God of the gaps

One of the points made by Rabbi Slifkin in the article I cited recently is that if you insist on using God as an explanans in the aspects of the world we do not yet understand, that is going to mean a decreasing role for God as we learn more. This is an old point. Wesley Elsberry and I made this point about the so-called "explanatory filter" of the Intelligent Design movement - it makes it unnecessary to do any further investigation about things we don't understand, or don't want to because it undercuts our belief system. But the history of the term "the God of the Gaps" is even more interesting.

At the end of the nineteenth century in English speaking countries, evolution was causing something of an upheaval in the way religion was being discussed. Largely due to the extensive output of Herbert Spencer, philosophical thinking was often centered on the "law" of evolution, and a group of philosophical and theological works were produced that could be grouped under the term of "evolutionism". While there were philosophies that made evolution a central theme, such as pragmatism, these were less monomanic about evolution in the workings out, but some discussions treated evolution as a major impediment to traditional thought.

The theological reaction was at first pretty muted. Evolution was just another facet of modernism, and the controversy over Higher Criticism, or the "scientific" discussion of the Bible and its origins, was by far the more pressing issue, But then some tried to make a theological case on the basis of evolution. Evolution was a process of increasing providential progress. Evolution was a challenge to traditional doctrine, and so on. Theologians and popular writers, like John Campbell, Duke of Argyll, argued that God was responsible for natural law, and evolution as conceived by Darwin and his adherents was fundamentally anomic. Often, Darwinism was compared to the popularly misunderstood doctrines of the Epicureans, who were held to think that it was all random chance. In fact, Epicurus and the Latin writer Lucretius whose writings are our major source of Epicurus' thought, made it clear that law ruled but that a "random swerve" of particles kicked off the construction of our world from a static undifferentiated universe to a complex one. This was a view that theology hated from the get-go.

One of these popular writers was Henry Drummond, a Scottish evangelical and missionary-supporter, who published Natural Law in 1883. But Drummond was unsatisfied with this work, and continued to think about evolution, and in 1893 he delivered a series of lectures at Boston, published the next year as Ascent of Man. In it, Drummond made the following comments:

There are reverent minds who ceaselessly scan the fields of Nature and the books of Science in search of gaps--gaps which they will 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, whose daily dread is that the cloud may lift, and who, as darkness melts from this field or from that, begin to tremble for the place of His abode? What needs altering in such finely-jealous souls is at once their view of Nature and of God. Nature is God's writing, and can only tell the truth; God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.

If by the accumulation of irresistible evidence we are driven--may not one say permitted--to accept Evolution as God's method in creation, it is a mistaken policy to glory in what it cannot account for. The reason why men grudge to Evolution each of its fresh claims to show how things have been made is the groundless fear that if we discover how they are made we minimize their divinity. When things are known, that is to say, we conceive them as natural, on Man's level; when they are unknown, we call them divine--as if our ignorance of a thing were the stamp of its divinity. If God is only to be left to the gaps in our knowledge, where shall we be when these gaps are filled up? And if they are never to be filled up, is God only to be found in the dis-orders of the world? Those who yield to the temptation to reserve a point here and there for special divine interposition are apt to forget that this virtually excludes God from the rest of the process. If God appears periodically, He disappears periodically. If He comes upon the scene at special crises, He is absent from the scene in the intervals. Whether is all-God or occasional-God the nobler theory? Positively, the idea of an immanent God, which is the God of Evolution, is infinitely grander than the occasional wonder-worker, who is the God of an old theology. Negatively, the older view is not only the less worthy, but it is discredited by science. And as to facts, the daily miracle of a flower, the courses of the stars, the upholding and sustaining day by day of this great palpitating world, need a living Will as much as the creation of atoms at the first. We know growth as the method by which things are made in Nature, and we know no other method. We do not know that there are not other methods; but if there are, we do not know them. Those cases which we do not know to be growths, we do not know to be anything else, and we may at least suspect them to be growths. Nor are they any the less miraculous because they appear to us as growths. A miracle is not something quick. The doings of these things may seem to us no miracle, nevertheless it is a miracle that they have been done.

Drummond's view of evolution is still theological, and it is not exactly the Darwinian view, but the point he makes when he says "When things are known, that is to say, we conceive them as natural, on Man's level; when they are unknown, we call them divine--as if our ignorance of a thing were the stamp of its divinity" is salient and important. Those theists who think that God is an explanation only of that which we cannot explain any other way have at best a very small and limited god, one that gets pulled out of the desk drawer only when we are or want to remain ignorant of the nature of something. And that is all ID is - the desire to remain ignorant, so we can call it divine.

Those who think this way are afraid. They fear the world as it is. They fear the lack of something that they and their coreligionists can use to draw them all together against the secular world. Most of all they fear modernity. So God is something that they can stuff in the cracks of knowledge to prevent modernity growing stronger or broader.

Intelligent theists do not have this overwhelming fear. Those who I know accept the world as it is. They know that they must deal with what God has created, and not try to limit their deity to comfortable truisms and the boundaries of their own education or imagination. Theologians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who accepted this, as well he might being related to some of the best physicists of his day, got on with the business of faith in the real world. Anything less deserves neither respect nor serious attention.