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“The Atheist's God of the Gaps”
Categories: evidences, evolutionAtheists mock the Christian’s “God of the Gaps,” as they term it. Whenever we find a gap in science that we cannot explain, they fault us for quickly attributing it to God.
Carl Sagan wrote in The Demon-Haunted World:
“Hippocrates of Cos is the father of medicine. He is still remembered 2,500 years later for the Hippocratic Oath (a modified form of which is still here and there taken by medical students upon their graduation). But he is chiefly celebrated because of his efforts to bring medicine out of the pall of superstition and into the light of science. In a typical passage Hippocrates wrote: ‘Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things.’ Instead of acknowledging that in many areas we are ignorant, we have tended to say things like the Universe is permeated with the ineffable. A God of the Gaps is assigned responsibility for what we do not yet understand” (pp. 7-8).
Sagan makes the logical error of creating a false binary choice: either you can believe that God is responsible for things we don’t understand, or you can believe in science. Obviously, since many scientists also believe in God, these are not mutually exclusive positions. We believe in God who created science!
But the Atheist (who doesn’t believe in a god) must also pay homage to a higher power or principle than what can be directly observed in nature. As he laughs at the “backward” Christian who attributes all things to God’s power, he waves off troubling questions by appealing to his own god of the gaps.
How does the Atheist explain the universe, life, and morality?
Dan Barker once pastored churches and wrote religious music, fully participating in charismatic worship out west. However, in the 1980s he was “deconverted” (as he puts it) to atheism and became a champion evangelist for the anti-god cause. “I am a biological organism in a natural environment, and that is all there is,” he wrote in godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America’s Leading Atheists, p. 42. (Yes, it’s godless with a lower-case g.)
In Barker’s chapter on “Refuting God,” he writes,
“Many or most cosmologists are now convinced that some kind of multiverse is likely. A multiverse is a collection of universes, and there are many scenarios.” (p. 107).
“We have not proved such a multiverse of universes yet. All we know is that they are plausible, and that there is at least one. The important point here is that if there is more than one, then the numerator of the fraction that determines probability rises, making the ‘fine tuning’ of the constants (if they vary) to allow for life by random chance more likely” (p. 108).
In other words, Barker and these theorists use the all-powerful if to increase the odds in their favor. Nothing has yet been proved, but if it were true, it would make the creationist’s “fine-tuning of the universe” argument less powerful. I’m not a certified scientist, but I’m pretty sure that’s not how science works.
Barker answers the creationist’s argument that it’s highly improbable such complex life could have occurred through evolution:
“Using probability after the fact is like a lottery winner saying, ‘It was indeed highly unlikely that out of the millions of entrants I could have picked the right ticket, therefore someone must have caused me to win.’ It is indeed highly unlikely that any particular person can be predicted to be the winner—which is exactly what each contestant is trying to do when he or she obtains a ticket. But it is not at all unlikely that one person will win. In fact, we would consider it a true miracle if no one ever won a lottery.” (p. 110)
Now that is a good example of begging the question! It’s as if to say, “Well, since we are here by the process of evolution, I suppose that defeats your theory.”
The evolutionist must depend upon his god “enough time” in both the past and the future because it turns out he does not know anything. He speaks as if he is in lock-step agreement with all true scientists, and together they have proven these things. But when you dive in, you find suggestions and possibilities piled upon unproven theories. My translation of what the evolutionists are saying goes: “My dear scientifically illiterate Christian, if all the things we have dreamed up really did happen the way we hope they did, then we have explained away all of your points. Given enough time in the past, complex life as we know it today could have come about via evolution. Given enough time in the future, we will have the evidence to prove us right and you wrong. So trust us.”
Barker’s fictitious creationist continues to argue, “Everything has a cause, and every cause is the effect of a previous cause. Something must have started it all. God, who exists outside of time and space, is the eternal first cause, the unmoved mover, the creator and sustainer of the universe” (pp. 114-5).
Barker answers, “The major premise of this argument, ‘everything had a cause,’ is contradicted by the conclusion that ‘God did not have a cause.’ You can’t have it both ways…” (p. 115).
Yes, you can have it both ways if it is true. Just saying “you can’t have it both ways,” doesn’t automatically change reality. We have a book in which God has communicated to us and told us He created everything in heaven and on earth. This is not a theory for us. We did not dream this one up. We know it is true because God revealed it to us, which is the only way we could have known. This divine communication Barker has rejected completely, and now he must come up with all kinds of theories and if-statements and bad arguments blended smoothly so as to appear logical. Barker rejects the above argument as illogical because he has already rejected the premise that anything exists outside of the material universe (unless it’s more universes, of course).
Actually…perhaps I spoke too soon. A few chapters later Barker toys with the idea that something could exist outside the known universe—something that did Not Begin to Exist (NBE, as he termed it).
“But perhaps there could be something outside the natural universe that would be accommodated by NBE, besides God” (p. 133).
“If theists, however, allow the theoretical possibility of an impersonal transcendent object in NBE—and it seems they must allow this, or some other nontheistic hypothesis—and if they have not convincingly eliminated it (or them) from the set of actual items in NBE, then they must remain open to the possibility that the origin of the universe could be explained in a purely naturalistic manner” (p. 134).
“Who is to say that personality could not have arisen from an impersonal cause? The impersonal might be more complex. If this is impossible, theists must explain why” (p. 135).
Notice what he’s doing here. He throws out more wild theories and then tells creationists we have a duty to consider these possibilities. Why should we when we already have the most plausible answer staring us in the face? This man is a loose cannon on a ship—every time it fires, the canon knocks over the crowd behind it and ends up facing another random direction.
Years ago, Darwin looked to the future for validation of his theories of macro evolution. He just knew we would discover all kinds of transitional fossils which would fill in the gaps on his evolutionary tree.
“Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.” (The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, 1859, p. 220).
Fast forward almost 200 years, and we still have not filled in those gaps. Instead, we have discovered biological complexity far beyond what even Darwin understood, making his macro-evolution theories less and less likely (and evolutionists to borrow more and more billions of years from their god of the gaps to make up for it).
Richard Dawkins, another evangelist for atheism, writes in his acclaimed book The Blind Watchmaker:
“Given infinite time, or infinite opportunities, anything is possible. The large numbers proverbially furnished by astronomy, and the large timespans characteristic of geology, combine to turn topsy-turvy our everyday estimates of what is expected and what is miraculous” (p. 139).
The rest of the chapter Dawkins gives over to wild speculation about how spontaneous generation might have happened and the probabilities involved.
Atheists have their own gods of the gaps. Two are called “enough time” and “if.” It’s actually quite hilarious when you sit back and observe the lengths to which they go attempting to explain reality. You can quickly tell they do not have solid footing. Their house is built on shifting sand. Many of these men brilliantly defend their positions, from the world’s standards of brilliance, and it is a shame they have squandered the gifts God has given them. They bring darkness to the world, not light. They destroy hope in the promised life ahead. They severely limit themselves and all who would believe in their preaching. They believe their thoughts are deep, but by rejecting their Creator they reject true life and true light. Science cannot fill their gaps.
God’s kingdom will overcome all these tiny fiefdoms. May God reign, and may Jesus route and overthrow the enemy of His people.
