I have something to say on the god of the gaps, but my break is ending. I’ll have to say it tonight.
True, and unavoidable but I’d suggest that we mostly end up with many questions about small details even as we come to solid conclusions and gain knowledge about the big concepts.
Take early hominids and the concept of the “missing link”. Every time a “missing link” is provided it also increases the number of subsequent “missing links” to 2.
Also, each fossil of that type will itself throw up new and interesting questions. Questions we didn’t have before because we didn’t have the fossil that prompted it. Even so, against that backdrop of minor uncertainties we build a solid picture of hominid evolution.
What I think is undeniable is that, whenever there is empirical knowledge to be gained it has always been the scientific method that provided the means to access it. That will be the same for all the myriad small gaps that follow no matter how much theists try to jam their gods in there.
Right, which is why god isn’t in the heavens or the waters anymore. Now, he’s in the quantum realm.
And it doesn’t mean that it’s not finite, and that we are not approaching complete knowledge either. Maybe there is an end, we figure it out, and say, “Oh, cool, I guess we are done here.”
I went through the god of the gaps phase in my deconversion. Kept trying to find a place where he fit. Just always around the next corner in my knowledge.
I didn’t gain full knowledge of the universe to rule out any hiding places left, I just found the whole idea to be ridiculous, and finished my conversion to atheism.
I unexpectedly got another break. The hypothesis that the world was created last Wednesday and that all evidence to the contrary was also created last Wednesday cannot be disproven. Solopsism cannot be disproven. I find both ideas rather silly, but ultimately they can only be put aside by an act of faith. Last time I checked we can deduce what happened up until an incredibly tiny fraction of a second (I think it’s a zero, a decimal point, thirty two more zeroes and then a one) after the Big Bang. Closer than that all laws of time and space break down. There will always be a last and final gap that is scientifically unknowable. Not just regarding the Big Bang but in other things as well. There will always be a last step that has to be an act of faith.
not really.
Saying “I don’t know” is not an act of faith.
This is what I get for rushing and for editing a long post (I mentioned Le Guin again. This time, it was her story Things) into a much shorter one.
What I meant (but apparently failed to say) was- There will always be things, no matter how small they may be, that are knowable only by faith. Before anybody objects, I realize that to atheists that isn’t really knowing. To the faithful, it is.
So did you change your mind about the chocolate?
I don’t know why, but there’s a part of me that refuses to let go of the concept of God. Maybe it’s my Catholic upbringing, maybe it’s a concern about the atheist tombstone: “All dressed up and no place to go.” I’m very much an atheist now about most things religious, just as I’m cynical about conspiracy theories, cults, or other mentally ill people who’ve “found the answer.” But I still believe in some kind of life force that drives everything that I’ve come to think of as God. Not the traditional paternal God that I was raised with but something else, something mysterious. I guess maybe I still need a little bit of Cosmic mystery in my life.
But the God of the Gaps argument isn’t that we don’t know something, but that the only possible explanation is God. Uncaused cause for the beginning of the universe, for instance. To combat it we don’t have to know for sure, we just need some plausible explanations, especially when we know for sure that we won’t know for sure.
The model the believers seem to have is that scientists just throw up their hands at these issues. I’ve read half a dozen speculations on the origin of the Big Bang - how plausible they are I can’t say, not being a cosmologist. I’ve yet to see a creationist with any apparent knowledge of any of these.
Which is an important point. What we call “religion” is a manifestation of what seems to me a near universal impulse in humans to want to live for the sake of “something greater than yourself”. Whether it’s a theology, an ideology, the People, a country, family, community, identity, “Justice”. It can involve what most of us refer to colloquially as “believing in God”, but it may not.
Right. It’s really question one.
And they obviate the existence of many believers who are evolutionary scientists.
Meanwhile God-of-the-gaps is, to me, a debasement of the God concept, at least in the JudeoChristian tradition. The God (YHWH, the Trinity, Allah) is supposed to be a transcendent beingness, beyond time, space, and physical laws. Heck what is supposed to be impressive and awe us is that such an incomprehensibly beyond-our-grasp beingness should even give a flying hoot to look our way (“what is man that you are mindful of him”) and even try to communicate in some way comprehensible to us. If you’re looking for God “in the gaps” you are already failing, some would say.
Am I off base, or are the gaps of the “God of the gaps” analogous to plot holes in a work of fiction?
Things we don’t yet have scientific explanations for would be like the “plot holes” where there could conceivably be an explanation that doesn’t contradict what we know of the story, but we’re just not provided with that explanation, even if we should have been.
Genuinely unfillable plot holes, that can’t be explained away, would be like events that are genuinely impossible without divine intervention of some sort. If there were indeed this sort of plot holes in reality, it would be evidence of some sort of God, but maybe of a God who was bad at plotting.
I’m reminded of the classic “A wizard did it.” Xena scene from The Simpsons.
I’m reminded of Douglas Adams ( I can’t remember the exact words) “Some speculate that everytime somebody figures the universe out, God replaces it with something more confusing. Some further speculate that this has happened many times- which is why the universe is so odd and complicated.”
Cribbing,
God-of-the-gaps fallacy is a variant of the argument from ignorance fallacy.
Usually following this form:
There is a gap in understanding of some aspect of the natural world.
Therefore, the cause must be a god.
One example of such an argument is as follows: “Because current science can’t figure out exactly how life started, it must be God who caused life to start.”
Followed by, when we do figure out exactly how life started: “Because current science can’t figure out exactly how the precursors of life started, it must be God who caused the precursors of life to exist.”
Rinse and repeat.
My journey:
~0-3: Non-believer. Too young to consider the premise.
~3-10: Believer. Premise accepted at face value. Authority figures are smart and why would they lie?
~10-15: Believer with Doubts. Premise doesn’t make much sense. Authority figures don’t know everything and sometimes lie (avid Mad Magazine reader).
~15-55: Non Believer. Premise doesn’t make any sense. Authority figures are mostly clueless and often lie.
~55-Present: Non-believer with Doubts. Premise doesn’t make much sense. Authority figures are mostly clueless and often lie, but some type of god could exist in the realm of quantum physics despite authority figure input.
Interesting. Throughout my childhood I sporadically attended local church/synagogue services with friends out of curiosity. I remember always being surprised that the people in attendance believed all the crazy stuff that was part of their religion. Never once have I ever thought, “hey, this makes sense”.
IMO, this is roughly the journey I would expect more people to take than seems to have been the case.
Because abiogenesis happens as a random process, it almost certainly involves a lot of variables and different sets of environmental conditions. I doubt we will ever know the exact sequence of events that led to the emergence of our particular biosphere, so there will always be a grey area.
Perhaps if we eventually travel to distant planets in other solar systems, we could establish some sort of classification system for the various different types of abiogenesis, and maybe even observe it in progress in some locations. But I doubt very much that the process would be exactly the same on any two planets in the Hubble Volume.
I was also an avid Mad Magazine reader, and I’m sure it helped me to be skeptical and critical about authority figures, politics, advertisement, pop culture, etc. But I also had authority figures in my own life, especially my parents, who were basically smart, knowledgeable, thoughtful, honest, and sincere. At least, they seemed that way at the time, and I’ve never in the course of my life had serious reason to doubt that assessment, though I realize they were fallible and imperfect.
I can’t imagine how it would feel to believe that you know God personally. That the very creator of the universe is someone who listens to you, and is on your side. Must be a warm feeling.
I’ll never know, because the idea always seemed fanciful to me, even as a child going to Catholic school. I don’t mean that to sound superior, I just couldn’t see it as anything other than mythology.
As an adult, the various philosophical arguments convinced me that theism is flawed. But long before I was aware of such arguments I already didn’t take it seriously.
This is me.