I want to present you with a hypothetical conversation between your everyday Christian and your everyday atheist.
Christian: “I believe that God is the ultimate cause of the universe.”
Atheist: “Why would you believe that?”
Christian: “I believe that there are certain things that science can’t explain, and God is the most reasonable explanation for those things such as the ultimate origin of life.”
Atheist: “Hold on a minute. That is simply the God of the gaps. You don’t have an explanation, so you simply plug God in. I believe in science. One day there will be no more gaps and you will not have any more reason to plug in God.”
This may seem to be rather simplistic, but you’d be amazed at how many times this general line of reasoning comes up even from such prominent speakers as Richard Dawkins.
In a sense, the atheist is right. There are certain things that we do not understand, and we do take it by faith. For example, we believe that God is the uncreated Creator. It is technically impossible to prove that scientifically, and it is equally as impossible to disprove that statement.
However, there is a very interesting presupposition made by the atheist that needs to be taken into account.
The atheist is making the claim that there is a naturalistic explanation for everything. That is a large assumption that is on very shaky philosophical ground.
For one thing, it implies omniscience. In order to know that there will be a naturalistic explanation for everything in the universe, you must have knowledge of everything in the universe. By admitting that there are still gaps, this argument undercuts itself.
It also presupposes that the scientific method itself is the only valid way to discern truth about the physical world. However, how do we even know that? We can’t test the validity of the scientific method by testing it using the scientific method. However, if the scientific method is the only way to discern truth, then we cannot prove that the scientific method is true. That is absurd and circular, but it is the logical conclusion of making that type of absolute statement. Science cannot be the only way of determining truth.
However, the largest issue here is that even though the accusation of the God of the gaps is being thrown at the Christian, the atheist is actually committing that fallacy. Because we do not know exactly what happens, we believe that there will be a naturalistic explanation for it. Any gap in knowledge must be filled by science and there cannot be any supernatural. There is no way to prove that science fills every gap as has already been established, but for the naturalist, that must be the inevitable yet problematic assumption. If there is nothing outside of the natural, then the natural must explain itself rather than believe that there was outside intervention from the supernatural.
As much as atheists want to say that they go wherever the evidence takes them, by presupposing that everything needs to have a naturalistic explanation and eliminating the supernatural, they are committing the argument from ignorance also known as the god of the gaps. Why can they make claims about things that they truly do not know yet assume to be true without being accused of that fallacy?
That is not the pursuit of knowledge but rather the defense of a belief system that doesn’t want to answer questions.
I believe in science. One day there will be no more gaps and you will not have any more reason to plug in God.”
I am unaware of any atheist who would make such a bold statement. Certainly, Dawkins doesn’t in the link you provide. In fact, I am aware of how carefully most public atheists are to admit some gap in knowledge by clearly stating in unambiguous terms, “I don’t know.” You fail in this post to highlight this difference between those who proclaim knowledge to be such because its explanatory application has been arbitrated by reality to produce consistent and reliable results deserving of very high confidence (like Dawkins), and those who insert a faith-based belief and proclaim certainty (like those who support these kinds of of religious tenets).
The scientific method has earned high confidence not because people assume it should or is deserving as a matter of principle, but because it produces knowledge that seems to work for everyone everywhere all the time. Religious belief is not equivalent, and all the diversionary talk about philosophical naturalism doesn’t alter this brute fact.
First of all, thanks for taking the time to comment.
The part I was referring to was when Dawkins says that there are certainly gaps in science that we are working towards filling. I know that that is indeed the intention of science for anybody involved in science no matter what his or her religious persuasion, but it seems that the implication of what he is saying is that science will indeed fill in that gap. It is just a challenge implies that it is something that will be overcome through science. Naturally, that means that we don’t need God to fill in the gaps from his perspective.
I do have one slight question regarding your response however. I would like to know if you believe that there is any other way to discern truth about the world and the universe beside the scientific method. I agree that it works very well for the natural world.
The reason I ask is because it seems to me that something that this type of approach is naturally presuppositional. There can’t be anything outside of the natural because that is the only thing we can measure with the scientific method. Would there be any way in this framework to even entertain the possibility of the truth of the supernatural? What evidence would you want to see?
The main point of my article was that there is a major presupposition being made, but nobody really ever talks about it as a presupposition.
Sorry for the delay… surgery, donchaknow (and a handy excuse if I mumble through this comment)!
There is no presupposition that the method of science will answer all questions. But there is a presupposition that reality may be able to reveal itself to us because of explanations we have hypothesized that have turned out to be explanatory. In other words, nature seems to be open to providing understandable explanations derived from our disciplined inquiries about how it works when we allow reality – and not our beliefs – to adjudicate claims made about it. This is why it’s vital to understand and appreciate that science is a method and not a product or a theory; that’s why we classify this approach as methodological naturalism for just this reason, which is often confused by the religious (and faitheists) to be philosophical naturalism that does require a presupposition similar to faith-based belief; insisting that methodological naturalism requires the ‘natural’ to be all there is to know. This is not true. The difference is really important if one wishes to understand why claims made about reality require arbitration by it rather than any other means (like faith, or philosophy, or metaphysics, or supernaturalism).
In addition, it is also very important to understand that the method of science is not based on these other presuppositions but incorporates the final say over claims to be held independent of those who may wish to support a claim. Your cell phone works regardless of why you think it does, what ethnicity you may be, your place of birth, the culture in which you were raised, what invisible forces you may believe are affecting it, what agencies you may believe are involved for its operation, and so on. You are not the one determining the explanation based on your history for how your cell phone works; this explanation is based on adjudicated understanding that is the same for everyone everywhere all the time. That’s why the self-correcting method is such a human achievment; it is this method that has eventually produced the cell phone, identical in every way to the explanation developed to identify the mechanism operating on critters of all kinds (including humans) called evolution. In other words, you can’t cherry pick which bits of scientific products that work to endorse the method while rejecting others that compete with cherished beliefs. It makes as much sense to claim cell phones work by invisible faeries running on invisible treadmills as it does to claim divine design by creationism for how life has come to be as we find it today. If evolution were wrong, for example, then so, too, is your cell phone because both have been arrived at and adjudicated by exactly the same disciplined method of inquiry that utilizes reality to arbitrate these explanations, both (unsurprisingly) producing efficacious products that work. It is the working that determines this knowledge value and not the beliefs ascribed to them.
There is ample opportunity using this method to find evidence for supernatural causation. For example, if prayer to a specific deity worked to cause effect revealed by a statistical anomaly reliably and consistently compared to others that did not, this would help us to support claims of causal efficacy attributed to the existence of such a deity. If faith healing produced results that worked for everyone everywhere all the time beyond placebo (as well as nocebo), then this would be evidence supporting claims of causal efficacy of faith arbitrated by the reality we share (again, regardless of our beliefs about it).
In addition, this method allows us to investigate claims without any biased presuppositions for evidence that should be there if the claims were true. For example, regardless of one’s beliefs about creationist ancestry for humans, there could have been genetic evidence that we descend from a common ancestor, as well as one that was male and that predated a female ancestor (but the two are reversed in reality and separated by some 70,000 years. I know. Hard to wrap one’s head around this notion but seems to be true, nevertheless). There could have been evidence of a global flood regardless of one’s support for believing that such an event took place. But reality clearly shows us no such evidence. There could have been evidence of biological tinkering and intervention. But reality once again fails to uphold this claim when it could have quite easily done so if true!
This lack of evidence is not suppositional; it is a conclusion arbitrated by what we find honestly in reality using the identical method of science that produces applications, therapies, and technologies that really do work for everyone everywhere all the time. And that’s why knowledge claims about the reality we share when in conflict between science and religion always flow in only direction: away from religion that has no method available to faith-based beliefs to independently arbitrate claims made on its behalf. This is not the fault of non believers or doubters or some global demonic conspiracy; it is what reality tells us is how valuable, how trustworthy, in how much confidence, we should hold knowledge claims derived from faith-based beliefs: none… because it produces no knowledge that works.
And before you assume incorrectly that this is methodological problem for religion alone, let me assure you that the same lack of disciplined methodology that utilizes independent verification is very, very common… so common, in fact, that it is a human shortcoming! That’s why and how snake oil salesmen make their living, from naturopathy to alternative medicine, climate change denial to anti-vaxers, astrologers to dowsers, ghost hunters to exorcists to tarot card readers, and the list goes on and on. When we fail to incorporate some reliable method to adjudicate claims independent of what we want to believe is true, I always think of physicist Richard Feynman’s observation: science is a way to not fool ourselves, and each of us is the easiest person in the world to fool. I’m no exception to this rule (hey, I’m a lifelong Ram’s fan) but I try to work a little harder to be a little less gullible.
Don’t worry about the delay. I hope you’re doing better, and, I have to admit, I was hoping that we would be able to continue talking.
I agree entirely with your initial premise that nature will reveal itself to us. The fact that I believe that there is a God behind it and you don’t doesn’t really change that. However, I guess I don’t quite understand the distinction that you are making in this particular case.
Are you not putting your faith in that method and the fact that it seems to produce results? Doesn’t it still require a baseline philosophical belief that your method is valid?
Please feel free to correct me if I am misrepresenting your position, but it seems to me that methodological naturalism is a belief that when we are disciplined about allowing nature to speak for itself, we will be able to understand reality more and more thoroughly. Again though, I am running into a presupposition. Why is that particular method a good one? Why do we need to be disciplined? Those seem to be philosophical. Can you help me understand that a little bit better? I just don’t want to be misrepresenting your position.
I understand what you’re saying about the cell phone. However, I would like to know if you are talking about evolution as a mechanism that we can observe today through genetic adaptation or as the ultimate creation of life in the universe? As far as I know, if we are talking about the second one, that is far from proven, and we really do not know how life can be created from nonlife. It has never been reproduced in a lab or ever seen again as far as I know. I feel like you’re trying to equivocate two things that don’t necessarily equate. One thing we definitely understand and have reproduced many times, and the other needs to be taken with some faith no matter what side of the argument you fall on.
Regarding the efficacy of prayer, I guess we would have to ultimately come back to the character of God. For need to demonstrate why certain prayers are answered or not, we would need to have a discussion about whether or not God orchestrates the universe in a certain way and then why He does that. This is a pretty epic theological question, and I’m certainly happy to go there if you want to, but given the popularity of this type of question, I know that there are other places to go for that kind of thing.
I am not familiar with the research regarding females being created 70,000 years before males. If you could pass along the link, I would like to check it out. Like you said, that is a little bit hard for me to wrap my head around.
As far as the worldwide flood, I find it rather fascinating that multiple cultures all share this story. There is obviously some variation within those stories, but a large flood is something that many people groups have talked about around the world. In that instance, is it that hard to believe that one family could have come through that event, but as their descendents became more and more spread around the earth, the stories could have changed slightly while holding onto a shared piece of truth in saying that there was indeed a flood?
Wow, I guess you really had a lot of time to think and formulate such a detailed response. Thanks again for engaging with me, and I am certainly up for continuing to talk if you want to.
Thanks for your kind wishes. I’m on the mend.
I’ll break my response for your questions into a couple of comments because I do like to explain why I hold the opinions I do rather than just state them (as if fact).
You write Are you not putting your faith in that method and the fact that it seems to produce results?
Yes, in the sense that faith is synonymous with confidence. I do have confidence not because of any a priori commitment to the idea of the scientific method but a post hoc justification because it works consistently and reliably well to describe reality and demonstrates this understanding by producing useful applications, therapies, and technologies. That’s why I said nature seems to be knowable utilizing this method.
The faith, the confidence, the justification I hold (and you do too) in the scientific method is based on this production. The method seems to be valid (in the sense of assigning confidence to it) because of this result. Furthermore, developing this method is a tremendous human achievement we should be proud of. After all, it’s hard to approach reality and develop a method that seems to work so well for everyone… demonstrated not by a placed faith (a justification dependent on questionable premises relying on nebulous terminology wrapped in logical form) but by producing identical results. Yes, the explanations may indeed be wrong, but rarely wholesale; so far we seem to find that the method adjusts explanations through ever decreasing minor corrections. For example, the explanation of Newtonian laws works very well in general, corrected by Einsteinian relativity to produce a classical physics that corrected for anomalies in Newtonian physics and now corrected again by quantum mechanics to establish astounding accuracies to the extreme edges of the micro and macro levels. These corrections are not an indication that the previous explanations were wrong, per se, (because they really did and continue to work well for most people almost everywhere most of the time!) but need refinement to do a better job explaining how reality operates. This ability, this means, to be able to self-correct is a marvelous part of this method unavailable to other kinds of methods used to justify explanations.
A myth, for example, even though of high value providing insight into the human condition has no means to be similarly self-correcting if its symbolic meaning is interpreted poorly. The degree of confidence we place between, say, myth and science as methods to produce explanations, therefore, should reflect this difference not just in its explanatory power we individually value and uphold for whatever products each produces, but recognize that science successfully carries this additional burden of being self-correcting. In other words, if an incompatible conflict arises between a mythical explanation and a scientific explanation (let me be very clear here: fictions can be just as valuable producing meaningful insight as empirical comparisons, so I’m not suggesting differences are in any way fatal) then I must rank science as the predominant explanation because it is the more trustworthy method by demonstration.
Having said all this, let’s turn to evolution for a moment and incorporate this understanding of the importance of methodology..
Perhaps you can better understand, therefore, why what seems to be a ridiculous notion like evolution (as an explanation how life changes over time to produce unguided yet astonishing complexity) must be deeply respected when it attains the highest level of scientific sanction: a theory… simply on the merit (even without any understanding at all on a personal level) of it being a scientific theory! This classification by definition means it has successfully incorporated all – not just some – contraindications held against it. And this means that problems I think may mitigate its explanatory power in reality have already been dealt with according to the consensus of working scientists in biology. Any lack of confidence in it’s explanatory power, then, is due to my lack of understanding it than it is from any weaknesses of the explanation itself. (This is a vital understanding of why evolution has nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of dogmatic belief or atheistic intentions.) And I can assume this because I understand how science works and to what extraordinary level of meeting these challenges such an explanation has had to undergo to reach the status of ‘theory’ (some 80 years after Darwin’s book, more commonly referred to as The Modern Synthesis). My confidence in this theory’s explanatory power is not due to an a priori commitment to it, nor commitment to the idea of evolution must be right, but owed to the degree that the method that produced it produced scientific consensus which has nothing but success in producing explanations that work (regardless of topic). This does not mean the explanation is complete but subject – like any other scientific explanation – to constant and exacting revision (specifically these days as to rate of speciation). For example, genetics didn’t have to reveal DNA kinship that is an exact replica (generally speaking) of predicted ancestry, meaning that we are closest in DNA replication (allele frequency) with our closest ancestors and equivalently more distant with earlier ancestry, but it did. This ‘synthesis’ between genetics and evolutionary theory justifies our full confidence in the explanation of how life changes over time, how speciation occurs, why we find the distribution of life we do, and so on. It’s a beuatiful idea. Furthermore, we now understand how biological complexity can increase… all by an unguided and purposeless natural mechanisms between environments and the reproduction of genes.
I use evolution quite on purpose because there is no scientifically valid opposition to it. None. The only opposition to the theory comes from religion and the opposition is not based on evidence adduced from reality. It comes only from faith-based belief in some kind of creationism for which there is no evidence (although it could have been so if it were true, and should be so if the opposition is to have any scientific merit). And I point this out to help explain why so many New Atheists come from the biological sciences (constantly under attack from creationists of all stripes) and why critics with scientific credentials come from other areas than biology. This is a clue…
Evolution is a foundational idea of modern biology that informs therapies, technologies, and applications that work just as reliably as your cell phone. Notice that we do not find scientists arguing that cell phones work by divine sanction, that the principles on which they operate were specially designed by an interventionist divine telecommunicator who favoured human wireless communication over that of other critters. The argument would be ludicrous if promoted in political circles to alter educational physics textbooks, to argue in favour of ‘teach the controversy’ of ‘creationist physics’ under the disguise of ‘academic freedom’ and suggest to physics students that this bit of science regarding how cell phones work was divided into two camps: a fundamentalist pseudo-religion armed by a global conspiracy to expel brave scientists from the other camp who had sound scientific reasons involving micro physics principles involving cell phones altered in this process only by a supernatural divine critter from macro-level physics of cell phone use. To paint such a ‘controversy as a disagreement between neo-cell-phone physicists who dogmatically asserted that the principles of physics were constant and not divisible as intellectually chained by a kind of atheistic religious belief would be seem for what it is: an apologetic desperation mounted on nonsense to insert religious belief into physics by insisting that an exception in the scientific method must be made in the name of god regarding cell phones rather than in the pursuit of understanding how reality operates.
Evolution is not cosmology and it’s not abiogenesis. For the scientific explanation of how either the universe or life began, we have the current answer of “I don’t know.” We have indications, hypotheses, and varying degrees of evidence for these but the confidence level remains (in comparison to evolution) relatively low because reality has not shown us compelling and definitive evidence in favour of one over another. In science, it’s a virtue to not be certain, to utilize probability for levels of confidence based on aggregate and mutually supportive evidence from many lines of inquiry. (Evolution is rich in this support.) Incompatible explanations based on religious belief does not share this value system of adducing from reality what it tells us about certain questions we have, this kind of standardized methodology to arrive a cohesive and unified one accessible to all, nor does it come equipped to have any means to alter and shape and refine religious explanations to fit ALL the data – supportive and contrary. This is not a theistic conspiracy to thwart science but a byproduct of valuing a faith-based approach, a method of inquiry, to believe in “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
Okay, I agree. I was actually going to ask if we could break up the discussion into a few different pieces so that we don’t have to cram everything together.
I appreciate you taking the time to clarify your position. I understand much better than I did before, and actually, I think it might be possible to be a methodological naturalist and a theist at the same time. Just because we believe that we will find a method in the world that does do a very good job of explaining why things happen (i.e. the scientific method) that is consistently accurate does not mean that we absolutely need to discount the existence of God. I understand that that is not your position in regards to the existence of God as far as I can tell, but it is interesting to think about the possibility of overlap between these two groups. I would need to think about it more I guess, but I do understand your initial position a little more clearly I think.
Now, I guess we get to the meat of our disagreement :-).
I understand that evolution is a theory. I understand that as we understand genetics more and more, we had been able to see the changes from generation to generation and how traits are passed on or not.
I think that the main point I want to focus on in your response is that you say that there is no scientifically valid opposition to evolution. I presume that you mean in this particular debate that I am forced into a position that because I cannot reproduce and empirically test the fact that God created the universe, it must not be a valid alternative for the opposition of evolution. I make that assumption because in your second paragraph regarding evolution, you do mention creationism.
Therefore, I think it is safe to say that we are talking about evolution as a creation method rather than evolution as something that we empirically see from certain varieties of moths for example. I don’t know that we can use the empirical proof that there is genetic adaptation to write off creationism.
I feel like you are kind of mixing apples and oranges because later on, you concede that we do not know how the universe began scientifically. However, if we don’t know how the universe began, then I find it very hard to write off the supernatural.
Therefore, you’re taking what we do empirically know about how genetics work through what we can observe and imposing it into an area that we do not know to automatically write off creationism. That doesn’t necessarily follow for me.
There are even plenty of Christians who hold that evolution does not necessarily have to be at odds with creationism. I presume that you have read their stuff, but would you be opposed to that kind of thought? I am just curious. Obviously, as Christians, we are pretty widespread on the origins question, but could there be some way you would be comfortable with in theory? I’m just trying to get a grasp on what you believe.
This is a good conversation. I appreciate the civility that is sometimes hard to come by.
When we look to reality to find out what it tells us about our beliefs, we know we have a method that works pretty well. So we wonder, for example, what kind of evidence should we expect to find if, say, a global flood occurred? Well, we look to flooding today to see what kind of evidence is left behind, and then see if we find this globally. Makes sense, right? There are significant clues from multiple avenues of inquiry that should be present if the claim is to stand. For example, turbidity precipitation occurs at fixed rates (meaning the size and weight of suspended particles in moving water settle out at fixed rates. We test these all the time (municipalities that utilize water reservoirs have to account for turbidity to draw fresh, clean water) and we get standardized results. During flood events, we get standardized sedimentation evidence of speed and depth (useful for insurance purposes verifying claims). A global flood should produce uniform sedimentation in a very specific density order (granting some local differences of topography). In other words big rocks should precipitate first, followed by smaller rocks to the smallest particles on the surface of the sedimentation (clay). The should also settle in the direction of where the water flowed. Trapped in these sedimentation layers should also be the flora and fauna trapped by rising waters similar to what we find today: well rooted trees and bushes remain while others are washed away. If they simply floated then they should be found after the water is gone in piles of debris. And so on. The point is that physical evidence should be remain. The fact is that it is absent. There is no global sedimentary layer. There is no ordered sedimentary layer. There is no flora and fauna debris fields. There is no global evidence of drained water, evaporated water, or flowed water. When you add salinity into the evidence pool, we should see a different kind of evidence than what we do. We should see a biodiversity spread in concentric circles from the first reclaimed land. This is absent. We should find settlement patterns and migration routes that show evidence of this supposed ‘restart’ moment. This is absent. There is no physical evidence to support the claim of a global event.
There is much evidence for local events of flooding and receding both of coastlines and interiors. But this evidence reveals local evidence along very different timelines interrupted by geological events we know occurred millions, hundreds of thousands, and thousands of years ago. The same understanding of nuclear decay that drives power plants is used for radioactive dating. If the dating method is wrong (yet supported by three different isotopic readings) then nuclear energy production (as well as bombs) shouldn’t work. Because they work, we can have confidence that the explanations for dating also works. To reject one is to reject the other because the methods are identical – a fact often overlooked by those who cherry pick supportive data from reality to help sustain their beliefs about it rather than all the data from reality that must be accounted for.
These are only some of the reasons why the claim for a global flood simply isn’t supported by what reality tells us is true about it. There are many other avenues of inquiry that all point in the same direction: no global flood. No compelling physical evidence from reality tells us differently; only human stories do that. But if I am pushed into stating where my confidence lies in answering the question if a global flood ever occurred, then I am forced by what reality tells me is true about it to answer in the negative… not for any other purpose or motive than to be honest. This is what we find. And that’s the proper role of science.
I agree in theory that it would make sense to look at floods today and be able to find that evidence back in time to look for the flood of Noah. However, if you look at the account Biblically, if that is true, it was nothing like a normal flood. It rained for 40 days, but in that time, there was theoretically enough water to cover Mount Everest. There is nothing normal about rain falling that fast. There is something crazy about that much water, so I think that is somewhat hard to extend what we know about turbidity for example to something that would have been happening on a presumably faster scale. I think of it kind of like trying to make a sharp turn in a car that is going 90 miles an hour as opposed to 9 miles an hour. This natural laws will have the same effect. Gravity will still be there, and friction will still be there. However, the result will a lot different when one is drifting in the other presumably isn’t or at least not nearly as much. The effects might be different than what you would expect simply because they had never seen of that volume to compare it to. We are talking about differences on a highly exponential level.
I do think that you do kind of downplay the importance of this shared narrative however. Why would many people groups are never had a reason to meet up with each other share a very similar kind of story of a global flood? They all could have independently made up a remarkably similar storyline, or it could have been inspired by an event in the past when humanity was not so spread out and had been passed down and altered somewhat over history. That would explain the variation in the storylines along with the shared line of potential truth that underlies it. The explanation of one family coming off of the Ark and sharing that story with several generations certainly seems more probable than many people coming up with very similar in isolation.
Admittedly, the science behind the flood is not my specialty. I certainly have read some about it, but I have not focused most of my attention there. However, in my perspective, when you have something happen like that, I don’t think that you can necessarily expect everything to happen exactly like we see everything in today. The volume and speed were so different that it is hard to tell if our current models would even be applicable at that level.