Here’s Why the ‘God of the Gaps’ Critique is a Mis-Characterization of Theism, Intelligent Design

One of the most commonly cited criticisms of those who believe human beings, Earth and indeed the entire universe exhibit evidence of intelligent design is the retort from evolutionists that concluding there must be a designer is “just another example of the ‘god of the gaps’ fallacy.”

On the surface, the god of the gaps accusation has a patina of intellectual credibility, but a closer examination of the evidence and reasoning for the designer conclusion reveals that it is a logical conclusion, not an assumption in the nature of a substitution to fill an evidentiary void.

Essentially, as Cold-Case Christianity’s J. Warner Wallace, the retired Los Angeles Police Detective who specialized in solving murder cases that had remained unsolved for year, explains, particular evidence requires certain characteristics in order to have explanatory power.

For example, your laptop requires software, which requires programming. Programming requires a programmer, that is an essential characteristic of software. As the watch requires a watchmaker, the software program requires a programmer. (How will Artificial Intelligence (AI) fit into this  logic?)

Wallace, who appeared for years on NBC’s “Dateline” program describing how he solved extremely challenging murder cases, knows a thing or three about evaluating evidence. He responds to the “god of the gaps” challenge in the following brief video:


FOR FURTHER THOUGHT:

“On the Trap of the ‘God of the Gaps,” Dr. William Lane Craig

“Can Intelligent Design be Empirically Detected?” Summit Ministries

“The Return of the God Hypothesis,” Stephen Meyer interviewed by Dr. Sean McDowell


 

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7 Comments

  1. Jim Brock on August 28, 2022 at 12:53 pm

    I am still in awe from the continuing discovery of physical laws without any suspicion that there must somewhere be a lawgiver.

  2. Mikkk Hayy on August 28, 2022 at 1:56 pm

    It’s always seemed to me that any halfway intelligent advocacy of intelligent design must reject phenomena where the “design” could have been from intelligent aliens, not a deity. Sure, the arguments could then progress several steps forward. Without this, we have non-intelligent (known as “dumb”) advocacy of intelligent design.

    • Lee Dise on August 28, 2022 at 9:44 pm

      Atheists criticize Christians because they believe in God without evidence.

      There’s no evidence that aliens exist, either.

      The difference seems to be aliens won’t hold us accountable for our moral choices.

  3. Lou on August 28, 2022 at 4:18 pm

    Not sure why it matters whether you get to “God” in one step or two. The objection still is that someone’s pulling a favorite explanation of a hat.

    • Lou on August 28, 2022 at 4:53 pm

      Another common objection, as stated by martyred Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “[H]ow wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of 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.”

      • Lee Dise on August 29, 2022 at 4:28 pm

        I admire Bonhoeffer greatly, and I don’t think Bonhoeffer meant to say that we shouldn’t look for His fingerprints in our universe. I don’t think looking for scientific explanations of observable phenomena should be curtailed simply because we believe God was the Creator of all things.

        The whole “God in the gaps” argument itself begs the question.

        The question is a philosophical one of whether science’s job is 1) to figure out how things work, and have worked, based on a premise that there is no God, or 2) to figure out how things work, and have worked.

        I tend to lean toward the second, myself. If it is possible to infer the existence of a Designer, I think I should like to know.

        • A Friend on August 31, 2022 at 12:44 am

          And precisely how would one go about testing a hypothesis that entails a non-natural, unobservable phenomenon — let alone one that is utterly unique, or indeed, ineffable? Such a phenomenon by definition falls beyond the reach of scientific inquiry.

          Question: If somehow that were not the case — i.e., if it actually were possible to test an “intelligent design” hypothesis — and experimental data consistently fell very strongly against the hypothesis, would you accept that outcome and acknowledge that ID is not science? (Nor should the Bible be misinterpreted as science?)

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