No More Room for a Small God

Long ago, we knew little about the world. No one knew why the seasons changed. Pagans prayed to their gods at winter solstice to please bring the warmth back for one more year. Scientists thought that flies were spontaneously generated from rotting meat. Clouds floating in the sky were a proof of God's existence because it was "impossible." We found God in the "gaps" of our knowledge - proved His existence from the unexplainable all around us.

This never should have been possible. It was our arrogance that assumed there could be a reason for God within the world. Now we arrogantly feel justified in assuming that there is no reason for God anywhere. We think that this is a conclusion based on our increased knowledge. But really, the only conclusion that can be rightly drawn from our modern knowledge is that there are several more areas in which we can say, “It basically makes sense if we assume that we understand the underlying pattern of natural laws.” The God of the Gaps has been squeezed out. Yes, there are arguments about this and there are certainly observations that we don't have a good explanation for yet, but it can't be denied that we have been very clever at figuring out possible explanations for the world around us.

We can no longer take the easy route by finding “God” as the reason for the things we don’t know. We must take the bolder position of finding God as the reason for the things we do know.
The God-of-the-Gaps argument is an argument from ignorance of the natural world. More and more, ignorance of the natural world is not our problem. What was it that used to give that ignorance power and persuasiveness? It was that it caused us to doubt our knowledge of the natural world; to doubt any conclusions we would come to about its operation. With increased knowledge, we have moved from doubt to faith. We now have great faith in our knowledge of the natural world. Our misplaced faith is the problem. Our knowledge is not worthy of such faith. We should have known this from the withering attack of the Skeptics: Hume, Kant, Hegel and Kierkegaard showed us how we must always doubt our senses. We must always doubt conclusions that we arrive at from observation. Yet somehow we have arrived at this position of absolute confidence in our powers of observation and conclusion-drawing. How ironic that, because we know so much, we should lose sight of the very nature of knowledge.

And yet our vast knowledge forces us, if we are willing to stop this blind trust, to posit no transcendent cause for this and that scattered event: but a great unseen cause for everything. And not simply an initial cause to start everything, but a cause within and behind every piece of knowledge that we possess. There must be a sufficient reason for us to assume that any event has occurred in the natural world for us to observe and draw conclusions from. This reason must not itself be an observable event within the natural world, for then we must simply ask the same question about it. By tying ourselves into the ring of making observations within the natural world, we have purposefully excluded ourselves from ever explaining those events. We could of course propose a Cause within the natural world that has its reason for being within itself, but to propose this would invalidate every other conclusion we have drawn from our observations of the natural world.

Someday we may be stuck with having explained everything within the natural world…but having no reason to believe our explanation. We can come up with any number of alternate explanations that equally explain our observations, and are equally immune to proof. There is no longer room for God within the cracks of our knowledge, but we have revealed the anguished hunger we have for God within every belief we hold about the world, within every fact of science. The Christian can no longer reasonably relegate God to certain “spiritual” or "unexplainable" areas of his life. God is either the explanation of everything, or the explanation of nothing.