What is ‘God of the gaps’?
Whenever there is a gap in scientific understanding, where science falls short in explaining anything, there is a tendency (especially by the people with religious inclinations) to regard this gap as an indication of existence of God. It becomes an opportunity to insert the presence of a divine creator. This theological tendency suggests that these scientific gaps represent moments of divine intervention or influence and are indications of the existence of God.
It looks like an old-fashioned thought and seem to be a doomed theological approach, but it is very much alive in the minds of many even today.
Newton’s role in popularizing ‘God of the gaps’
God-of-the-gaps easily get seeded if you ask a few basic questions:
- Can current science figure out exactly how life started?
- Is not the solar system with the precise arrangements of each planet an “Intelligent design”?
The theological concept gained popularity with a very famous Issac Newton’s explanation in his book ‘The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy’:
“This most elegant system of the sun, planets, and comets could not have arisen without the design and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being. And if the fixed stars are the centers of similar systems, they will all be constructed according to a similar design and subject to the dominion of the One … so that they will not fall upon one another as a result of their gravity.
HE has placed them at immense distances from one another.”
He was convinced that the Cosmos is an imprint and direct manifestation of God’s mind and plan. Newton made direct use of the God-of-the-gaps approach, suggesting that God only can explain something that science can’t.
How is the “God of the gaps” of Newton countered?
God got compressed and squeezed into smaller gaps as science advanced. The example of solar system by the French physicist and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace in the early 1800s is famous. Laplace was the first to show that planetary orbits are stable by his nebular model and showed the purely physical origin of the solar system based on the contraction of a huge spinning gas cloud due to gravity. This spinning ball gets flattened at the poles and grows at the equator. It may even “break” into separate rings where the planets would form.
Napoleon and Laplace
A famous incident between Laplace and Napoleon Bonaparte lends how the pendulum swings between a scientific advancement, the gaps that are still there and God’s entry. Laplace was a former professor who had examined and passed the 16-year-old Napoleon Bonaparte.
Laplace gave a copy of his Celestial Mechanics to Napoleon that described the motions of the planets and comets in the solar system. Napoleon had invited Laplace to his palace. After understanding Laplace in his opus magus, he congratulated him but expressed his astonishment at not seeing God mentioned in the manuscript.
Laplace gave a succinct famous answer that tells it all: “Sir, I have no need for that hypothesis.” However, there is a catch. Laplace didn’t explain where the gas cloud came from. Did God put it there?
Similarly, it seems that God-of-the-gaps fills in for the mechanism of formation of stars and galaxies. But the modern theory seems to squeeze God out. As per this theory, the stars and galaxies formation can be done with a combination of 3 ingredients:
- Normal matter like electrons and protons
- Dark matter (which is six times more abundant than normal matter, though we don’t yet know its composition)
- Dark energy (which is three times more than dark matter, though we don’t really understand it too).
Add some tiny values of the fields that existed then in the earliest history of the universe and we should be able to reproduce the universe.
How is the God-of-the-gaps criticized?
In his book ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, Part Two, Friedrich Nietzsche says, “Into every gap the Priests have put their delusion, their stopgap, which they called God.” The case for the existence of God basically relies on the gaps in human understanding and ignorance. As scientific knowledge advance, these gaps shrink, potentially weakening the argument for God’s existence.- IGNORANCE FALLACY: There is an inherent flaw in the reasoning that just because something is not currently explained by science; it must be attributed to a supernatural cause. We assume an act of God as the explanation for an unknown phenomenon. For example, because current science can’t figure out exactly how life started, it must be God who caused life to start.
As per 1978 article ‘Man come of Age: Bonhoeffer’s Response to the God-of-the-Gaps’ by Richard Bube, the Darwin’s Origin of Species is a “death knell” of God-of-the-gaps. The God-of-the-gaps he talks is not the same as the God of the Bible. That is, he is not arguing against God per se, but rather asserting that there was a fundamental problem with the perception of God as existing in the gaps of present-day knowledge.
What William Dembski, the American proponent of intelligent design said is striking, “Scientists rightly resist invoking the supernatural in scientific explanations for fear of committing a god-of-the-gaps fallacy (the fallacy of using God as a stop-gap for ignorance).
Yet, scientists are in danger of committing a logically equivalent fallacy – the “chance-of-the-gaps fallacy.” Chance, like God, can become a stop-gap for ignorance.”
God-of-the-gaps in medical science
The Pandora’s box
An amusing entry of God-of-the-gaps can be learnt from the Greek mythology. God Jupiter was angry when man accepted the gift of fire from Prometheus, a fire god and divine trickster, who had stolen fire from heaven for the mortals. Zeus, the sky and thunder god and the king of gods residing on Mount Olympus put all the diseases, sorrows, vices and crimes into a box and gave it to Hermes (the Roman Mercury), the god of translators and interpreters, for custody. Mercury soon became very tired from carrying his burden. He gave it to Epimetheus for safe keeping. Epimetheus was the Titan god of afterthought and excuses and the husband of Pandora (Greek: “All-Gifts”), the first woman. Pandora desperately wanted to know what was in the box. Once Epimetheus was gone, she opened the box, and all of the ills of the world flew out and spread throughout the human world. The God-of-the-gaps concept was born.
Throughout the history, people have authorized many medical acts to God, all of which can be explained if not almost fully, by pretty basic science.
One of the earliest examples is of Leprosy, reported as early as 600 BC in India, China and Egypt. It was considered a curse of God, incurable and disfiguring, associated with sin. It did not kill, but neither did it seem to end. People with leprosy were banished from family and neighbors.
The biblical leprosy, Hebrew tsara’ath, occurs 68 times in the Bible. It was a powerful symbol of sin’s spread and its horrible consequences. All this ended when the bacteria causing it was discovered in 1873 by the Norwegian physician Gerhard Hansen who proved that leprosy was an infectious disease and not a curse. Improved socioeconomic conditions and medicines led to a dramatic fall in the number of new cases.
Another example is of bubonic Plague outbreaks in Europe between 1347 and the late 1700s. Earlier it meant that the gods are displeased and punishing humanity. Later it was strongly believed to be caused by “miasmas (poisoned air),” that emanated from swamps where they could be inhaled. One of the popes even kept large fires burning at both ends of the room he worked in order to counteract the miasmas. Of course, the smoke and aromatic herbs were ineffective, because the plague was primarily spread by flea bites harbored on rats with Yersinia pestis and they could have been prevented had the standards for hygiene been elevated.
Even Hippocrates, the “Father of Medicine” (480–323 BC) clearly warned against God filling the gaps in epilepsy, “People think that epilepsy is divine simply because they don’t have any idea what causes epilepsy. But I believe that someday we will understand what causes epilepsy, and at that moment, we will cease to believe that it’s divine. And so it is with everything in the universe.”
If you think that God-of-the-gaps was a concept of yesteryear, it will shock you how God still fills up ‘the gaps’ even today! In a survey in May 2023 conducted by the NGO Child Rights and You (CRY) on the occasion of World Menstrual Hygiene Day on 28 May, 12% young girls of the 4,000 girls aged 10-17 years from 38 districts in India did not know the correct cause of menstruation. They said it is a curse from God or caused by a disease. 4.6% of the girls were not at all aware about the cause of menstruation!
The God-of-the-gaps argument tends to relegate God to the leftovers of science, because, as the scientific knowledge increases, the dominion of God decreases.
So, decade by decade, century by century, with burps and hiccups, sometimes slow and sometimes with gallop, superstitions have been coming down. It has never reversed its course, meaning, never has a scientific discovery been deemed false and replaced by a mystical explanation.
Argumentum Ad Nauseam
Each time science plugs gaps, additional smaller gaps form. When each gap is filled, the believer hops onto the next gap. This continues ad nauseam, because human knowledge will never be able to explain everything.
The ultimate God-of-the-gaps that is likely not possible to bridge is “Well, God started everything”, because, even if we somehow prove that our universe came out from the “big bang”, one will always ask, “yes, but what created that magic?”
These prove the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel’s 1931 incompleteness theorems, widely considered one of the greatest intellectual achievements. The Gödel’s theorem state that ‘in any reasonable mathematical system there will always be true statements that cannot be proved.’ So, God will always have a little gap left to hide in, but there will be an inconsistency.
ABIOGENESIS as God-of-the-gaps
ABIOGENESIS is the process by which life arises naturally from non-living matter. Again, “what created that magic?”
One world famous experiment is startling to fill this God-of-the-gaps.
The Miller–Urey chemistry experiment of 1952 is regarded as a groundbreaking experiment, and the classic experiment investigating abiogenesis.
It simulated the conditions thought to be present in the atmosphere of the early, prebiotic Earth, to test the hypothesis of chemical origin of life under those conditions. The experiment used water, methane, ammonia, hydrogen in the ratio 2:2:1 and an electric arc (the latter simulating lightning) considered found in the early earth’s atmosphere. They excluded Oxygen as Oxygen would make the formation of organic molecules from non-organic molecules impossible.
The idea was that the early earth’s atmosphere was able to produce amino acids (the organic building blocks needed to form proteins or RNA required for life) from inorganic matter. The experiment provided the first evidence that building blocks of life could form in the primordial soup from inorganic molecules.
After Miller’s death in 2007, scientists examining the preserved sealed vials from the original experiments showed that 20 different amino acids were produced in Miller’s original experiments.
How to strike a balance between the ‘Gaps and God’?
This is a question that needs such an answer that we can live with it.
The chasm between the gaps and the gods can be best filled up and lived in a fulfilling way through the following answers:
- “We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know.” Learn this quick! Robert Ingersoll, the American politician known as “the great agnostic” said it right that “No one infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, the unknown, and the incomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.”
- “Either God is in the whole of Nature with no gaps, or He’s not there at all.” 2 Learn to realize God in the whole of Nature. The whole is holy.
- Science can explain the mechanisms and dynamics of the physical universe. But science can’t explain the purpose of the universe. “We lose meaningful experiences of the world of we pit science and religion against each other.” Learn not to pit them.
God’s domain is in the spiritual world, a realm not possible to explore with the tools and language of science. It must be examined with the heart, the mind, and the soul.
References
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, letter to Eberhard Bethge, 29 May 1944, pages 310–312, Letters and Papers from Prison edited by Eberhard Bethge, translated by Reginald H. Fuller, Touchstone, ISBN 0-684-83827-3, 1997.
- Charles Coulson 1955 book ‘Science and Christian Belief’: last reprinted in 1971. It is claimed that the actual phrase ‘God of the gaps’ was invented by Coulson. Coulson, Fontana edition, p. 35.
- The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Francis Collins.
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