God of the Gaps

There are aspects of life for which no explanations can be found in science, economics, history, sociology, or other areas of empirically or rationally obtained human knowledge. For many of those experiences and phenomena, the default explanatory fallback is that god is responsible. Whether the issue is the origin of life, what happened "before the big bang", the question of life after death, or how consciousness arises, when mankind has not discovered answers, the answers must be obtained from a higher power, or a more traditional, personal and anthropomorphic god. The god of the gaps argument is known as an "argument from ignorance" ("because we don't know, then we do know"). Or as Stephen Colbert reported about Bill O'Reilly on his TV show, "Like all great theologies, Bill's can be boiled down to one sentence: There must be a god, ... because I don't know how things work".

Trying to explain the unknown in terms of the incomprehensible can never increase our understanding. As Plato realized, to say that god did it is not to explain anything, but simply to offer an excuse for not having an explanation. (Plato, Cratylus, 426a). In a similar vein, the Norm Levan Panel on Intelligent Design concluded:

Invoking the supernatural is dead-end to further inquiry. Science cannot test supernatural explanations, since they are unfalsifiable, unverifiable, and can be altered to fit any situation post-hoc.

It is a common trap that is very easy to fall into. For many people it is uncomfortable to be faced with a situation for which there is no answer - a more psychologically satisfying position is to believe that there is an answer, but that answer is known only to god. For everything that we did not understand there was always a supernatural and often sentient explanation. Unfortunately for god, the number of things that he is responsible for has been shrinking for centuries, and the pace really began to pick up after the Copernican revolution, the Scientfic Revolution, the Enlightenment (thanks to thinkers such as Galileo, Locke, Newton, Hume, Spinoza, and many others). He is now seriously underemployed. The gaps of our knowledge were once very great, but many of these gaps have been closed. God no longer causes lightening to strike, stars to remain fixed in the sky, planets to move through the sky, earthquakes (or lack thereof), volcanic eruptions, good and/or bad weather, health and disease, sunrise/sunset, rainbows, tides, the change of seasons, plagues or cures for plagues, victory and defeat in battle, or the evolution of living creatures into separate species.

Science has done an incredible job explaining the previously unexplainable through impersonal, observable, and predictable forces. Evolutionary biology and anthropology indicate that morality, altruism, heroism, and other noble and subtle human virtues, as well as the less noble ones, probably have primitive correlates in other species. Behind everything we have so far observed in the external world, natural explanations have succeeded in demonstrating that previously deemed supernatural phenomena are actually the result of causes that can be reduced to space, time, material, and physical laws. The success of methodological naturalism in eliminating gaps and explaining what previously lied within them has shown beyond most doubt that Metaphysical Naturalism is almost certainly true. Humans have found naturalistic explanations for these formerly mysterious processes that used to be attributable to god. Yes, there are things that are not yet explainable.

Given the remarkable and uninterrupted success of naturalistic explanations and the miserable failure of theistic explanations, it is very likely that these remaining mysteries (dark matter, the origin of the universe, how life was created, consciousness, spontaneous order and emergent behaviors) will be be shown to be the result of natural causes, not supernatural. The trend towards taking god out of the causal chain continues with no sign of abatement. For the last few centuries those who relied on god as the explanation for physical phenomena have experienced a long and steady string of disappointments. Unfortunately for them, this is likely to continue.

God of the Gaps is a mistake that even the best of us can inadvertently fall into. Even Isaac Newton, one of the greatest minds in the last millenium did. He discovered the laws of orbital dynamics, which explained mathematically what Copernicus and Kepler first pioneered. But he just couldn't bring himself to believe that planets could go into motion by themselves - someone had to have placed them there:

"The six primary Planets are revolv'd about the Sun, in circles concentric with the Sun, and with motions directed towards the same parts, and almost in the same plane. […] But it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions. […] This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being."

He also thought that god's hand must occasionally readjust the orbits to get them back on track when they interfered with each other. In both of these examples — one related to the origin of the motions and the other related to the ongoing motion of the planets — Newton is employing textbook God of the gaps reasoning. Scientific theories are proposed to explain as much as possible, and then God is brought in to cover any remaining unexplained gaps in the explanation. We now know that purely naturalistic explanations can account for everything to do with orbits of planets. We must always be vigilant about making the same mistake.