God-in-the-Details
10 minutes
“...since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” (Romans 1:19-32, RSVCE)
The Water We Drink
The dreaded “God-of-the-gaps” (GTG) fallacy haunts the attempts of modern theists to argue from the facts of nature, to the existence of an ordering mind behind nature. And fear of committing the GTG fallacy seems to be a stumbling block for even positively disposed and sympathetic non-theists, who might otherwise follow their suspicions where they naturally led – to a creating Hand. What Paul says above is true, but it was written in a very different intellectual environment than our own.
When Paul, a very educated man, penned the above words, and characterized those without basic knowledge of God as being “without excuse,” he likely had in mind a distinction between the sort of pagan philosophers (Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Cicero) whose rational journeys led them to affirm God (or something like God,) and those who took a more radically reductionist approach. As Paul terms it, the existence of God, and even his basic attributes, are plain to any honest searcher/intellectual, though not to the willfully dishonest, or immoral thinker. Faith, as Paul implies and as the Catholic Church teaches, completes and builds upon the natural understanding that there is a God; that God is good, honest, consistent, etc., but, according to Paul, any truth-seeker would at least know that there is such a being, even if ignorant of many specifics. Hence he praises the Athenians for their piety toward an Unknown God (Acts 17.)
Yet Paul lived in an intellectual milieu far removed from our own. In his world, materialistic monism and reductionism came earlier, with the pre-Socratics and the sophists, while the philosophical realism and proto-monotheism of Aristotle et al came afterwards, an advance over a more intellectually decadent past, and a partial solution to it. His was a world in which the best parts of paganism were not so far from what he considered to be the basic, commonsensical home-truths upon which Christianity built and expanded. To paraphrase philosopher and convert from paganism St. Justin Martyr (100-165 A.D.,) Socrates, Plato, and the others were “Christians before Christ.”
The intellectual landscape has changed drastically since Paul’s day. Since the Enlightenment, the trend has been away from Socrates/Aristotle. The new thinking, while it wasn’t necessarily atheistic in intent, had reductionism built into its DNA. Enlightenment thinkers, anxious to make use of the new mechanical and mathematical sciences in order to better understand (and exploit) the structure of the material world, and chafing from the physical sciences’ intellectual subordination to philosophy and theology (upon whose assumptions they were partially dependent,) drew a line in the sand between the “objective” world of facts, figures, and experiential data, and the “subjective” experiences of meaning, purpose, spiritual experience. Fast forward several hundred years, and the extraordinary practical successes of that method of analysis – at least in terms of its technological output – has become part of the western genome. Three hundred seventy-two years after the death of Descartes, even religious people have to be quite intentional, quite out-of-the-box, to avoid imbibing this “measurability-as-objectivity-as-reality” lens. It’s in the water.
The God of the Gaps
It goes beyond the scope of this short reflection to construct a teleological argument that will make everyone happy, or to attempt to overcome this collective mental DNA. What I hope to do is to briefly address the objection/concern that seeing God in nature’s order is always (or even usually) a case of “God-of-the-gaps.” But first, what is God-of-the-gaps?
God-of-the-gaps (GTG) is the fallacy of invoking God as the solution to some gap in material knowledge. It amounts to saying, “Since X (material phenomenon) is mysterious and requires a cause, and since God is the only cause we can think of capable of producing X, then God is the cause of X.” Put concretely: “There must be some cause for the amazing phenomena of caterpillars becoming butterflies. We do not understand exactly how/why this happens, but we do know that an all-powerful God would be able to do it. Therefore, God causes caterpillar metamorphosis.” In other words, it involves invoking God as the immediate, material cause of any long-standing gap in human scientific knowledge.
GTG has two obvious problems, one philosophical, the other rhetorical/practical. In the first place, it seems incredibly arbitrary, having reasoned so far through a series of proximate causes, to suddenly invoke a miraculous cause. In the second place, what happens when some material knowledge gap into which God has been inserted as an answer is suddenly filled-in by a new discovery? In that case is that God is no longer needed to fill that gap, and therefore has one less toehold in the universe. This is problematic from a faith perspective, because it makes God’s existence beholden to our current state of material knowledge. If anything, such a conception of God as gap-filler predisposes a religious person to dislike scientific progress, since it tends, over time, to push the gap-filling God further and further into irrelevance. From an empiricist perspective, God becomes a cheap way-out of mysteries that are, at least in principle, within the purview of science.
I will not deal here with the historical assertion that belief in God has always depended upon such gaps. I doubt that this was true, even for the ordinary person, but it’s beside the point. What I’m interested in addressing is the possibly legitimate fear, even of the sympathetic investigator, that any movement from nature’s design to God’s existence would be fallacious, such that, as a matter of intellectual rigor, science must be officially agnostic, and work under assumptions that are practically (if not theoretically) atheistic. Must I, in order to see God’s hand in nature, first leave my brain at the laboratory door?
The short answer is 1) no, we need not be practical agnostics in order to be good scientists, and 2) there is a way to do good science, while finding God in the details.
Distinctions, Distinctions
Some distinctions are in order: First, according to the Christina theological tradition, God is the final, formal, material, and efficient cause of every created thing. That is to say, God is just as intimately involved in “normal” cases of cause and effect that we partially understand as he is in extraordinary events or facts that we do not yet understand. If God created the world ex nihilo, and continues to actively sustain in existence all that is not God, then he also creates and sustains the whole series of causal relationships that obtain among beings. And yet there is a whole series of causal relationships among created beings. These causes, many of which are investigated in the physical sciences, are termed proximate causes. Proximate causality is the side of causality that is visible to us. In nature, it displays consistent, lawlike behavior that we can study, and – given the kind of minds that we have – that same study is bound to reveal many truths about nature.
Now Christianity also holds that God, in addition to owning the entire series of proximate causes, is free, if he so chooses, to act in such a way as to produce a visible sign of his presence. These signs needn’t always involve what appear to be extraordinary exceptions to the rule. When a poor family, down to its last dollar, cries out to God for help, and is answered with an unexpected windfall (say, an old friend calls out the blue to hire the mother for a job) they may well interpret this as a sign of God’s affection. And they would be totally right in doing so, though each step along the way was perfectly explicable in terms of particular causes and effects.
One Christmas, when I was an impulsive teenager, I spent the $40 dollars I had set aside to buy my brother a Megazord. Full of sorrow over what I’d done, I walked aimlessly through the mall parking lot, praying for God to help me make up for my selfishness. I had no other Christmas money. This was totally my own fault. Stopping at a random spot, I looked down at my feet (in shame) and found there two balled-up $20 bills. Clearly, some person had dropped the $40 dollars, which, because of its random placement on the ground, was now fair game. Equally clearly, God had heard my prayer, and immediately answered it. I do not imagine for a second that he created the bills ex nihilo, or turned a bit of pavement into money, but neither can its placement exactly there have been a coincidence.
In addition to these “ordinary” examples of God’s action in the world, action which testifies to a mind-boggling comprehension and foreknowledge of all the proximate causes in all of human history, themselves interconnected in an endless causal matrix, Christian experience also testifies to rare, and mighty signs. These are the “Class A” miracles we find in scripture, and in the lives of the saints. They amount to God acting in a manner that goes far beyond the usual signs and helps he gives to believers, and which demonstrates his total command over material reality, his capacity to enter into his creation, and tinker with it for the benefit of the viewer.
And this is where the trouble potentially starts with GTG. Certain aspects of nature are more obviously extraordinary than others. Life itself differs in kind from non-life, consciousness life from vegative life, and the human intellect from mere consciousness. Then there are the countless wonders to be found in the details of biological life. What is to stop this God character from “popping in” to do something miraculous just when we were getting going with our research program? If we even admit God into reality, are we not potentially giving up all hope of discovery, of law, and of comprehensible order? How can we possibly know ahead of time if a certain gap in our knowledge represents the current limitations of our research programs – which will never be complete anyway – or an actual discontinuity of the sort that exists between a jug of water, and the same jug, once it has been turned into wine? How can we keep God from messing up science?
God as Logos
I believe part of the solution starts with the knowledge of God himself. If God created all things, and causes them to have the order and regularity that they do, then God is both good and reasonable. He has also given us minds that are particularly adapted to higher knowledge, even though that higher knowledge often serves little practical purpose in the day-to-day, at least until some portion of it has been turned into a useful technology (whose workings most of us don’t understand or think about anyway.) Now if God is reasonable, and has created a world of causes that we can investigate and understand, it follows that God wants us to use our reason to investigate and understand the universe. Any father knows what it is to pose a challenge to his child, and to deliberately hold back, or only to ask clarifying questions, so that the child can figure the thing out on his own, and thus enjoy that particular kind of freedom and mastery that comes with knowledge.
The God of Christianity delights in the growing knowledge and understanding of his children; he blesses (and makes possible) rational investigation. That being so, and considering that we are uniquely fitted and adapted to explore the world, there is a good case that God would have created a world that normally responds to just this sort of inquiry. After all, even a true miracle (like walking on water) would be insensible and meaningless to us unless we had a strong sense of the normal workings of nature. Christian theism implies therefore that the universe is orderly, law-bound, and discoverable.
With this insight, we turn back to nature, and, more specifically, to biology. Should our approach to it assume that the progress and workings of nature, the unfolding of biological history, is likely to be a series of disconnected “Class A” miracles (like multiplying loaves and fishes,) or rather a series of beings with specific natures forming some kind of causal continuum, a continuum that is, at least in principle, accessible to investigation? I think on the face of things, the latter is more likely. After all, the universe shows us an unfolding process. The process of the ascent of life from microbe to man parallels the process of unfolding from the big bang, through star formation, through the emergence of planets like earth. On the one hand, there is definitely something miraculous about the whole spread of things; on the other, that spread takes place in fashion that suggests progressive steps and causal connections. Why create a universe that emerges in this way, that looks so much like a series of forms unfolding in their proper times and places according to discoverable principles, unless you actually intend it to be discoverable and knowable?
This does not mean we are guaranteed to get answers for all of our questions. It also doesn’t mean that the regularities and principles will behave in as simple and law-like a way as we expect; as some people, particularly those who tend toward reductionism, would want them to behave. It may be, for example, that the evolution of life is like the unfolding of a symphony, and that each novel animal form is somehow contained in a virtual way in the forms that preceded and activated it. One thinks of how two highly flammable substances, oxygen and hydrogen, somehow bond to become a substance almost totally different from themselves. The history of life may turn out to be like that, with, say, the form of the feathers contained virtually within some deep-seated genomic logic such that, at a particular moment, when certain conditions are naturally but inevitably reached, the feather emerges almost all at once, or in several discrete, very deliberate steps. This would seem like a miracle from the perspective of the creature, but might at the same time be a manifestation of a set of plans and rules that are built into nature, and are, in principle, discoverable.
Of course, it is also possible that God simply created proto-birds ex nihilo, then later created true birds ex nihilo. But if so, this image of God is hard to reconcile with the idea of a good, and eminently reasonable God who has given us reason so that we can know him, and his creation. It would seem so arbitrary, and at odds with the general picture of creation as a whole, that it hardly seems possible to reconcile it with God’s goodness and wisdom.
Am I saying that God, in order to be good, must have made the world in a way that is totally explicable to us? No. I am saying that the world he made has a particular order, a particular historical sweep, and a certain reliable, regular logic, which, taken altogether with the facts available to us now, and with our knowledge of God, suggests that he probably has not “popped in” to put a feathers on a reptile here; to add legs to a fish there. It is much more likely, given all the above, that all of this happens according to some (still largely obscure) deep order in creation, which works itself out in time, and which has a certain “freedom” to develop according to the contingencies of geological history. That would both line up with what we see in nature, and with how God typically acts in human history. On the one hand, creation would have a certain autonomy, a certain freedom; on the other hand, the whole sweep of creation, its deep unfolding logic would be a shocking demonstration of his power and goodness.
The Non-Issue…that Cuts Both Ways
If what I’ve said above is correct, then there needn’t be any God-of-the-gaps issues to speak of. The scientific investigator, using his methods, would simply discover the detail of what’s there. That, after all, is the glory of science: looking to see what’s actually there. Since, even when we’re certain of God’s existence and of his creation of the world, we don’t know ahead of time how it was done, the only possible way to discover it would be through active investigation. Any theory, theistic or atheistic, which attempts to assert a priori how nature must be, and which then purports to explain it or spin it out merely in accordance with the principles of a theory, and without actually looking — well, that’s an unscientific theory. It’s fine to criticize fundamentalist creationists for ignoring the actual data of nature, and “explaining” nature in accordance with their particular theological understanding (their theory.) Yet let’s be consistent and do the same with evolutionary biologists of the hard-Darwinian variety who make wild assertions about the power of natural selection without actually attending to facts emerging from molecular biology, Evo Devo, structuralist critiques, glaring taxonomic novelties, etc., which show that the situation is much more complicated and interesting than their favorite theory suggests. It’s not just God-of-the-gaps that’s a problem for science and reason. Any ready-made logical placeholder, designed to stand in for good science, is guilty of the same error. Natural Selection-of-the-gaps, anyone?
Yet this is a digression, born of little sleep, and much long-windedness. All that I have been trying to say is this: God, if he created the world, is in the details. Nothing in those details should threaten any reasonable person. If God exists, and if faith is the consummation of reason, then the religious person should expect to answer questions about the nature of creation by actually looking at creation, and how it operates. After doing so, he may have ample reason to step back, and argue from it towards God’s clear existence, but the basis for doing so will be the deep logic of order, beauty, and purpose built into creation, and revealed by scientific study. Meanwhile, the friendly non-theist, when he finds the same order, beauty, and purpose in the details and unfolding of nature, will be justified in seeing them as pointing towards the Hand from which they came. God-in-the-details.
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