God of the Gaps

Christians who use God to fill in the spaces at the limits of our power or understanding are often criticized of having a “god of the gaps“. We cut and paste “God” into whatever space we need something to operate within but for which we lack a material explanation. 

This then presents an embarrassment when along comes a material explanation which is convincing enough for a particular community. We used to believe that God made humanity, but now we have evolution so God is no longer necessary to fill the hole of our wonder. God then recedes to “what caused the big bang” only to be threatened by the “multiverse”. 

Gaps and Agency

Many have pointed out that what is at play in this conversation is really agency. Attribution for human or non-human events often appears on some levels to be simple but on others frightfully complex. While we try the serial killer for the crimes they commit we don’t try the monster of a father that planted the seeds or the guidance counselor who failed to flag the psychopath or the system of laws that made it impossible restrain someone from doing what seemed inevitable or the thousands of genetic generations and permutations that gave birth to the DNA in the system. If we are to take the “God as immanent” approach to the “gap” issues we might as well try God as we normally do in our courts of our own judgment.

The Scientific Method

The Scientific method is about isolating the cause and effect string for a particular outcome or state of being. When we apply this to the serial killer we immediately are faced with a problem. There are many more psychopaths than there are serial killers. There are many more children with horrendous parents than there are serial killers. There are many more people capable of murder than there are murderers. There are many dangerously sick individuals for whom we say at one time or another “they’ll wind up in jail” but for the sake of justice we don’t lock them up until they actually take someone’s life. The murder’s victim dies for the sake of justice in an ironic Christlike twist. 

Science is wonderful at isolating and identifying strings of cause and effect but when applied to the complexity of the real world the tool’s usefulness and applicability is diminished. 

To offset this we scale up with increasingly sophisticated computer models. We see this in the area of weather and climate change. There are hosts of variables and factors and as our data sets grow and our observation of our data plays out we become increasingly confident about our capacity to predict and that confidence in many cases is well founded. 

Successes in some fields inspire our imagination and invite our intuitions to envision the day when our mastery of the knowledge of cause and effect will grow sufficiently expansive as to offer us the power to prevent all of the outcomes we fear and to provide for us all of the outcomes we desire. This is the reverse-god-of-the-gaps of science. 

The God of the Gaps of Science and Technology

• It is a god in fact because it seems to offer us all of our dreams.
• It is a god because it requires faith in a process we are not in control of.
• It is a god because its promises all lie in the future and it requires faith to imagine not only that subsequent human communities will use this increasing level of power for good but also that all such gaps are able to be filled by our ability to employ knowledge and technology.
• Belief in this is a religion because it invites its faithful to embrace a glorious future that their material selves will never partake in. 

Doubters in the Technology God

If we have a religion we also have its doubters and I would count myself among them.

What we have managed to achieve thought science and technology is truly amazing and breathtaking, but it always seems to come with newer versions of unintended consequences that threat to become our own hell.

• Knowledge of the atom brings power and destruction.
• Nano-technology brings promise and incredible risk.
• The amazing employment of petroleum to power the world now threatens the same world with CO2 emissions and while many of the powerful and wealthy agree that this is indeed a threat no political or economic solution to the threat appears at hand. 

Believers at the temple of human technology who wish to address their fears double down on their faith in technology. “At some point, somehow we will figure out our way out of this mess.” 

Atheists attack theists claiming they have confidence in something they have no evidence for. Do we have any evidence in all of human history that more power, more knowledge and better technology will sooth our fears and deliver to us unending happiness, comfort and security? This is faith against evidence. We have far more evidence that this doesn’t work than we do that it does. 

Will Our Power Save Humanity?

Doubters of theism like to talk about evidence. What does the evidence tell us about humanity’s ability to employ technology to resolve our problems? It seems we can’t employ evidence without contaminating it with bias, intuition and perspective. 

If you’re sitting in a comfortable space in the developed world backed with access to medical science, protected by laws, rights and military with enough money to invite you to imagine you can live a decade or more you might profess faith in this god, it works quite well. If you are in how many other billion places in the world, however, you will have your doubts. 

Even if you are fully convinced that employment of our knowledge and our power will resolve all things surely you know it won’t happen in YOUR lifetime. It is something that will have to wait for some blessed future, one that you yourself will never participate in. 

Final Outcomes

Part of the irony of the faith in science and technology is that not only are its choicest promises of bliss and fulfillment postponed to later generations “when we finally discover…” but casting far enough into the future leads to the same dark and cold outcome for humanity as it does for each individual. The sun will not shine forever. The universe will not host humanity forever. The big bang wound up a clock that will wind down and the material universe will no longer be able to host the lifestyle our faith wishes for our descendants. The same tomb of nothingness offered to every individual is the destiny for all living holder of every science and technology.

There is a reason futurists imagine we will kill ourselves with escapist drugs and games long before the universe kills us. We will kill ourselves before anything else gets the chance, which is the final profession of our faith in our own power. 

To What End?

Now we might profess that somehow our power through science and technology will save us from ourselves but then we need to ask to what end? If happiness is the end and we find a way to preserve our conscious selves either by extending the meat robot or transferring it into a chip made by Intel and occupying it with programmed bliss as long as we can find energy sources to power the experience is this what we desire? 

We imagine there must be a better end than that, but alas, we arrive at a gap again. 

The real gap we cannot cross is the gap of our own end, our own purpose. We do not know the ultimate good because every good we find and capture never fully satisfies. We always imagine there is another, better one. We arrive at Lewis’ argument from desire. 

It would be a sad universe indeed if all that we are is highly evolved apes who prospered because of some ambition gene only to discover that the gene lead us to futility. It would be like finding the most fabulous key to a promised door only to discover that no door really existed. It would be a cruel joke. It would mean that all hungers and thirsters for justice never see it. All who quest for beauty only get teased. All who long for rest only find more struggle. Maybe this is why I am a Christian. Maybe this is why I hope.