The God of the Gaps

The phrase, “the God of the gaps”, comes from a notion that all things that cannot be explained must come from a god. Admittedly, if we just used God as an answer to all questions, we would have learned very little about our world. People who refuse to acknowledge God’s existence will often use “God of the gaps” to belittle those who believe in a Creator God.

Those who use the “God of the gaps” against Creationist (those who believe in a creator) lack understanding. Let me use a car to illustrate my point. If we could take a car back in time 4000 years and let people ride in it, they most likely would believe it came from the gods or God. As a modern thinker, one might think that it is ignorant. I would say those who believe that are ignorant. Why do you ask? Well, today, we may know how cars work and how they are created. We understand the mechanical principles that cause it to function. We designed the electronic circuitry that runs throughout it. So then the modern thinker says to the ancient man, “see there is no god!”. They misunderstand what a god is.  To the ancient man, a god was someone or something that possessed knowledge or power that most men did not.  People like Ford, Volt, and Tesla could be called the gods of the car? This is essentially what people did in the past. They recognized that things came from other intelligent beings. 

We need to go farther, though. While we know men have discovered the laws of physics, we also know they did not create these laws. So where do we go from there? Until we know better, we say God gave them to us. In my mind, if we just say they exist without an intelligent being creating them, we have not answered the question. It is just a refusal to accept God as an answer. The modern thinker has come no closer to understanding our world apart from God than ancient. All we can do today is describe our world in more granular detail.

So reader, please do not let anyone make you feel foolish for believe there is a God. Believing in God means you recognize that there are things that we just don’t understand. We also acknowledge that order comes from design, and design comes from intelligence. The fool is the one who will not accept the possibility of a God who believes that their intelligence is nothing more than an illusion.