"God of the gaps" is a theological perspective in which gaps in scientific knowledge are taken to be evidence or proof of God's existence. The "gaps" usage was made by Christian theologians not to discredit theism but rather to point out the fallacy of relying on teleological arguments for God's existence.
Some use the phrase as a criticism of theology, to mean that the
existence of a creator is almost always proposed for anything not
currently explained by science.
Origins of the term
From the 1880s, Friedrick Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part Two, "On Priests", said "... into every gap they put their delusion, their stopgap, which they called God."
The concept, although not the exact wording, goes back to Henry Drummond, a 19th-century evangelist lecturer, from his Lowell Lectures on The Ascent of Man. He chastises those Christians
who point to the things that science can not yet explain—"gaps which
they will fill up with God"—and urges them to embrace all nature as
God's, as the work of "an immanent
God, which is the God of Evolution, is infinitely grander than the
occasional wonder-worker, who is the God of an old theology."
In 1933, Ernest Barnes, the Bishop of Birmingham, used the phrase in a discussion of general relativity's implication of a Big Bang:
Must we then postulate Divine intervention? Are we to bring in God to create the first current of Laplace's nebula or to let off the cosmic firework of Lemaître's imagination? I confess an unwillingness to bring God in this way upon the scene. The circumstances with thus seem to demand his presence are too remote and too obscure to afford me any true satisfaction. Men have thought to find God at the special creation of their own species, or active when mind or life first appeared on earth. They have made him God of the gaps in human knowledge. To me the God of the trigger is as little satisfying as the God of the gaps. It is because throughout the physical Universe I find thought and plan and power that behind it I see God as the creator.
During World War II the German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer expressed the concept in similar terms in letters he wrote while in a Nazi prison. Bonhoeffer wrote, for example
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. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know.
In his 1955 book Science and Christian Belief Charles Alfred Coulson (1910−1974) wrote:
There is no 'God of the gaps' to take over at those strategic places where science fails; and the reason is that gaps of this sort have the unpreventable habit of shrinking.
and
Either God is in the whole of Nature, with no gaps, or He's not there at all.
Coulson was a mathematics professor at Oxford University as well as a Methodist church leader, often appearing in the religious programs of British Broadcasting Corporation. His book got national attention, was reissued as a paperback, and was reprinted several times, most recently in 1971.
It is claimed that the actual phrase 'God of the gaps' was invented by Coulson.
The term was then used in a 1971 book and a 1978 article, by Richard Bube. He articulated the concept in greater detail in Man come of Age: Bonhoeffer’s Response to the God-of-the-Gaps
(1978). Bube attributed modern crises in religious faith in part to the
inexorable shrinking of the God-of-the-gaps as scientific knowledge
progressed. As humans progressively increased their understanding of
nature, the previous "realm" of God seemed to many persons and religions
to be getting smaller and smaller by comparison. Bube maintained that Darwin's Origin of Species
was the "death knell" of the God-of-the-gaps. Bube also maintained that
the God-of-the-gaps was not the same as the God of the Bible (that is,
he was not making an argument
against God per se, but rather asserting there was a fundamental
problem with the perception of God as existing in the gaps of
present-day knowledge).
General usage
The term "God of the gaps" is sometimes used in describing the incremental retreat of religious explanations of physical phenomena in the face of increasingly comprehensive scientific explanations for those phenomena. Dorothy Dinnerstein includes psychological explanations for a person believing in a deity, particularly a male deity.
R. Laird Harris writes of the physical science aspect of this:
The expression, "God of the Gaps," contains a real truth. It is erroneous if it is taken to mean that God is not immanent in natural law but is only to be observed in mysteries unexplained by law. No significant Christian group has believed this view. It is true, however, if it be taken to emphasize that God is not only immanent in natural law but also is active in the numerous phenomena associated with the supernatural and the spiritual. There are gaps in a physical-chemical explanation of this world, and there always will be. Because science has learned many marvelous secrets of nature, it cannot be concluded that it can explain all phenomena. Meaning, soul, spirits, and life are subjects incapable of physical-chemical explanation or formation.
Usage in referring to a type of argument
The term God-of-the-gaps fallacy can refer to a position that assumes an act of God as the explanation for an unknown phenomenon, which is a variant of an argument from ignorance fallacy. Such an argument is sometimes reduced to the following form:
- There is a gap in understanding of some aspect of the natural world.
- Therefore the cause must be supernatural.
One example of such an argument, which uses God as an explanation of
one of the current gaps in biological science, is as follows:
"Because current science can't figure out exactly how life started, it
must be God who caused life to start." Critics of intelligent design creationism, for example, have accused proponents of using this basic type of argument.
It is important to note that while "God-of-the-gaps" refers to an
argument from ignorance regarding natural phenomena (e.g., That volcano
is erupting because the god of the earth is angry"), intelligent design
arguments (e.g., A mousetrap is irreducibly complex and did not evolve
by natural selection causes) are not necessary identical to the
"God-of-the-gaps" fallacy. Irreducible complexity is an argument from
knowledge, not ignorance.
God-of-the-gaps arguments have been discouraged by some
theologians who assert that such arguments tend to relegate God to the
leftovers of science: as scientific knowledge increases, the dominion of
God decreases.
Criticism
The
term was invented as a criticism of people who perceive that God only
acts in the gaps, and who restrict God's activity to such "gaps".
It has also been argued that the God-of-the-gaps view is predicated on
the assumption that any event which can be explained by science
automatically excludes God; that if God did not do something via direct
action, that he had no role in it at all.
The "God of the gaps" argument, as traditionally advanced by
scholarly Christians, was intended as a criticism against weak or
tenuous faith, not as a statement against theism or belief in God.
According to John Habgood in The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology,
the phrase is generally derogatory, and is inherently a direct
criticism of a tendency to postulate acts of God to explain phenomena
for which science has yet to give a satisfactory account. Habgood also states:
It is theologically more satisfactory to look for evidence of God's actions within natural processes rather than apart from them, in much the same way that the meaning of a book transcends, but is not independent of, the paper and ink of which it is comprised.
Both many theologians and scientists believe that it is a logical
fallacy to base belief in God on gaps in scientific knowledge. In this
vein, Richard Dawkins, an atheist, dedicates a chapter of his book The God Delusion to criticism of the God-of-the-gaps fallacy. Other scientists holding religious beliefs, such as Francis Collins, reject a God-of-the-gaps while embracing the idea of a God who fine tuned the universe precisely so human life could exist.
