God of the Gaps

Question 1

God of the Gaps Theory

Answer 1

In the past and still today, some Christians attribute anything they cannot scientifically to God, for example the idea that directly caused the expansion of the Singularity led to the Big Bang.
- Science itself shows how flawed this is: as scientific understanding grows, God gets ‘squeezed out’ of more and more gaps. Many Christians see it as diminishing God.

This is the arguments that as scientific knowledge of the world increases, there is less and less need for God to be used to fill the gaps in our understanding.

• Once science has developed and discovered everything there is no need to know, we will not need God.
• This is illustrated well by Flew’s Parable of the Gardener, where unsubstantiated religious claims ‘die the death of a thousand qualifications.’

Question 2

Christian responses to God of the Gaps Theory

Answer 2

ALL DISAGREE

1. Paul Tillich says that God is ‘being itself’ and is not a being who acts in the world, so cannot just be a being who ‘fills in the gaps’.
2. Maurice Wiles says that God’s only acts was creation itself and so God does not ‘fill the gaps’.
3. John Polkinghorne says that God continually acts in the world undetectably at the Quantum level and so is not only a ‘God of the gaps’.

Conclusion: Most Christians would say that a God who is only revealed in gaps in science would not be God at all, so this argument has at least made Christians think about this debate further.