Skip to main content

God of the gaps

I'm no fan of I.D., or at least not an ardent one. In fact, it seems to me that ID proves at most the following disjunctive: either some superhuman being, or a deistic-styled deity, or the God of monotheists is the source of the species that presently populate the earth.

In spite of my not being a fan of ID, it seems to me that the "God of the Gaps" objection (i.e., the claim that ID resorts to God to fill the ever-narrowing gaps in our knowledge of nature) is not always a fair one. Isn't every scientific explanation an attempt to fill a gap?

Comments

Unknown said…
The difference between a "God of the gaps" hypothesis and an ordinary scientific hypothesis is that the first isn't empirically testable while the latter is. If you propose a new law of gravity that has certain hitherto untested consequences (such as the lensing of distant starlight around the sun) then you can set up an experiment and test whether you're right. When the hypothesis at hand, however, is a Designer which has by definition no necessary physical presence, then the hypothesis is, as a result, not inherently testable. (We are at His whim, we only know what He reveals about Himself - because if you propose a merely *human* designer, then you have a testable hypothesis, since humans necessarily have bodies and hence an essential physical presence - but an unseeing being is a different story. That is to say, even if you could empirically prove that a designer exists, it doesn't prove that the designer is uncreated.) This doesn't rule out philosophical arguments, like invoking the anthropological principle, but I think it does mean that seeing a Deity behind nature is not a scientific hypothesis.
4:55 PM
Unknown said…
Oops - meant to say "unseen" above.
4:56 PM
Post a Comment