God of the Gaps

[Besides entering my busiest time of year work-wise, I'm teaching one class at the Kilns and another two classes on the internet. What suffers is my time to write new blog posts. So the following is taken from a discussion thread in my internet class, in which I clarify what I take to be the issue with the God-of-the-gaps charge.]

I guess I have a slightly different take on the God-of-the-gaps issue. As I see it, this is not so much something of which Christians generally (and much less practicing scientists who are Christians) are really guilty. Rather, it is an illegitimate charge made against Christians by naturalists. And when naturalists raise this charge, they are generally guilty of several logical fallacies...

1) They are guilty of creating a straw man. While there may be some who easily claim "because God did it" too early in the search for explanations, this is an extreme position and not the one taken by the vast majority of Christians engaged in scientific discussion. When one addresses only the absurd, extreme articulations of his opponents (setting up a straw man that is easily knocked down) instead of addressing the thoughtful, difficult objections made by more moderate opponents, one is being academically disingenuous and logically fallacious.

2) They are guilty of the ad futurum fallacy. (I actually wanted to make up my own name for a fallacy, the "log-in-your-own-eye fallacy," but will stick with a well-recognized name.) But what I mean is that the naturalist is equally guilty (moreso, actually) of engaging in naturalism-of-the-gaps. The claim is that while we don't currently know the natural explanation, give us 75 years and we will. This is a faulty appeal to the future. In good reasoning, one is expected to find the best explanation for all the currently available evidence, rather than appeal to hypothetical future evidence.

3) More fundamentally, the naturalist is guilty of equivocation, wrongly using two significantly different definitions of the 'gaps' being addressed.

The naturalist likes to identify epistemological gaps (gaps of knowledge), and show that historically such gaps have closed. But the more interesting gaps--and those raised by the old-Earth creationist and the proponent of Intelligent Design--are ontological gaps (gaps of existence or being). The naturalist serves his own cause by conflating these two definitions or by ignoring this crucial distinction.

We could discuss (for example) the gap between the existence of a universe and the non-existence of a universe, or the gap between the Edicarean life forms and those of the Cambrian. These are fundamentally gaps of being, not merely gaps in our knowledge. And while the actual gaps involved are unchanging, the epistemological gaps (as we better understand the breadth and suddenness of the Cambrian explosion) are getting larger, not smaller. Perhaps the best example is that of the origin of life. The gap between non-living chemistry and the simplest life is now understood to be much larger than any evolutionary naturalist ever conceived.

So, it is rather uninteresting to note that we ought not be guilty of appealing to the supernatural prematurely, when there is still every indication that a natural (process) explanation will be found (for whatever phenomenon is being studied). But when we are studying origins* questions (rather than process questions), there is every reason to use abductive reasoning, and explanations that involve a supernatural being can reasonably be offered in such cases. This is especially true since only a theistic worldview logically grounds the assumptions that make science worthwhile (as discussed in another thread).



* Failure to differentiate between empirical (process) research and historical (origins) research also serves the scientific naturalist's cause. Whether this represents mere imprecision/naivete or disingenuity on their part I'm never quite sure.

Harris on Extinction

As you may recall, I'm teaching a class right now in Critical Thinking, which is mostly an introductory logic course. As we get to the point of identifying fallacies and other errors in reasoning, I expect to lean heavily on the writings of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and the other 'New Atheists.' And this is simply because their reasoning is so sophomoric (which is also why more thoughtful atheists are so embarrassed by their books). Here's an example from Harris' best-selling book, Letter to a Christian Nation...

Over 99 percent of the species that ever walked, flew, or slithered upon this earth are now extinct. This fact alone appears to rule out intelligent design.

I don't really know where to begin in critiquing such nonsense. Perhaps I should start by saying that it doesn't even come close to being an argument, but is nothing but bald, unsubstantiated opinion. To get from the single premise ('99% of species that have lived are now extinct') to the conclusion ('living things cannot have been designed') requires so many intermediate premises, each of which would require support the likes of which Harris' book is entirely devoid, that it's difficult to imagine that anyone would be persuaded by such claims.

Another thing that might be pointed out is that this pseudo-argument is not scientific, but metaphysical (religious). (This true, by the way, of most of Darwin's arguments and most of those made by his modern defenders.) Harris has here placed himself in the role of designer of life (God), and determined that he wouldn't have done it that way. Apparently, Harris' concept of a supreme, self-existent Being who created the entire universe includes the requirement that He be satisfied with creating life once and once only, and not allowing any such creations to die out. We do not, of course, require the same of either human artists or human designers, giving them instead the freedom to shelve or discard some of their works.

More importantly, this is not a claim about God from the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, which state quite the opposite (in Psalm 104, for example)--that the Creator God reserves the right to give life and to take it away, to create and to re-create. And since the Judeo-Christian God is the one toward which most of Harris' illogical venom is directed, the rules of argumentation would require that he address that God and not a straw-man of his own imagination.

But to see just how ludicrous Harris' claim here is, consider a comparable one...

Over 99% of all dialing telephones are no longer in use. This fact alone appears to rule out the idea that they were designed in the first place.

Like living things, some early telephones are still extant, and many of the extinct ones can be found in museums. Far more are buried or lost, never again to see the light of day. And like extinct living things, one possible refutation of the silly claim about phones is that their designer didn't intend that they would last forever, or even remain the most advanced iteration for all of time.

As with most of the subjects Harris has the audacity to address, he's way in over his head with regard to the history of life on earth. What scientists are beginning to understand is that early life forms were perfectly suited for the conditions on earth at the time in which they lived, that later forms could not have survived those quite different earlier conditions, and that the earlier forms played key roles in making earth (including its atmosphere, oceans, crust, and other aspects) suitable for the later forms. In short, the entire history of life on earth--including the many extinction events--absolutely demands the very conclusion of design that Harris' weak pseudo-argument seeks to deny.