Darwin of the Gaps

There is a component to the scientific argument against God that goes like this: religion has been wrong about so many things, and things that religion claimed have been proven wrong by science. Given that some religious claims have been shown to be false, all religious claims will eventually be shown false as science advances.

The first problem with this claim is that most traditional religious teachings of which I am aware make no particular claims about science. The creation stories are not meant to be scientific explanations of creation but are meant to illustrate truths about man, God and the relationship between them. Particularly in the case of the Judeo-Christian Genesis story, the depiction of the process of creation is meant to help us understand the goodness of God, something about His Divine Nature, and man as a special category of the creation. We are told that man was created good and perfect but fell and that God promised to redeem him because the Creator genuinely cares for man and has a purpose for his existence.

Other than the general and -- within the local frame -- correct observation that everything bears offspring after its kind (which we ultimately learn is also a spiritual truth), what statement does religion make about the natural order of things? We are told that man was created from the dust of the earth, just as was every other creature. The difference is that God breathed a spirit life into man and put him in charge of things. Interpreters of religious revelation have from time to time made statements about science but that is not the revelation itself, which says only “in the beginning God created” all that is. The biblical revelation is primarily concerned with a) revealing man to himself and b) revealing God to man. I would question the idea that science has proven any of that to be untrue.

Secondly the theory of evolution is an explanation of how the organisms on the planet have become so diverse, as Darwin indeed titled his work “The Origin of the Species”. With this religious people have no reason to quarrel. All that has been disproved by evolutionary theory is the assertion that each species was created in place, uniquely, just as it exists today. This is similar to saying that science has somehow disproved “my love is like a red, red rose.” Just as no one who understands poetry would claim that a human is really a flowering plant with thorns, so no one who understands the purpose of God’s revelation would think that the earth really was constructed in a single week in 4004 B.C.

Materialists are not satisfied with this, however. The materialist claims that nothing exists except matter and energy, and that all arose, without any reason from some sort of cosmic singularity. As the universe moves from zero or near zero entropy to near infinite entropy in a cold universe, the increasing entropy brings with it increasing degrees of freedom – up to a point. The universe has become, temporarily, less deterministic. For the moment, quantum theory actually works and this allows the organic to arise from the inorganic.

Of course, the materialist can prove none of this. Cosmology has had to add in the twilight zone concept of dark matter and dark energy to get the equations to balance, meaning that – rather than dark matter and energy being real – the equations are probably faulty. But science is pragmatic and will cling to anything that has any predictive value, no matter how localized. Materialists do not know how life began. They cannot create living organisms from inorganic materials. Not only do they not know whether the cat is alive or dead, they cannot even define what they mean by alive or dead in quantitative terms.

“He’s dead, Jim.”

Naturally, that does not stop them from confidently asserting that the answers to the origin of life will be found and it won’t be God.

“42” perhaps?

It is this view that we “supernaturalists” like to call “darwinism”. We use this term specifically to distance the view from legitimate evolutionary theory and natural selection. Darwinism is very much a religious position, though its proponents probably think of themselves as anti-religious. Huxley in his day and Dawkins today see darwinism as a means to usurp God’s place in the universe and replace Him with the impersonal “god of forces” that does not care about man any more than it cares about amoeba. In doing so they attempt to rid themselves of what they perceive as the constraints of religion and moral authority. The anti-God apologists will deny this and claim that we are misrepresenting evolutionary theory. But, again, we are not disputing evolution as such, only the unjustified extrapolations of it.

For this reason we point out the fact that there is much that is unexplained by science and more which will likely never be explained. The materialist, struck at this point, attempts to counter that religion is resorting to a God of the gaps and that science will close the gaps, eventually. For us, of course, there are no gaps. Gaps exist for the materialist looking up, not for the believer viewing things from above. Again, this is why we call it darwinism, for the materialist is actually postulating a “darwin of the gaps” when he says science will explain everything, though it cannot now.