Unpacking “God of the Gaps”
This article is part of the Unpacking Culture series in which we examine a well-known axiom and weigh any true or positive aspects of it against any negative or misleading connotations of the phrase.
Filling in the Gaps
Imagine this scenario: during a conversation, a non-Christian asks you if there’s any credible evidence that God exists. What would you say? You’re no expert in apologetics, but you do try to read widely. Your first instinct is to highlight scientific examples that point back to God, a strategy that makes sense given the respect science still enjoys in society.
So, you begin a Socratic line of questioning. What about the Big Bang? We don’t know what happened before that singular moment, so it must have been God. What about human consciousness? No philosopher or scientist understands what consciousness is, much less where it comes from, which (again) suggests that God did it. In effect, you’re looking for aspects of the world where science has no answers; if science can’t explain it, then it must be God!
At this point, your friend calls you out for committing the God-of-the-gaps fallacy. In science and faith discussions, that phrase is a kind of death sentence. It means you have violated a cardinal rule. What’s going on? What exactly is the God-of-the-gaps fallacy, and why is it such a bad thing?
Making Sense of the Fallacy
Let’s begin with natural science, the broad name for fields like physics, chemistry, and biology that investigate God’s world empirically. Scientists develop theories to understand the natural world. For example, the equation F = ma tells us that the force on an object equals its mass multiplied by its acceleration. Indeed, we have many scientific explanations for how the world operates.
But here’s the thing. On the one hand, our best scientific knowledge still has gaps, areas where scientists do not understand how things work. In such cases, they cannot accurately describe what’s going on at a physical level. On the other hand, Christians believe there’s more to reality than merely the physical. Scripture tells us—and some of us have also experienced—that God works in miraculous ways that transcend the physical. If you put these two insights together, it’s clear why someone might take gaps in science as proof that God exists and that he acts supernaturally. It’s this mindset that people disparagingly call the God-of-the-gaps fallacy.
Does Science Make God Irrelevant?
Hans Madueme
This concise booklet explains science from a biblical perspective, helping readers see how faith and science can coexist to glorify God and help us praise our Creator.
While it’s true that science has unanswered questions, scientific theories and explanations are not static. Theories develop and new ones emerge as scientists develop new ideas, make new discoveries, and fill in the gaps in our knowledge. You see the problem? In AD 25, people thought God caused lightning directly when he was angry at human sin. Two millennia later, scientists know that the white bolt, which we call “lightning,” is sparked when there’s an electric potential between different parts of a storm cloud. Lightning has a natural explanation, not supernatural. That’s the problem with God-of-the-gaps arguments: something we can’t explain today may be explained tomorrow.
God of the Gaps and Intelligent Design
Scientists raise the same objection against the Intelligent Design (ID) movement. This movement exploded on the scene in 1991 when Phillip Johnson, then a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, published his groundbreaking Darwin on Trial. He challenged the naturalistic assumptions of mainstream science. Next came Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (Free Press, 1995). William Dembski, Stephen Meyer, and others have also written seminal works defending ID.1
ID says that nature has specific patterns that could only have been produced by an intelligent designer. Behe sees “irreducible complexity” throughout the biological world. Take the examples of the bacterial flagellum, the human immune system, and the blood clotting process. These biological systems are so complex, involving so many cells and molecules interacting with each other, that they could not possibly have arisen by a natural process. The immune system must have been designed by an Intelligent Mind. Similarly, Dembski and Meyer argue that only an intelligent agent could produce the specified information embedded in DNA and the rest of biology, chemistry, and even physics.2
Critics who focus on this part of the argument dismiss ID as a God-of-the-gaps fallacy: if we can find parts of nature that can’t be explained by a natural process, then it’s evidence of intelligent design. But ID theorists are also making a positive case from human experience, namely, that only an intelligent agent can produce the kind of irreducible complexity and specified information that we find in nature. Thus, ID is not an argument based merely on what we do not know; it is based on our knowledge of intelligent causes.
Nevertheless, the standard view is that if you are doing real science, you cannot appeal to spiritual or supernatural entities. If you work in a lab, say, you’re not allowed to invoke “God” or “angels” or “demons” to explain the phenomena. You must act as if spiritual realities do not exist—even if you are Christian. This attitude goes by the name methodological naturalism.
The Problem with Methodological Naturalism
Does that mean believers can’t be real scientists? No, that’s not what methodological naturalists are saying. They stipulate that if you’re a Christian and a scientist, you must compartmentalize. While doing science, you should operate as if God and supernatural entities don’t exist. As soon as you leave work, though, the sky’s the limit; you can believe whatever you want. That’s why the ID movement is often accused of the God of the gaps—they reject this methodological naturalism.
If we run the tape of history, methodological naturalism might seem sensible. In ancient times, people had no idea why much of the natural world behaved the way it did. They blamed anything they couldn’t understand on the gods. As Keith Parsons explains, “At various times in the past disease, eclipses, lightning, insanity, earthquakes, monstrous births, crop failures, rain, pregnancy, and victory in war . . . were all thought to be brought about by gods.”3 But we now know things they did not know. Science has taught us that the mechanisms in each case are physical, not supernatural.
The moral of the story? Given the historical progress of science, there’s no reason to think God works miraculously in the world. If current science has gaps, we are confident that scientists will eventually explain those gaps by natural causes alone.
However, here’s the problem with this logic: consider just a few miracles from Scripture. Balaam’s donkey sees an angel and then speaks (Num. 22:21–33). The ten plagues of Egypt (Ex. 7:14–12:30). The virgin birth (Matt. 1:18–25; Luke 1:26–38). Jesus turning water into wine (John 2:1–11). The list goes on! In each of these miracles, Robert Larmer explains, “it is evident that our increased knowledge of how natural causes operate has not made it easier, but more difficult, to explain them naturalistically.”4 Despite all the astonishing developments since the seventeenth century in physiology, biology, microbiology, chemistry, and anatomy, these biblical miracles are even less explicable in natural terms. A supernatural framework is not merely possible but necessary.
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The God of Both Nature and Miracles
However, there is a grain of truth to the God of the gaps critique. Christians have sometimes prematurely interpreted natural processes they do not understand as signs of divine miracle. Precisely the God of the gaps: the shoe fits. This theological mistake forgets that creation often surprises us, and we don’t always know how it works. Scientists need time to figure things out.
All the same, Christian theology has more to say. What kind of world do we live in? That’s the real issue: the nature of reality. At its heart is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This triune God is the Creator; all else is his creation. Rather than being independent of God, “nature” is always and ever pervaded by his presence. The invisible “laws of nature” are merely a function of God’s providence, the way he sustains the universe in existence moment by moment. Science is the human attempt to describe the world God created and sustains everywhere all the time: “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
In other words, there are no “gaps” in God’s creation. The material world is inseparable from Christ’s preeminence. “For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:16–17). God’s providence sustains everything that scientists investigate. There are no gaps in the natural world in which to insert God, for God is already there!
But miracles have happened in the past, and still happen today, though not because God suddenly shows up where he was absent before. Again, the providential God is always present! Genuine miracles occur when God decides to speak or act in the world differently from how he does all the time.5 He doesn’t do that capriciously or randomly; miracles are signs reminding us of God’s authority and giving us a foretaste of his everlasting kingdom intruding into the present age.
Science cannot explain such miracles, and that’s no fallacy. It’s simply the way of this world and the wonderful works of God. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the Creator who saturates his creation. He is also the God who parts the Red Sea, the God who heals the sick, and best of all—the message of the gospel—the God who raises the dead.
Notes:
- E.g., see William Dembski’s The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased Without Intelligence (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); Stephen C. Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Design (New York: HarperOne, 2009), and Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2013).
- For the fine-tuning argument in physics, see Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Wesley Richards, The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2004).
- Quoted in Robert Larmer, The Legitimacy of Miracle (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 83.
- Larmer, The Legitimacy of Miracle, 85.
- For a helpful analysis of the concept of design and whether we can “detect” divine miraculous activity over and above God’s ordinary providence, see Del Ratzsch, Nature, Design, and Science: The Status of Design in Natural Science (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001). See also Tim Morris and Don Petcher, Science & Grace: God’s Reign in the Natural Sciences (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2006), 115–37.
Hans Madueme is the author of Does Science Make God Irrelevant?.
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