God of the Gaps

God of the Gaps names an apologetic strategy that points to a currently unexplained feature of nature, rather than nature as a whole, as the evidence for God. Henry Drummond criticized “reverent minds who ceaselessly scan the fields of Nature and the books of Science in search of gaps… which they will fill up with God,”¹ and Dietrich Bonhoeffer later made a closely parallel point about using “God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge.”² Because scientific explanation keeps advancing, an apologetic staked on any one gap loses ground as that particular gap closes.

Historical Development

Design Arguments Before the Term

Arguments that pointed to order, complexity, or design in the natural world as evidence of God predate the “gaps” language by centuries. Thomas Aquinas’s fifth way, from the Summa Theologica (1270), reasoned from the goal-directed behavior of things that lack knowledge to an intelligent director: “We see that things which lack knowledge, such as natural bodies, act for an end… Now whatever lacks knowledge cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is directed by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.”³

The Puritan theologian Stephen Charnock used a similar artificer analogy over a century before William Paley made it famous, arguing that a spiritual idea must precede any designed work: “Every artificer, watchmaker, carpenter, hath a model in his own mind of the work he designs to frame: the material and outward fabric is squared according to an inward and spiritual idea.”⁴

Isaac Newton, in the General Scholium he added to the Principia (1713), argued from the sheer variety of created things to a personal designer, rather than a chain of necessity: “Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every where, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being necessarily existing.”⁵ William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802) opened with an analogy comparing a watch found on a heath to the created order: were the mechanism of a watch observed on the ground, “the inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker… who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.”⁶ Charles Hodge later systematized the same reasoning at length, insisting that the argument does not depend on the limits of past experience (“every house, ship, telescope… we ever saw had an intelligent maker”) but on the nature of design itself, “that it of necessity implies an intelligent agent.”⁷

Naming the Pattern (1894-1944)

Drummond’s 1894 lectures, later published as The Ascent of Man, criticized the practice by name (if not yet by the later label), warning that a faith built on gaps would retreat as those gaps closed: “What needs altering in such finely jealous souls is at once their view of Nature and of God. Nature is God’s writing, and can only tell the truth; God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.”¹ Writing from prison fifty years later, Bonhoeffer made the same argument in explicitly theological terms: “If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know.”²

Modern Usage

Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (1988) carried the same pattern into popular secular science writing. Hawking presented the uniform temperature of the early universe as a puzzle that “would be very difficult to explain… except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us,” then introduced inflationary and “no-boundary” cosmological models to close that particular gap, concluding: “So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place then, for a creator?”⁸

The intelligent-design movement of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been accused of the same pattern by its critics, though its proponents dispute the charge. Louis Markos describes Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, and William Dembski as arguing from positive claims about biological information and irreducible complexity, such as the bacterial flagellum and the genetic information encoded in DNA, rather than merely from the current absence of a Darwinian explanation, while noting that critics accuse the movement’s proponents of “creationism in disguise” largely because most (not all) of its leading figures are Christians.⁹

Theological and Philosophical Problems

Reformed theologians who have not used the “gaps” label have made substantially the same objection to the underlying reasoning. Louis Berkhof, assessing theistic-evolution schemes that call in a special divine act only to bridge the gaps between inorganic and organic, or irrational and rational, creation, noted that this move concedes the theory’s own limits: “to the extent to which a special operation of God is assumed, gaps are admitted which evolution cannot bridge, and something new is called into being, the theory naturally ceases to be a pure theory of evolution.”¹⁰

Herman Bavinck raised a related caution about what natural theology can responsibly claim. He held the teleological argument as “valid,” but reached a deliberately “modest conclusion”: design is evidenced by the ordinary, pervasive order of things (climate and seasons, the circulation of blood, “such complex bodily structures as the hand and eye”) rather than by whatever nature has not yet explained, and he noted that materialist objections which explain apparent purpose “by way of impersonal, evolutionary forces such as natural selection” are themselves unproven claims of faith, not settled science.¹¹ Natural theology becomes, in Bavinck’s terms, “an invalid and impious activity” when it stands on its own and “in a self-sufficient and rationalistic fashion sets aside the need for special revelation.”¹²

Hodge’s own defense of the design argument answers the same weakness from the other direction. Against Hume’s objection that design inferences are only licensed within the bounds of past experience (we have seen houses built, never worlds), Hodge replied that the argument does not reason from repeated experience at all, but from the nature of design as such: wherever evidence of design appears, “we are convinced that it is to be referred to the operation of mind.”⁷

Related Doctrines

References

Henry Drummond, The Ascent of Man (New York: James Pott & Co., 1894), 333. ↩ ↩²
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, letter of 29 May 1944, in Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge, trans. Reginald H. Fuller, enlarged ed. (New York: Touchstone, 1997). ↩ ↩²
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, Q.2, Art.3, “The Fifth Way,” trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1920). ↩
Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. William Symington, 2 vols. (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1853), vol. 1, “Discourse III: On God’s Being a Spirit,” 184. ↩
Isaac Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), General Scholium, added 2nd ed. (1713). ↩
William Paley, Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (London, 1802), chap. 1. ↩
Charles Hodge, “Chapter II. Theism.,” in Systematic Theology, Volume I (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 217, 227. ↩ ↩²
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), chap. 8, “The Origin and Fate of the Universe.” ↩
Louis Markos, From Aristotle to Christ: How Aristotelian Thought Clarified the Christian Faith (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2024), “Preface: A Platonist Learns to Love Aristotle.” ↩
Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 168. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 7, “Knowing God,” sec. “‘Proofs’ for God’s Existence: The Teleological Argument.” ↩
Bavinck, chap. 7, “Knowing God,” sec. “‘Proofs’ for God’s Existence.” ↩