How to Avoid “God of the Gaps”

by Timm Simpkins on April 3, 2011

I have recently been having discussions with some theists that believe that there is evidence for a god, and they claim that their evidence is absolutely not “God of the gaps” arguments, and it got me thinking about what constitutes a god of the gaps.

What is “God of the Gaps”?

I thought that the phrase “God of the gaps” was pretty self explanatory.  It simply means substituting God for the answer to unanswered questions.  I find it strange that anyone could do this and not realize they were doing it if they understood that this is a problem for theists in the first place.

As an example, let’s look at the cosmological argument.  The cosmological argument, in addition to making assumptions about what cosmologists believe, proposes an answer to a question.  Namely that God created the universe.  Is this a god of the gaps argument?

When scientists propose a theory, they can make predictions about that theory based on the evidence provided.  Scientists can predict where we may find a certain type of fossil that has never been seen before by using the evidence of evolution, and then find it.  This is rather useful.

People like the theists I have been having discussions with are attempting to do this with things like the cosmological argument.  They claim that based on the evidence, we can predict a god exists.  I don’t think this is the same thing though.  In fact, I think it is a “God of the gaps” argument.

When these people propose that God did it, they get to a point in our knowledge that we are unable to fill with our current level of understanding about the universe, and immediately jump to saying that God is the only answer.  This isn’t using evidence to predict the existence of something, like a scientist would do at all, since we have no god to study and show that it is capable of doing such things.

With the evolution example, we have some known things that predict what the unknown is.  We know that there is a process that causes organisms to change over time.  We know that at a certain point in time we had certain types of animals, and at another point in time we have animals that were different.  The process of evolution says that there are are transitions over time, and that there should be something between the first animal and the later one, and it should have certain traits.

With cosmological arguments, there is no known process with predictive power to show that there is a god behind it.  In essence, the people arguing this are working backwards.  They are saying that there is some process, God, that creates universes, and the evidence for that is the lack of knowledge of any other process.  If that’s not a god of the gaps argument, I don’t know what is.

How to Avoid It

The process must be known.  You need to know how it was done in order to explain away any other explanation.  For instance, I could say an unknown, but completely non-intelligent force is responsible for making universes, and it holds just as much explanatory power as god.  Since the answers to all the questions about the unknown force would be the same as the answers for all the questions about God, there is absolutely no difference.  I could ask how god makes a universe, and you would have to answer, “I don’t know”.  With my non-intelligent force, the answer would be the same.

If we are looking for a force capable of doing something, we need to know what has been done.  What exactly happened when the universe expanded.  If we knew the exact, or even an approximate process, we could make some predictions about what properties the force that did it has.

Without one of these two things, there is no evidence for any unknown thing’s existence.  Any answer you come up with would necessarily be a god of the gaps argument.

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Tagged as: Apologetics, Cosmic Origins, philosophy

  • F.

    i’m sympathetic to the cosmological (specifically contingency) argument. it’s got premises that are intuitive to me. i think i believed it before i heard about it from someone else. but i’d agree with the guy who says that it does much less than some apologists make it out to do. for me, it shows that the physical world is not self-explanatory, and shows that something non-physical gave rise to it. whether it’s an intelligent force or not is not touched by the argument. thus, one can be an atheist and believe in it. one cannot, though, be a physicalist/naturalist and believe in it.

    let me look at one premise of your argument here:

    “we are unable to fill with our current level of understanding about the universe, and immediately jump to saying that God is the only answer.”

    can you expand on this? what is the gap in our knowledge about the contingency of the physical world? are there possible facts out there that, if we knew, we’d know that the physical world actually does exist by logical necessity? or, are you saying that there’s a gap in our knowledge as to what needs explanation, that what is contingent may not need explanation at all?

    • http://godlessons.com Godlessons

      There are always possible facts that we don’t know or understand. Are there facts out there that could make the physical world exist by logical necessity? I don’t know. It is entirely possible that there is a totally illogical reason for the existence of the universe. Logic works in our universe because we see cause and effect. There is no reason to believe that cause and effect are always in existence.

      But, to your final sentence, we certainly have a gap in our knowledge when it comes to the expansion event. We don’t know how all matter and energy could begin to expand. We don’t know what forces could have been at work to cause it. We don’t know what actually happened to the universe at that moment either, other than it expanded.

      To illustrate a little, I can look at a ripple in a pond, and if that’s all I see, it’s difficult to say that it was something hitting the surface of the water. The water itself could just have started undulating. On the other hand, if we can take all the measurements of everything other than the rock, it could be predicted that an object of a certain size, shape and mass hit the water to cause those ripples. Even if I had never seen a rock before, I could predict one exists based on the data collected.

      We have no way to do that with the expansion event. We can’t rewind time and see how the universe acted or reacted at that moment, so there is not enough data to precisely predict what kind of force would be necessary, if any at all. Anyone that claims they know is lying to you. All anyone can do is speculate.

      Now, if we come across a force that has the ability to do such things, we wouldn’t necessarily need to rewind time. We could observe how the force acts and fit what is known about that with what is known about how our universe began.

      You see, one or the other, the force or the reaction, needs to be known in order to say that something is evidence.

  • http://www.bromei.nl/natusaurus Jonathan

    “When these people propose that God did it, they get to a point in our knowledge that we are unable to fill with our current level of understanding about the universe, and immediately jump to saying that God is the only answer.”

    On the one hand, this is an acceptable description of the ‘God of the gaps’. However, at the same time, I don’t think it really describes what theists do when they attribute some inadequately understood phenomenon to God.

    One attribute common to many religions, and I would contend it is common to all, is the concept of mystery. I would claim that all religions that put faith in something that transcends humanity also give this transcendent reality a mysterious quality, something that is, principally or practically, unknowable. In addition, I think that most theists would agree that their God is essentially mysterious in this way.

    This means that when God is used to explain things we do not understand, the theist is merely redefining the mystery. This is not the same as an explanation. In fact, it is the exact opposite. Of course this has no predictive power; the only prediction it makes is that probing the mystery will bring new knowledge. Rather than being a delibirate attempt to stop scientific progress, it is an acknowledgement that the science in any period is limited. That’s a double-edged sword; boundaries can be pushed, but there’s also the somewhat infuriating suggestion that science cannot make true its implicit message of being able to exhaustively describe reality with its methods.

    The reason the God of the gaps has often been ridiculed is because of the inconsistent definition of God it results in. Once science has filled a gap in our knowledge, God’s role is diminished a bit more. Atheists, in that line of reasoning, are the people who take a shortcut and decide that science has explained so much that we can already see a God with nothing to do at all resulting from future science. That’s not why I am an atheist, but Dawkins, the “intellectually fulfilled” atheist, apparently is.

    However, the critique doesn’t hold because no theology claims that God is active only in processes we cannot understand. He’s either very detached (as in deism) or actively involved, through nature, the actions of people, fate, or miracles. Since natural processes are part of at least the first three, it would be daft to paint a picture of theism where God can only work in the things we don’t understand. The God of the Gaps is not a true God present in doctrine.

    It is, however, a consequence of how the relation of God towards nature was traditionally seen and has then evolved. As science progressed, successive generations were less likely to recognize fewer phenomena as inherently mysterious, making it seem as if God’s role diminished. That, however, is not how the changing role of God in nature should justifiably de viewed. I know this doesn’t go down well with some atheists, but I am convinced that in the past ages faith and religious doctrine has, through its continual promise of mystery, done more to make science progress than science itself.

    • http://godlessons.com Godlessons

      I am generally speaking of all the supposed “proofs” for the existence of god. Although in reality, none of them is a proof, they are still lacking in the fact that they find things that are either highly or totally mysterious to us and propose something that is entirely mysterious as the answer.

      I don’t think that these things are borne out theologically either, as I know of no text that conforms with general modern American dogma about the nature of God. I am only speaking to those arguments for god’s existence, where a proposal is made to solve something we don’t understand, be that cosmology, morality, logic, etc. About the only arguments that are made that aren’t speaking to gaps in our understanding of how things work are the ontological arguments, and they suffer from their own special set of problems.

      Now, to those people that believe in a god based solely on faith, which is the only thing nobody can argue against, other than to question why someone would put such weight on faith alone, I have no problem. They don’t go around clouding minds with ideas that aren’t what they are claimed to be.

      The reality is, the reason I started to stop believing had nothing to do with finding flaws in the religions themselves, or arguments for the existence of God either. It had to do more with the fact that there is no possible way to determine which religion is true, and if that’s the case, I can’t justify thinking any religion is true. The rest of my questioning came well after that realization. I don’t think science can ever give a full understanding of the universe. In fact, it absolutely can’t. I don’t think that people that make that stand are on very firm ground, since there are always going to be things we can’t know.

      As to how the ideas of gods have evolved, I find it rather strange how Christians will make claims about the nature of their god that are apparently extra-biblical. I have heard such things as, “No man can look upon God or he will be killed.” And “God is non-physical”. These things seem to be modern creations to put God out of the realm of examination, otherwise, how did Jacob wrestle with God in Genesis? How did God show Moses his “back parts”?

      • Jonathan

        All the supposed proofs of God I’ve seen can more justifiably be called justifications. Somewhere, the existence of God is always assumed or the definition of God is stretched to something that is universal and evidently true.

        These proofs don’t really interest me.

        What I was arguing however, is that the God of the gaps phenomenon is not the result of a supposed proof of God, but a consequence of how theists acknowledge the mystery in nature.

        I don’t know how Jacob wrestled with God in Genesis. That’s a complex theological issue, but there are a lot of experts who are more than willing to help you with it. Here in Amsterdam, there’s a group of Jesuits who are willing to offer time to talk to people. Perhaps there’s something similar in your neighbourhood. Also, there are many books about exegesis, but I cannot recommend any particular one.

  • Anonymous

    the atheist has a problem when it comes to the question of God. He says that God does not exist therefore any argument that assumes he does must be falacious. The fact that you don’t assume there is a god is just as potentially falacious as the proported belief of others that there is a God. Mathematically speaking there is no such thing as an indefinate serries of dependant causes. What ever is had to come from something. The evolutionist does not believe in spontanious generation of life from non living materiaL Somewhere back in the primordial soup there has to be someone or something that cooked the soup. You can call this the god of the gap or something else but you have to be honest with your self that the lack of a soup maker results in no soup.

    • http://godlessons.com Godlessons

      The fact that you don’t assume there is a god is just as potentially falacious as the proported belief of others that there is a God.

      So, we should presuppose the existence of all sorts of insanity? Should you assume that I am right when I tell you that my coffee pot steals socks? I would imagine you wouldn’t.

      Assuming the existence of a thing without evidence for that thing is not how we get to knowledge, it’s how we get to believing in all sorts of strangeness.

      Mathematically speaking there is no such thing as an indefinate serries of dependant causes. What ever is had to come from something. The evolutionist does not believe in spontanious generation of life from non living materiaL Somewhere back in the primordial soup there has to be someone or something that cooked the soup. You can call this the god of the gap or something else but you have to be honest with your self that the lack of a soup maker results in no soup.

      Why should we assume an endless chain of causality in the first place? You seem to think that everything needed a cause except for God. Why should we need to go that far? Nothing points to an all powerful being existing. It is arguable that there is a necessity of a first cause, but that first cause need not be intelligent by any means.

      There is no evidence, either physical or philosophical, that points to the existence of the being you claim exists. All you can do is point to somewhere that we have a gap in our knowledge and say, “Look, goddidit.” That’s not an intellectual point of view at all. It’s childlike.

      • Anonymous

        why should we assume that being child like is such a bad thing? My grandkids assume that I love them. Are they being foolish for be;ieving that what I said is indeed a fact? God said he loves us. Am I to call GOD a liar? You may say there is no eviedence that God exist. Maybe you havn’t been listening to what He has been telling you. open your ears and your mind to what he has said in his word and maybe the gaps caused by unbelief might just get filled

        • http://godlessons.com Godlessons

          Why would they assume you love them? I bet they have evidence.

          God didn’t say anything. Someone else wrote in a book that god loves you. You wouldn’t be calling God a liar, you would be calling the person who wrote it in the book a liar. Big difference.

          Faith is not evidence. You have faith that what you feel is reality. I have no such frailty. I know I can be fooled by my feelings. I have no problem admitting that.

          Now, if you were to say that you believe because you believe, I can accept that you believe, but I can’t consider that evidence.

    • http://www.bromei.nl/natusaurus Jonathan

      The assumption that God doesn’t exist isn’t in itself fallacious or problematic. Why would it be? If the belief in God is an acceptable base assumption, then the non-belief in God should be just as acceptable, or there wouldn’t be any point in believing in God. It’s not like believing in thinking; you have to accept it in some form, because it’s impossible to believe you’re not thinking anything at all.

      Unlike disbelief in thinking, disbelief in God is a valid starting point. The empirical problems (what caused the universe to be?) don’t change that; everyone’s free to choose with which assumptions she will tackle that question. I for one don’t think that belief in God makes the question less problematic, although it could, as I pointed out earlier, acknowledge the inherent mystery of the subject.

      Now, I really mean no offense to you and I am sorry I have to write this, but your ‘primordial soup’ assertments have to be the worst analogy I’ve read in years. I mean, God the Father and God the Shepherd are great and perhaps even inspiring examples of describing articles of faith, but “Praise to the Chef who cooketh our Primordial Soup” is just completely Monty Python. It’s not going to promote your religion, and that is putting it mildly.

      • Anonymous

        I do not call God the primordial cook. My argument is merely an assertion that there has to be one or something that began it all. I choose to believe that the one who began it all is the eternal God of the Bible, who created us and sent His Son to redeem us for himself. Not all illustrations require that they walk on all legs. The evolutionist says we came from primordial soup. I believe we were created by a loving GOD who formed us from the dust of the earth and breathed in us the breath of life.

        • http://godlessons.com Godlessons

          You believe that there is something that must have created the universe. Let’s grant that for a moment. Why then, does there not need to be a god maker out there? I’m sure you will presume that God can’t have a creator, but if you are willing to jump to that kind of step about God, that has no evidence for his existence, why can’t we leave it at the universe, or at least energy, of which there is overwhelming evidence for their existence? Why the necessity that the universe has a universe creator and not that a god has a god creator?

          • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=690392610 Andy Gray

            Very simply – it’s illogical – that’s why. You can’t have an infinite regress.

            Ever dealt with Alvin Plantinga’s work on the properly basic belief in the existence of God?

          • http://godlessons.com Godlessons

            I haven’t read much from Plantinga, but what I have read is laughable, like his modal argument.

            Having said that, I would still like to hear it in your own words why we can’t just stop at energy, or the universe? It makes no sense to jump to the belief in an unbelievable, undemonstrable, illogical being instead. It would stop the regression problem as well.

  • Stretmediq
  • Calamitous Intent

    A good point, and one that I take very seriously as a theist. I hope your discussions with theists steer away from this sort of logic and hit more depth in the future.

    • http://godlessons.com Godlessons

      Unfortunately, I can only think of one argument that isn’t a God of the gaps argument, but it is extremely faulty. The Ontological argument(in most of its forms) is the one, since it makes no presuppositions.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=690392610 Andy Gray

    Bwahahahahaha This is atheism of the gaps. lol

  • Udaybhanu Chitrakar

                               God of the Gaps Argument-From a New Perspective
                              
                       I will begin this article with two suppositions: 1) God has created this universe; 2) He has brought man in this universe with some purpose.
             I am not claiming here that these two suppositions are true, or that I can prove them to be true. But I want to show here that if these two suppositions are true, then God will always be the God of the gaps. Anyone who will be reading this article should not forget that there is an “if” clause in the last sentence.
              Now I begin with the supposition that God has created this universe. If God has created this universe, then He could have created it in four different ways: 1) He created it in such a way that there was no necessity for Him to intervene in it after creation, 2) After creation He intervened in it, but these interventions were a bare minimum, that is, He intervened only when these were absolutely necessary. In order to clarify my point here, I will say that He intervened only when He found that without His intervention the universe would come to a standstill, 3) He created the universe in such a way that in order to keep it going He had to make very frequent interventions in it, 4) God’s total intervention after creation.
             If it was the purpose of God to keep mankind crippled in every possible way, then He would have adopted either the third or the fourth way while creating the universe. This is because in these two cases man, in spite of his having sufficient intelligence and reasoning power, will fail to unveil the secrets of nature, because in almost every phenomenon of nature that he will decide to study he will ultimately find that there always remains an unknown factor, for which he will have no explanation. For him the book of nature will thus remain closed for ever. But if it were God’s purpose that man be master of His creation, then it is quite natural for Him that He would try to keep the book of nature as much open to him as possible, so that with the little intelligence he has been endowed with man will be able to decipher the language of nature, and with that acquired knowledge will also be able to improve the material conditions of his life. In that case God will try to adopt the policy of maximum withdrawal from His creation. He will create the universe in such a way that without His intervention the created world will be able to unfold itself. However that does not mean that He will never intervene. He will definitely intervene when without His intervention the created world would become stagnant. In such a scenario man will be able to give an explanation of almost all physical events in scientific language. But in those cases where God has actually intervened, he will fail to do so.
        So I think there is no reason for us to be ashamed of the “God of the gaps” hypothesis. Yes, if God has created the universe, and if God’s purpose was that man be master of His creation, then He would try to keep as little gap in His creation as possible. But the minimum gap that would be ultimately left can never be bridged by any sort of scientific explanation. God will also reside in that gap. Why should we be ashamed of that?
          The whole matter can be seen from another angle. Those who strongly believe that God has created this universe also believe that He has created it alone. Now is it believable that a God, who is capable of creating such a vast universe alone, is not capable enough to keep a proof of His existence in the created world? So I think it is more reasonable to believe that while creating the universe God has also kept a proof of His existence in something created. This proof is open to us all, but we have not found it, because we have not searched for it. So even if it is the case that God has never intervened in the created world after its creation, still then there will be a gap in this natural world, purposefully left by God, for which science will find no explanation. This will be the ultimate gap that can only be filled up by invoking God.
                              So it is quite logical that a God who will create man with some purpose will always prefer to be the God of the gaps. Yes, if we were really created by some God, and if it was not God’s desire that we be some sort of semi-savage beast, then it makes quite a good sense if I say that in that case God would try to keep the book of nature as much open to us as possible (policy of maximum withdrawal). In such a case man will also be able to explain almost everything of nature without invoking God. But then this “ability to explain almost everything of nature without invoking God” will not prove that there is no God, because it might also be the case that this ability itself is God’s design, God’s plan.
             Here I will give an example in order to make my point more clear: Let A be one most obvious fact of nature, and let D be one natural phenomenon that follows from A. Let us also suppose that D does not directly follow from A, but there are some intermediate steps. A causes B, then B causes C, then C causes D. In order to be more precise here let us say that A means dark clouds gathering in the sky, and that D means lightning. We know very well that lightning does not always take place whenever there are dark clouds in the sky. So we will modify the above chain from A to D in this way: A causes B, but B does not always cause C. Instead of C, it sometimes causes C1. When B causes C1, there is no lightning. But when B causes C, in that case only lightning occurs. Now it might be the case that there is a God, and that after creating the universe He has not intervened in it at all. So all the processes from A to D will be natural. In that case if man wills then one day he will be able to understand the whole natural process here. He will understand what lightning is, how and when it occurs, and with that knowledge it can be hoped that one day he will also be able to protect himself and his property from lightning. Now let us suppose that after creation God has frequently intervened in his creation, but his intervention was not total, but only partial. Let us also suppose that God has chosen the above case of lightning for His intervention. That means lightning can never take place unless He wills. When He decides to punish mankind by sending lightning, then only B can cause C, otherwise in every other case B causes C1. In this case the whole chain from A to D will be broken at B. Man will never understand how B can naturally cause C, and so he will never understand how D naturally follows from A. So lightning will forever remain a mystery to him. Now let us suppose that God’s intervention in this universe is total, that is, behind every natural phenomenon there is hand of God. In that case man will understand nothing of nature, and he will remain as ignorant as a savage. In this world his fate will be no better than birds and beasts, and his condition will remain as miserable and helpless as those birds and beasts in the face of natural calamities. But if God wills that man be almost equal to Him in the knowledge of things in nature, and if He also wills that man live in this world with some dignity and not just like birds and beasts, then He will create the universe in such a way that almost all the phenomena in nature can take place naturally without His intervention. In that case He will adopt the policy of maximum withdrawal. He will intervene only in those cases where His intervention is absolutely necessary. One such case is genetic code. Genetic code is information code, and those who believe that there is a God try to make a point here. They say that information code cannot naturally arise from space, time, force, field, matter, energy. Some intelligence is required, and nature does not possess that intelligence. Only God possesses that intelligence, and therefore only God can generate information code. If what they are saying is true, then I will say that man will never understand how information code can arise from space, time, force, field, matter, energy. It will forever remain a mystery to him.
                               My thesis presented here has at least one merit. It can successfully explain as to why nature has opened her secrets to man, whereas proponents of accidental origin of man cannot give any reason as to why nature has done so. If their theory was correct, then man also could have led a life just like the other higher primates, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutangs. That man has not done so and that instead he has been able to raise a civilization and lead a life with some dignity and self-respect shows that nature has taken a special care for us and equipped our brain accordingly.                        
                             
     

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