heads, then the rational move would be to assume the pattern will continue, at least until evidence suggests otherwise.

I see this as the same here: if all prior attempts to explain natural phenomena under folk/divine theories have failed, then we should assume the pattern will continue until evidence suggests otherwise.

To borrow an example from naturalism panth:

In Theism and Explanation Gregory Dawes quotes the famed biologist Charles Lyell as follows: “It is not from enquiries into the physical world, present or past, that we gain an insight into the spiritual; we may arrive at conclusions unwelcome to our speculations.” Commenting on this quote from Lyell, Matthew Baratholomew says the following: “it is a revealing comment. Before 1859 natural philosophers in Britain had confidently believed precisely the opposite. They were certain that enquiries into the physical world were bound to elicit clear insights into “the spiritual,” insights so unambiguous that they could be used as a foundation for a defence of the Christian faith. In 1859 that foundation turned to dust, and Lyell’s brief statement can stand as an emblem of his recognition of that disaster.” (Dawes, 2015 132)

-Why I am an atheist

Nowadays, most theists don’t deny the success of the materialistic research program, and indeed, they have, with a bit of intellectual masturbation, and reintepretation, altered their best models in order to accomdate these materialistic theories. At this point in time, most of them, instead resort to, asserting that God works through these secondary, natural causes, setting up the natural laws with the wisdom to know how the world will play out given his initial design. He also doesn’t like intefering too much in the world he has created.

All phenomena which occur in Nature do so because God sustains the world in being, thus (at least indirectly) causing everything.

But this hardly implies that all phenomena make equally good evidence for God's existence.

There are two problems with this. First, we have no good reason to assume that God would work only through natural processes. Given His nature as a supernatural being, He has a vast range of options to choose from. The theist must then explain why God specifically chooses to work through natural means.

But, to address the second point, it’s true that most, modern day, intelligent theists don’t posit god in place as an explanation for most natural phenomena, cause they know better than that.

To the best of my knowledge, no Christian apologist has ever made the following argument: 1) Science cannot explain high temperature superconductivity [a puzzling phenomenon in condensed matter physics], 2) therefore an intelligent designer must have caused it, 3) therefore God exists. The reason is that it is obvious in this case that there should exist in principle an ordinary scientific explanation for this phenomenon. Superconductors involve complicated, messy physics and there is no particularly good reason to be surprised that we don't understand them fully yet.

In the case of high-temperature superconductivity, we know that we have a sufficient understanding of physics to make it likely that any remaining gaps not answered by our best scientific theories will eventually be resolved by a better theory or a modification of an existing one. There is no room for supernatural explanations. Theists only target areas that are sufficiently mysterious, such as the seeming fine-tuning of the universe. But just because there is a gap to be filled doesn’t mean that anything will fit. Given our past, where supernatural explanations were consistently shown not to fit, we should expect that this time won’t be any different.