God of the gaps

So I think this is kind of getting to the crux of what we wanted to explore in this episode, because we've talked about this a little bit in the past of, this idea of science and faith being in conflict with each other.

And I think that it's probably this idea of the God of the gaps where, you know, what we don't understand is where we bring God into the picture.

And that is shrinking all the time.

And yet when you look at this and say only 5% of the observed, well, the entire observable universe, the stuff we can see and interact with is 5% of what we think is actually there.

And the remaining 95%, is kind of almost entirely unknown at this point.

And I think that's an interesting one from an atheist standpoint or a standpoint of the God of the gaps theory where, well, there's a lot of gaps out there as it turns out.

So I don't know, maybe Alex, if we can take a step back from this and let's approach that because we've got in pretty hot with a lot of complexity there.

I guess from a starting point of...

We can even say that AI still can't do certain things that only humans can do.

But as my friend the other day pointed out, that just seems to be the human equivalent of the old God of the Gaps argument.

You can keep saying that only humans can do things that AI can't, but then AI could develop to the point that it too can do things that humans can do.

So all this goes to the question of what it means to be human.

It jumped quite a bit there because this is four and a half hours long.

Oh my God,

this was so long.

This was so long.

But I am going to ask you, Marsh, how did Joe introduce this particular episode from April 2024 in the show notes?

So this is going to be a conversation with Graham Hancock and Flint Dibbles.

So we start by introducing Graham Hancock, formerly a foreign correspondent for The Economist, has been an international bestselling author for more than 30 years with a series of books, notably Fingerprints of the Gods, Magicians of the Gods, and America Before, which investigate the controversial possibility of a lost civilization of the Ice Age destroyed in a global cataclysm some 12,000 years ago.

Graham is the presenter of the hit Netflix documentary series, Ancient Apocalypse.

So are there some explanations in the history of religions that attempted to explain the universe in a way that would allow for science to replace it? Yes, we acknowledge that.

Philosophers call that God of the Gaps type reasoning, where we see some phenomenon in the universe and we just automatically appeal to the transcendent.

But yet science gives us new knowledge about the physical universe in the future that would allow for us to plug that gap, offer a natural explanation as opposed to appealing to a transcendent reality to explain that thing.

But we can actually challenge the assumption that all religious explanations of the universe are such that they can be replaced by science.

A second one is probably my nearest and dearest argument for God is, is the breath in my lungs i did an episode of my show the shed and beam maybe you can link it down in the show notes but how god saved me from mormonism and suicide i was raised mormon when my parents left i became suicidally depressed around the age 14 and in a pit of utter nihilism and despair The breath in my lungs, the fact that Jesus saved me, every breath and every heartbeat is another argument, not just for a beginner or a designer or a moral lawgiver, but a gracious God who saved a schlub like me.

So to the argument, is this just Williams, McDowell, are you guys just doing this God of the gaps thing? Eventually, science will plug up all these gaps, leaving your God permanently unemployed, an outdated hypothesis.

It's an important objection, and I think it's important here to dive into the actual arguments, and I'll make it quick, to see that these are not like historic God gaps that were closed.

Rather, these gaps keep growing...

He has done so much work on, like you said, information and information theory.

And where do you get the new genetic information to explain the diversity of species? Here's another example of the more science is done, the bigger the God gaps become.

Let me close with this thought on the God of the gaps.

Consciousness has, we talked about maybe four or five features of it.

And, um, there's this tendency in, um...

Have you come across the God of the gaps fallacy?

No.

So the God of the gaps is this idea where, um, we put it...

So hu- we like to explain our situations.

Um, the human brain hates ambiguity.

People still get the bubonic plague every, you know, couple cases a year usually, and it's treatable with antibiotics, which we also know about because we have limited our scientific explanations to things that can be tested.

Roundabout way of saying, at the time, they didn't know what it was, so they labeled it with a supernatural explanation.