Text: Hebrews 3:4
The “god of the gaps argument” is an accusation sometimes levelled at Christians by well versed Atheists. It is the claim that Christians, along with other religions, use God as an explanation whenever there is ignorance about natural occurring phenomena. A basic example of this would be to experience rain and rather than deduce a scientific explanation, out of ignorance you conclude a god must be crying. Or you witness someone seriously sick and conclude that a god must be angry with that person when there is actually a sound medical explanation.
To be fair, many religions are prone to this, especially ancient pagan religions. Christians specifically get accused of this when they assert that God is the one that brought the universe about when, according to Atheists, there might otherwise be a perfectly natural explanation. In other words, Christians fill a gap in scientific knowledge with an explanation of God. Ultimately, Atheists tend to believe that expanding scientific knowledge is doing away with a need for God and that the Christian explanation of God being the creator is a shallow, lazy way of thinking about the origins of life.
So are Christians lazy, illogical thinkers who simply use God as an explanation of unknown scientific phenomena? At times Christians may reason from ignorance and it’s something they need to be mindful of. Having said that, such an accusation is quite unfair and doesn’t take into consideration the many intelligent and rational people from many different disciplines, including maths and science, who claim a belief in God. The reason for this is the god of the gaps is not the God you read about in the Bible. The God of the Bible is not so limited that He scales back to plug another gap as soon as new scientific knowledge is discovered. No, the God of the Bible is the being who made and designed every natural phenomena.
So when a new scientific discovery is made, Christians understand that such a discovery doesn’t do away with God, it just explains Him more. Additionally, the Christian argument for the existence of God doesn’t rest on ignorance but rather a thoughtful consideration of indirect sources. This includes the eye witness testimony of Jesus, the historical accuracy of the New Testament documents, logical and ethical arguments from Christian philosophy, scientific discovery and one’s own experience of walking a Christian life. So in other words Christians reason towards a belief in God based on information that already exists.
At the end of the day, Atheists accusing Christians of the god of the gaps fail to understand the God of the Bible and refuse to sincerely consider the arguments made by Christians. They also fail to see that they too are in danger of committing their own gaps fallacy by inserting the notion that the world came into being through a yet to be discovered near miraculous event of nature.
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Hebrews 11:1(NKJV)
