Mind The Gap

 

The so-called “God of the gaps” critique is a classic straw man. Virtually no serious Christian thinker ever claimed, “We have a gap in our scientific understanding, therefore God did it.” It's a flimsy criticism of a proposition that is rarely, if ever, seriously made.

By contrast, there is a valid “Science of the gaps” criticism, easily directed at figures like Richard Dawkins and others. It goes something like this: “We don’t currently understand X, but eventually science will explain it - so there’s no need to consider other possibilities.”

This attitude assumes the primacy and completeness of the scientific method, even in areas where it may not be applicable. Science is inherently limited to the lens of reality it can measure and quantify, which means the framework often narrows until only scientifically tractable phenomena are treated as real or important. Anything outside that scope is dismissed as trivial, mistaken, or irrelevant.

In this light, the “God of the gaps” critique is significantly over-attributed, and the ‘Science of the gaps” critique is hugely under-attributed.