GOD-OF-THE-GAPS

This is a popular approach in discussing the relationship of science and religion, and one that I have found attractive in the past. It basically says, “Whatever science can't explain, that is evidence of God's direct work.” It is often applied to the evolution of life.

The whole proposed course of evolutionary events begins with simple inorganic molecules and proceeds step-wise to simple organic molecules, to simple polyamide chains to RNA and DNA and then on to forms of life that become increasingly more complex. Most critics of evolution concentrate on the transformations from one species of life to another, looking for missing links where they can state that this is evidence for the existence of God. There certainly are gaps here but I believe that it is a basic mistake to concentrate in this direction. If we we want to look for gaps, we should be looking instead at prebiotic evolution before RNA and DNA appeared on the scene. There are at least two main reasons for me saying this. Number One: the prebiotic world is the domain of organic chemists such as myself, and organic chemistry is a very mature field that has been around for hundreds of years. The chance of any brand new insights into the fairly simple chemistry that supposedly occurred at this point is still possible but quite slim. So any gaps in knowledge that we have there today are likely to remain in the foreseeable future. By contrast, the various scientific fields related to life such as biochemistry, microbiology and paleontology are still in their relative infancy and the chance of rapidly filling in gaps in these areas is almost certain. Secondly, once molecules reach a certain level of complexity, they literally take on a life of their own because they become capable of self-arrangement so that complex developments can take place by strictly natural processes from that point on. The same is not true of prebiotic processes.

As a typical God-of-the-gaps example you may run into, consider the development of the eye, cited by many critics of evolution, as you can see from an internet picture captioned: “What if I told you that Darwin confessed that the human eye alone disproved evolution?” This implies strongly that Darwin knew that evolution was a lie, but he foisted the idea on the world anyway. And did Darwin in fact say anything like this? Here is what he actually said, also from the internet: “To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree” Note the word “seems” and the lack of a period at the end of the quote. That is because Darwin went on to say (and I'm condensing his words since he was rather long-winded):

“Yet reason tells me and certain facts suggest that minute inherited variations caused by changing environmental conditions over time can result in development of a complex eye from a simple sensitive nerve. Therefore the difficulty in believing it possible can hardly be considered real.”

Whether or not you believe in evolution, so far this example only proves the basic honesty of scientists like Darwin who freely admit, and are usually the first to point out, the gaps in their present understanding. And it also demonstrates that some Christian critics of science apparently have no problem at all in purposely using half truths or out-and-out lies to try to make their point. Getting back to the evolution of the eye, another problem with Christian critics is that if they are going to honestly engage in debate with scientists on their ideas, they need to know what they are talking about and keep up with the latest developments in science.

Coincidentally, a recent National Geographic issue had an article on this very subject. It reported the latest results from Dr. Dan-Eric Nilsson, who conducted experiments looking at simple flat light-sensitive cells on earthworms and exposing them to light to demonstrate that the cells in each subsequent generation became more and more thickened and curved until they developed into a crude lens (exactly as Darwin predicted). Nilsson calculates that a fully functioning camera-like lens could easily arise within the biological time frame. Whether or not you believe that this evidence is decisive is not the question. But if you are going to argue against it, you at least need to be up to date on your facts.

The basic practical problem with any God-of-the-gaps approach has been pointed out by atheists and Christians alike:

Atheist Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of the new Cosmos series and StarTalk on TV, states: “If that's how you want to invoke your evidence for God, then your God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time goes on.” You might expect that comment from an atheist, but...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of our 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.” And if Bonhoeffer is too liberal a Christian for you to trust...

Henry Drummond: “There are reverent minds who ceaselessly scan the fields of Nature and the books of Science in search of gaps – gaps which they fill up with God. As if God lived in gaps? What view of Nature or of Truth is theirs whose interest in Science is not in what it can explain but in what it cannot, whose quest is ignorance not knowledge?”(1908), quoted in Dictionary of Christianity and Science, p. 333. Drummond was author of The Greatest Thing in the World and a colleague of revivalist Dwight Moody.

There is one form of the God-of-the-gaps approach that I do wholeheartedly support because it is spelled out in the Bible and involves gaps in the evolution of mankind which science is incapable of filling. You might call it spiritual evolution. I can explain myself best by using as a parable the plot of Stanley Kubrick's movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Many of you have probably seen the movie. It starts out with a sequence in which some ape-like creatures encounter a black obelisk and touch it. Instantly, they take a forward leap in development and start using tools. However you chose to interpret Genesis 2, we are obviously taught that at some point in time God took pre-existing matter (whether it consisted of literal dirt or some sort of hominoid animal closely related to Homo sapians) and breathed a soul into it, raising it immediately to a much higher form of life than a mere animal.

Then, we fast-forward in time to the discovery of another obelisk on the dark side of the moon. When touched, it sends a beam into outer space pointing to the direction where mankind knows they need to send their next space mission. This can be seen as equivalent to the Day of Pentacost where the Holy Spirit was given to believers, raising them, and us, to an even higher plane in the evolutionary scheme by implanting in us the Holy Spirit as an internal guide to direct our spiritual progress. We truly become a New Creation.

After a series of adventures has reduced the crew of the ship to one lone astronaut, he is subjected to a series of visions which recap all the phases of earth's development from the very beginning until we see him next as an old man in a room containing another black obelisk. When he touches it, he is totally reborn.

So in the final scene, we see him as an embryo floating through space. This can be related to the final stage in mankind's development in which believers are actually given a new body that will never be subject to death and decay. These phases in spiritual development are the important ones for us to concentrate on, and they are not subject to change when new scientific facts come to light.