GOD OF THE GAPS, REVISITED

 God-of-the-Gaps Theory Updated

About one year ago I wrote a post titled “God of the Gaps.” An update is in order since recently (10/7/26) it was announced that the Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai for providing a possible chemical mechanism for how life on earth could turn out naturally to be almost exclusively composed of one-sided molecules (i.e., Imagine two molecules which are mirror-images of one another but not superimposable on one another, like your left and right hands). Because homochirality was long cited as a major hurdle for purely materialistic explanations of the origin of life, this issue involves some major implications regarding why the basic building blocks of life as we know it on earth are (almost) exclusively composed of “left handed” rather than “right-handed.” molecules.

As I said earlier, the main practical problem with any God-of-the-gaps approach has been pointed out by atheists and Christians alike:

Atheist Neil deGrasse Tyson 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 to be trusted., consider the following:

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.

Getting back to the recent Nobel Prize for Chemistry, the recipients' work is certainly worth such recognition since it should prove to be of great benefit to medical researchers who are investigating new cures for diseases. However, if you read news reports, some of them may in addition give the erroneous impression that another such “gap” in the Theory of Evolution has now been completely filled in, excluding God from yet another part of our universe. And I am just as sure that there are plenty of preachers out there who will cite this work (assuming they even find out about it) as yet another glaring example of how all scientists are atheists hell-bent on destroying Christianity through any dishonest trick they can muster..

I myself am a PhD organic research chemist who wrestled unsuccessfully for over two years, using all the modern tools available at the time, to carefully control all my reaction conditions, in attempts to carry out a much more simple but somewhat related task in chemical synthesis, the stereospecific derivatization of n-alkanes at the terminal carbon. But even my rather pathetic results caught the attention of Dr. Ron Breslow, who cited one of my patents as an early example of the new field of biomimetic catalysis, attempts to mimic synthetically the action of enzymes in living creatures.

Getting back to the present day, in the box sections below is what Google AI says in regard to how this recently Nobel Prize-winning research result could be understood by those of differing philosophies. My personal perspective, based on my experiences in research would grade the three possibilities below as follows:

I would judge View 1 as being incredibly naive, highly improbable, and often prompted by an unspoken desire to give themselves a ready excuse to ignore the possibility of a personal God..

The second perspective fits in well with those of a Deistic mindset who picture a remote God who wound up the universe and then sat back and watched it develop without his further involvement. It also ignores the vast number of individual processes and conditions that needed to be separately and simultaneously present in order for life to begin in such a manner.

For me at least as a trained chemical researcher and devoted Christian, Option 3 is by far the best way to picture the process of life beginning, one in which God was intimately involved in every single step, just as He remains directly involved in the fate of His creation today.

There is even one additional view not represented. It is that of the rather ignorant Christians who simply dismiss as purposeful lies everything with which they personally disagree. That is generally accompanied by a scathing personal denunciation of those scientists who dare to propose anything which does not fit into their neat limited prior worldview. I have unfortunately run into a number of these self-righteous and self-appointed defenders of orthodoxy in past churches I have attended.

1. The Naturalistic View: Spontaneous Self-Organization

For secular scientists and proponents of a purely naturalistic origin of life (abiogenesis), the Soai reaction bridges a massive explanatory gap.

The Implication: It demonstrates that the absolute structural purity required for life does not require a miracle, a supernatural creator, or an incredibly rare cosmic accident.

The Argument: Instead, the laws of chemistry naturally possess built-in mechanisms to amplify total chaos (a random 50/50 molecular mix) into perfect order. It shows that life's molecular symmetry could have been triggered by nothing more than a tiny, random statistical fluctuation on the early Earth.

2. The Theistic Evolution View: An Elegant, Ordered Creation

For religious individuals and theologians who believe that a creator operates through the laws of nature, this chemistry is viewed as a testament to divine design.  

The Implication: Rather than disproving a creator, the work is seen as revealing the brilliant "programming" within the universe. 

The Argument: From this perspective, a creator did not need to step in and manually orient every molecule to be left- or right-handed. Instead, the creator established elegant, finely-tuned physical laws—like asymmetric autocatalysis—that allow matter to beautifully organize itself into the building blocks of life

.3. The Intelligent Design View: The Role of the Chemist (i.e. God)

Proponents of Intelligent Design (ID) or Creationism interpret the laboratory success of these reactions differently, focusing on the specific environment required to make them work. 

 The Implication: They argue that the reaction actually highlights the necessity of intelligent guidance to achieve homochirality. 

The Argument: Critics from this viewpoint point out that the Soai reaction requires highly specific, purified starting materials (like organozinc compounds) and precisely controlled laboratory conditions that are highly unlikely to exist in a chaotic, unguided primordial soup. They argue that the experiment proves that a high degree of intelligence (the chemist) is still required to set up the system for order to emerge.