Replies to Roi Tzazna's Response to the Faith and Science Series on ynet

Below are the words of Roi Tzazna, with my comments after each section (2 sections in all):

First chapter in the series 'Between Science and God' by Roi Tzazna, which first attempts to answer the question of what, exactly, God is
Many people like to think of Charles Darwin today as the great prophet of evolution and atheism. They sometimes forget that in his youth Charles Darwin yearned to understand the world and unravel its secrets in the name of religion and for the glory of God. In fact, Darwin studied theology in his youth and even considered entering the clergy before deciding to devote himself to the life sciences. In those days, many naturalists came from the ranks of the clergy, out of the belief that if they understood the world around them better, they could better understand God himself as well. This was also Darwin's aspiration when he embarked on his great journey around the world, from which he returned with his first insights regarding the theory of evolution.

But Darwin took a step too far. The religious figures of the nineteenth century saw the theory he conceived and developed as a kind of direct challenge to God himself.

And all that remains to ask is: were they right?

It is fitting that, more than a hundred and fifty years after the conception of the theory of evolution, we try to answer this question in a way that will be clear and intelligible both to religious people and to scientists. But to do so, we must answer another difficult question: what, exactly, is God?

There are several answers to this question. One sees God as a kind of transcendent being that created the world and went on its way, ignoring human beings from then onward. The theory of evolution cannot disprove the existence of a God of that sort, and no one claims that it does[m1]. But it is worth asking what connection there is between such a being and the plethora of customs and superstitious, trivial beliefs that religious people have associated with his name from time immemorial.

By contrast, there is the Orthodox religious approach, which sees God as a sort of cross between Papa Smurf and Gargamel. He watches over his children from far above, directs them on the straight path through his prophets (who arrive only rarely) and through countless punishments in the form of plagues, natural disasters, and, in a few frustratingly rare cases, even targeted assassinations. Despite his high blood pressure and his tendency to shoot first and ask questions afterward, he is, all in all, a good-hearted God. He knows everything, he is all-powerful, and human beings are always at the center for him. After all, he created the world for them, six thousand years ago, give or take.

Can the existence of such a creature be disproved by relying on science and human logic? This is a dilemma thousands of years old: can one really understand God's will, or grasp his attributes? For such a being, all-powerful and all-knowing, can take into account facts and reasons that we do not yet know or understand.

Well, that is possible. But one cannot address such claims without more serious evidence for the existence of that being, or for the deep processes of thought it carries out. Any other way of drawing conclusions about God leads us back to pure faith and nothing more. And if faith is what we are discussing, who can guarantee that the Jews are more correct than the Christians, the Muslims, the Buddhists, or any of the hundreds of other religions and sects that fill the face of the earth? If we use faith alone as our guide, why should we take the Jewish God more seriously than Kiki-Tiki, the ancient stone god of the pygmies, buried beneath the floor of the sea?

Faith is not the way to find truth, as many sages in the Talmud already noted. If we want to come as close as possible to the truth, the only way to do so is by weighing the actual evidence available to us today[m2].

I can already recommend to the believing reader not to worry too much, because it must be admitted that the existence of God can never be disproved with certainty. In science, as opposed to faith, there is no absolute certainty. We can never definitively disprove the existence of God. At most we can make him ridiculous – and that is exactly what the theory of evolution does, almost without noticing.

To explain how it does this, we will now address two of God's most prominent attributes and try to examine them logically and soberly, in light of the insights that the theory of evolution provides us about the world into which we were born.

Is God good?
You will certainly be surprised to hear that the theory of evolution was not so revolutionary when it was first published. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a number of different theories of evolution began to take shape, including that of the naturalist Lamarck, who held that living creatures were capable of improving their abilities during their lifetimes and passing those improved traits on to their offspring. According to Lamarck's theory, the giraffe developed from an antelope that wanted to nibble the leaves on especially tall trees, and the more it strained to reach them, the longer its neck became. This theory was accepted by the public at the beginning of the nineteenth century, even though it in fact supported the same conclusion as Darwin's theory of evolution: simple organisms undergo processes of change and improvement over the generations, and these processes led to the creation of the great diversity of all the living creatures on the face of the earth.

Theories of evolution, therefore, were not a great surprise or innovation for religious people in Darwin's time. Why then did Darwin's theory of evolution cause such a great uproar? One of the main reasons was that it went against God's wisdom and benevolence.

Many of us, who do not know the theory in depth, like to think of Darwinian evolution as an orderly and regulated process. A kind of Lamarckism. Living organisms develop, produce improved offspring, and die of old age. Darwin's evolution is far darker and grimmer, because it introduced a different mechanism for evolution: natural selection.

What is natural selection? It is reality. Let us explain with a relatively simple example.

A certain female dog gave birth to two puppies. One had a long, warm coat, and the other a short coat. In regions with a hot and humid climate, the body of the dog with the long coat will overheat, and it will have difficulty running or fighting for long periods. The puppy with the short, airy coat will do very well in that same environment.

The theory of evolution by natural selection states that the dog that is not adapted to environmental conditions will produce fewer offspring than the dog that is better adapted. It will be less healthy, less fit to fight for mating with females, and even if it produces offspring, they will be few in number. Since the offspring carry their parents' traits with them, it follows that the sons and grandsons of the dog with the long coat will also be highly likely to receive the trait for a long coat – and therefore they too will produce fewer offspring than the short-coated dogs. Over dozens of generations, the long-coated dogs will become fewer and fewer, and the number of short-coated dogs will keep growing. Eventually we will reach a situation in which an overwhelming majority of the dog population in that climate has short coats. All this – provided that the climate under which they live remains hot and oppressive. And that, in a nutshell, is natural selection.

And now – a reversal. What will happen if the habitat changes all at once? Let us suppose (as indeed happened) that a huge volcano erupts and releases into the atmosphere enormous quantities of powdery volcanic dust that blocks the sun's light and heat. Temperatures will drop significantly for a period of many years, until the dust settles. In that case, the dog population in that region – which we have already concluded is almost entirely short-coated – will find it very hard to survive. Some of them will die of cold at night. Others will come down with influenza and other unpleasant diseases that will take advantage of their precarious physical condition. Only a few dogs will manage to survive and produce offspring, and these will mainly be the few dogs with long coats, which succeed in retaining body heat. In this way the population will change drastically as a result of changes in the environment.

Archaeological and geological evidence shows that many catastrophes of this kind befell life during the billions of years in which it developed on earth. The last event of mass extinction occurred only 65 million years ago, apparently as a result of a large asteroid striking the earth. The enormous explosion, the fires, the dust released into the atmosphere – all these made life almost impossible for most living creatures. The result was that 75% of all species disappeared from the face of the earth and never returned. Only those adapted to the new environmental conditions, or those that managed to adapt quickly enough, remained alive and passed their improved traits on to their offspring, who repopulated the earth.

We know of at least five similar mass extinctions that took place in the last five hundred million years. Each of them led to an enormous leap in evolution because it destroyed the existing order and brought about a situation in which only the specially adapted species could survive and thrive. Mass extinctions of this kind are also the reason we find it difficult to locate some of the transitional links – the intermediary stages between dinosaur and bird, for example – among living creatures today. The animals that underwent that evolution became extinct and are no more. At most, we manage to find the fossils they left behind deep in the ground.

Some theologians, such as Rabbi Dr. Michael Abraham, argue that here we have a decisive example of the divine plan at its best. After all, the dinosaurs became extinct en masse so that human beings could develop[m3].

This is not an argument we can easily reject or disprove. It may, of course, be that there is a plan for creation and its progress, and that yesterday's giants had to collapse so that human beings could stand up on their feet. And yet there is here a clash with all those attributes we so love to ascribe to the Creator. How can it be that a benevolent Creator would allow such a vast number of living creatures – each of which he himself endowed with the capacity to feel love and attraction, fear and pain – to die in suffering and agony? And not for one generation alone, but for millions and billions of generations – until human beings arrived on the scene? Many thinkers believe that one cannot ascribe justice and benevolence to God, given the way evolution operates, and I tend to agree with them[m4].

Very well. Let us assume that he is not benevolent. But is he at least wise?

Is God wise?
Since God does not seem to be endowed with an excess of love for his creatures, we must consider the existence of another kind of God. One who regards the lives of animals coolly and even indifferently. He need not be cruel. Perhaps a better definition for such a God, in today's marketing language, would be goal-oriented. His goal throughout evolution is the creation of human beings, and ultimately the transmission of the Torah to Moses / Jesus / Muhammad (delete whichever is irrelevant from your perspective, and try to ignore the fact that billions of people throughout the world do precisely the opposite every single day, for reasons equally good or equally bad[m5]).

What can evolution teach us about this kind of God?

Unfortunately, it appears that God fails in this category as well when his achievements are confronted with reality. Today we know that the age of the universe exceeds thirteen billion years. In the early years, atoms combined with atoms and formed molecules, stars flared up and slowly burned out. And in the end, after an immense span of time during which absolutely nothing happened that God could not have created on his own in a single instant – the earth took shape out of random collisions of meteorites and dust particles, and the first living cell on earth came into being.

The age of the earth itself stands at 4.5 billion years. Of all that time, the last 3.5 billion years were devoted to an appallingly slow, gradual process of evolution, which often reached dead ends as well. Ancient bacteria developed the ability to produce energy from sunlight and evolved over hundreds of millions of years into algae and fungi, which after hundreds of millions of additional years joined together to form multicellular creatures. Much more time was required before the first fish emerged from these, and after yet hundreds of millions of more years – here we are.

When we try to examine this mode of conduct of the act of creation with sober eyes, it is hard not to be appalled. Every small government project usually includes an item for estimating time, and if the contractor cannot meet the deadline, the task is transferred to someone else. How much time, in your opinion, would an all-powerful architect need to create the world as it is today? The unavoidable answer is a single instant. Why, then, would such an all-powerful architect choose to wait nearly fourteen billion years while the world slowly takes shape, with a great many failures along the way[m6]?

Instead of thought and advance planning, we get a god who throws atoms, molecules, and physical forces into the playground of the universe, and lets them coalesce on their own into basic living creatures. Then he stands to the side and lets those same living creatures compete with one another in the greatest gladiatorial arena in the world. If he already knew what the result would be, why could he not have created the world from the outset as it is today? Such an architect would be fired immediately today. This is not an intelligent God, or one who plans ahead. At best it is a bungler-god[m7].

Can God's will be guessed?
In light of these hard-to-swallow points, it is easy to understand the source of the religious opposition to Darwin's theory of evolution already a hundred and fifty years ago. It is even easier to understand the reason for the opposition of Jewish rabbis, Muslim imams, and Christian priests to the theory of evolution and the implications that emerge from it.

Despite the reluctance on the part of religious figures, some of the believing public has already begun to accept evolution as a working assumption, while omitting from it the parts it finds uncomfortable. Such is the case with Dr. Michael Abraham, who in a systematic article published in YNET argued that an understanding of evolution necessarily leads to the understanding that God indeed exists. He preferred, intentionally, to avoid defining the God whose existence he advocates[m8]. In this article, the first in the series 'Between Science and God,' I described the character of the God reflected through the theory of evolution[m9].

And about that all that remains is to say: with gods like these, I prefer to remain an atheist[m10].

[m1]Really? Dawkins, like all who follow him, argues that evolution proves that no transcendent being of any kind exists. Most of the claims of the neo-Darwinians are directed toward the philosophical God, not some particular religious God. The claim is that if the world was created in a natural and intelligible way, there is no need to resort to the assumption of such a transcendent being.

[m2]Every such weighing involves quite a few a priori beliefs. The illusion of naive empiricism already went to its grave in the eighteenth century.

[m3]First, the conferral of the title theologian is not really acceptable to me. I would be willing to consider an offer to serve at the institute of theology that Tzazna is about to establish. I am no more a theologian than Tzazna himself.

This terminology is, of course, rhetorical, meant to present my claims as tendentious. Whereas it is precisely Tzazna's claims that suffer from severe tendentiousness.

Second, a claim of this kind does not appear in my book, unless Tzazna found another version of the book that is unknown to me. Ridicule is the technique of someone confronted by an argument he cannot handle. What he does is present a ridiculous version of the argument and attack that.

Tzazna in effect presents my argument as follows: the basic claim is that God is the wisest and best of all beings. Proof: he destroyed the dinosaurs so that people could exist. It seems to me that if that is the argument, then the rest of the article is indeed superfluous. Who would buy such an argument? But even so, a sacred duty rests upon us to strengthen the hearts of the believers in holy atheism, and not to let any of them fall into the net of so foolish an argument as this, lest, heaven forbid, they lapse into heresy.

In several places in my book I point out that the physico-theological proof with which I deal does not concern God's benevolence or wickedness, but rather the very existence of such an entity, and in some places its intelligence.

But this, of course, is not supposed to prevent anyone from putting words in my mouth and energetically claiming that I am wrong.

[m4]To make this 'brilliant' argument, there is no need to reach mass extinctions. The benevolent God kills every one of us eventually, though usually this is done one by one. He also causes many of us disease or suffering, and again one by one. Tolstoy already wrote about this: all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

But why raise a simple argument when one can present something complicated that sounds more intelligent?

This is Tzazna's razor: if you can present a complex argument and a simple one, always choose the complex one. It is usually more correct, and, more importantly, it sounds more intelligent.

[m5]Let us also ignore the fact that everyone agrees that the Torah was given at Sinai to Moses. Both Christians and Muslims. The disputes concern what happened afterward.

But again, the facts are not really important when one argues on behalf of the correct faith.

And I am not even speaking about the strange assumption that if many people disagree with me, or if many different opinions exist, then apparently nobody is right. According to this bizarre principle, evolution too should be abandoned, since there are many millions who dispute its truth.

[m6]I would be happy to see a somewhat more precise plan for creating a world in a shorter time. I am sure such a plan lies in Tzazna's briefcase; otherwise, on what basis does he assert its existence? I would be glad if he could share it with us.

[m7]Here there is begging the question. Let us examine which two options stand here one against the other:

God creates the world over 13.5 billion years in an evolutionary process.
God creates the whole world as it stands before us in a shorter time (let us say 6,000 years).
I emphasize that we must assume that we are speaking of the very same world; otherwise there is no point in comparing the two possibilities. That is, option 2 also speaks of a world that includes all the fossils and all the processes that led to the world before us, since every such thing has a role in our world today.

Now Tzazna argues that the first option, which he chooses, shows that God is cruel and not benevolent, and that he is also not really intelligent.

But it turns out that quite a few religious apologists argue for claim 2, according to which the world was indeed created in a shorter time (6,000 years), and all the fossils and the history we uncover (which must be in it, according to the argument above) were created as they are a short time ago. Moreover, in this abbreviated description there are no mass extinctions at all, since all the fossils that reveal them to us were created as fossils as we see them today.

That claim is rejected contemptuously (and rightly so) as apologetics, although of course there is no proof against it. It simply sounds implausible (to me too). So if I too do not accept claim 2, what do I have against Tzazna's argument? The answer is very simple. If he had justified why he chooses option 1, I would join him completely. But what Tzazna chooses to do is something else entirely: to base himself on this assumption without justification, and to derive from it the core of his argument. He asks why God chose option 1 and did not create the world in a shorter time (option 2). This proves that he is not benevolent but cruel, and that he is not wise either. If you assume that he is stupid and evil (and therefore chooses option 1), then it is not surprising that you eventually reach this conclusion. By contrast, if you adopt assumption 2, you will reach opposite conclusions. In other words: what he should have done was argue in favor of option 2. But Tzazna does not do that. He makes do with the assumption that option 1 is the correct one and not option 2, which of course immediately proves that God is wicked and foolish. I think this is what those who coined the term 'begging the question' meant.

[m8]I defined him well, only not according to the definition Tzazna proposes, at least not fully. I defined him as the one who created the world, and as one possessed of perfect intelligence. I did not address his benevolence, nor the commandments he expects us to keep. That is for the simple reason that these are layers that cannot be dealt with by philosophical tools. Philosophical tools can at most bring us to the philosophical God (the intelligent being that created and governs the world).

[m9]To that I entirely agree. Indeed, God is reflected through evolution. As to his character, I too tend to agree. That is, I find it very difficult to understand his motives. But that does not mean the conclusion is that he does not exist.

[m10]If that is your preference, that is perfectly fine. But if you claim that it is true, then you are mistaken. Your conclusion is at most that diplomatic relations should be severed with him. But how can you argue from this that he does not exist?

As I explained in my book, the proof of God's existence is based on the improbability of the world's arising randomly as it appears before our eyes. If that argument is correct, then it makes no difference whether the world reflects cruelty or wickedness, for at most you can claim that God is evil, but not that he does not exist. In Paley's watch parable, if you find a watch on the ground, you assume that someone made it and that it did not arise on its own. Now you examine it more closely, and you discover that the watch is built in a puzzling way, or more precisely in a way that does not fit the image of the watchmaker you constructed in your imagination, or not in the way you yourself would have built it. For example, the watch is always two hours slow.

Now we must consider what conclusion follows from this: 1. The watch arose on its own. 2. Apparently the watchmaker you had in mind is not really the correct watchmaker (his intelligence / morality differs from yours). 3. It is possible that what you think is the proper way is not really so (that is, the one who lacks morality or intelligence is you, not he). I do not know whether conclusion 2 or 3 is preferable. What is clear is that conclusion 1 is certainly utterly absurd. Watches, even those built in a way that does not appeal to me, do not make themselves.

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Between Science and God, Chapter Two: Does the Big Bang Indicate the Existence of God?

13.7 billion years ago, a flash of light filled the entire universe. This was not difficult, because the entire universe was then the size of a single point, devoid of dimensions

At the beginning of 2011, Pope Benedict XVI stood on the balcony of the Vatican, looked out over the tens of thousands of believers who had come to hear his words, and announced publicly that he accepted the theory of the Big Bang. Not only that; it even supports the doctrine of Christian creation – and hence the existence of God.

He was not the first to try to matchmake between science and religion. Before him came Pope John Paul II in 1996, who accepted the theory of evolution, with one small correction according to which God implanted spirit and soul at a certain stage of humanity's development from the ape. The centuries before the last two popes are likewise full of attempts to turn every new scientific discovery into evidence for the existence of God, often by scientists themselves.

Does the theory of the Big Bang indeed indicate the existence of God? In this article we will briefly review the theory and try to understand together why Pope Benedict concluded that it requires a supreme Creator – and why he is wrong.

The Big Bang

13.7 billion years ago, a flash of light filled the entire universe. This was not difficult, because the entire universe was then the size of a single point, devoid of dimensions. It was smaller than an ant. Smaller than a human cell. Smaller than an atom. All the mass and energy of billions of exploding suns were trapped in that tiny point, which collapsed under its own weight. The physical forces went mad at that point, also known as a singularity point because, in simple terms, we have no idea what the physical laws were inside it. All we know is that, following processes that remain unclear to us to this day, it began to expand.

The initial expansion was fast. Very fast. This does not mean expansion into space, because all existing space, including the axis of time itself, was contained in that point, which began to expand. The universe stretched, like an enormous sheet of elastic rubber. That was the Big Bang.

The stretching sheet contained the space we know so well: the three dimensions of height, width, and depth, and the additional dimension of time. And what existed outside that sheet? That we do not know. We only know that the sheet continues to expand to this day, among other things because of the force of the original explosion unleashed in the Big Bang. We can know this because the distances between galaxies keep lengthening all the time. Not because they move through space (though they do indeed move) but because space itself stretches between them, and the distances separating galaxy from galaxy keep growing.

From the energy of the Big Bang the elementary particles were created. We got electrons, protons, and neutrons – the basic components of every atom. Physical forces acting on those elementary particles caused them to join together and create the first atoms – hydrogen, helium, and lithium – which assembled into immense clouds of thin gas throughout the universe. When a large enough amount of gas concentrated in one dense place, the first stars were formed, composed (like our good yellow sun) mainly of hydrogen and helium. In some of those stars the simple atoms fused into one another and created heavier atoms, such as iron.

Let us move the hands of the clock forward, far forward. Roughly ten billion years, and we get the gradual formation of the solar system, and with it our mud-ball, and the beginning of the evolutionary process that the Pope has already accepted. All this – from one Big Bang that led to the dispersal of all matter in the world.

So how does all this prove the existence of God?

Who Blew Up My Point?

We human beings love to trace primary causes, almost obsessively. Because of that, it is no wonder that every mythology contains a description of the creation of the world. The Norse believed that the world was shaped out of the endless lickings of a giant cow. The Japanese believed that the world was created from an oil stain on the water. Science has shown, within the limits of its time and tools, that the world was created from a single singular point. A cosmic egg, if you will, from which the entire universe hatched.

But who created the egg? What was the first cause of the singular point itself?

This question is illustrated by the parable – perhaps a true story – in which the philosopher William James argues with an old and ignorant woman who tells him that the earth stands on the back of a giant turtle.

"But my dear lady," James asks politely, "what does that turtle stand on?"

"It stands on the back of a second turtle," she says.

"And what does the second turtle stand on?" James tries to trap her.

The woman does not despair. She understands where he is heading and answers immediately, "It's turtles, Professor, all the way down!"

God as the Turtles' Foundation

The turtle parable provides a clear analogy for the problem of the first cause. We know that the earth was formed through gradual and natural processes, not through the lickings of an enormous cow. We understand that the gas from which the solar system was formed was dispersed during the Big Bang. But who created the Big Bang itself? Do the natural processes continue all the way down, to the creation of matter from nothing and from zero – a natural process that has never been discovered?

The first approach to solving the parable was presented recently in the thought of Rabbi Dr. Michael Abraham, who argued that the series of turtles cannot be infinite and must end somewhere. There must be solid ground on which the lowest turtle sets its feet. There must be a foundation, even if we do not understand its nature. And how could we understand? After all, all we know are turtles! Therefore, the foundation must be incomprehensible and beyond the laws of nature familiar to us, and that is God[m1].

This is one solution to the problem of the first cause, but it has two major flaws, both resting on the fact that in the course of the solution we 'cheat the rules' and add external factors that we do not know and whose existence we are not sure of.

Turtles Up to Here

The first flaw is expressed in the failure of the original turtle parable. This parable, like many others, is intended to convey a particular point to readers. The author of the parable sneers at the attempt to attribute the first cause to natural processes long familiar to us. He treats that first cause as a necessity, and hints that it must be based on some external factors that are not 'turtles' or physical laws known to us.

But what if there is no first cause?

This question seems to run against the intuition familiar to us from the world around us. And yet many proven scientific theories run against the way of thinking we have developed for ourselves. Seemingly random processes of evolution create order and logic. Objects at quantum scales (and recently evidence has begun to appear that larger objects may do so as well) can be present at two points in space at the same time. The world, it turns out, is more complex and more wondrous than anything we imagine[m2].

So why should it not also be eternal?

This is cheating, of course. We are giving an answer to the parable that departs from its original rules. But it is no different from the previous solution by which we 'proved' the existence of God. To posit the existence of God as the creator of something from nothing, we are forced to invent circumstances and physical forces we do not know and do not understand. There is nothing wrong with that – physics has been discovering such new forces almost every decade of the last century, and we learn to understand them and make use of them for our benefit. But if we permit ourselves to 'cheat the parable' and solve it by adding a factor that bypasses all the forces of nature[m3], then logically we can equally accept another symmetry-breaking explanation, according to which the universe is eternal. After all, if all we know is turtles upon turtles, how can we know that they really have an end or a beginning[m4]?

This answer receives support from some physicists. Recently a new model of the Big Bang has been proposed, according to which there exists an enormous – perhaps infinite – number of universes, each of which expands for tens of billions of years and then begins to contract in excruciating slowness until it reaches a state of singularity, a cosmic egg containing within it all the energy and mass of a complete universe. Sound familiar? That point will expand again in a vast explosion and create the universe in which we live, fight, and love. Our universe too is expanding, but in time it will reach the point at which the elastic sheet is stretched to the limit of its ability – and then it will begin to contract back into a new singular point, which will also explode in its turn. A world without end, without beginning.

You can relax: our universe will not begin to contract before another few tens of billions of years have passed. An immense span of time, by which point all the stars will have gone dark and entropy will rule the black void. Human beings will become extinct long before that.

This, then, is the eternal expanding and contracting universe. But here one can ask again: who created this universe? This question, as we have already explained, is irrelevant because the very phrasing implies that there is a creator, and there is no reason to assume that. In fact, if we decide that logically a creator may exist, then we must also decide that, by the same logic, the universe may be eternal and not created by anyone[m5].

God of the Gaps

The second flaw is expressed in our reliance on ignorance – lack of knowledge – in order to determine the existence and identity of God. Even if there must be a foundation for the turtles (and this is still a claim that requires proof), that still does not prove that this foundation is the all-powerful God, or even a half-all-powerful or quarter-all-powerful one. Logicians give a name to this kind of logical fallacy, in which we take the unknown and call it 'God.' This is the God of the gaps.

This term was coined in the nineteenth century by the Christian evangelical lecturer Henry Drummond, who rebuked believers who exploited every point of uncertainty and lack of knowledge in the scientific explanation of the world in order to claim that God was present there. We are not sure how the world was created? God created it. We are not sure why one person falls ill and another remains healthy? God did it. Drummond called on Christians to accept all of nature as one great God, "…the God of evolution, infinitely greater than the old theological God, that hasty wonder-worker."

Even if we choose to accept the existence of some God on the basis of the lack of knowledge we possess, the idea of God as the foundation of all the turtles and physical laws does not answer the persistent question of God's character. Just as Christian, Muslim, and Jewish religious people choose to determine that the foundation of the turtles, that first cause of all first causes, is the benevolent God familiar to us from the Hebrew Bible, so any inveterate fool can announce that the Devil created the whole world (as Yazidi religious people indeed do), a cosmic cow that licked the universe into its present form (as the Norse believe), or that behind the Big Bang stands the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which created the world with its eternal tentacles (as the Pastafarians believe). Of course they are all wrong: Falaf-El created the world. And yet it is easy to see how the logical argument for the existence of Falaf-El has here been taken entirely out of context and reason[m6].

Finding God

From all this we learn that there is no good reason to attribute the Big Bang to a divine initiative. More than that, as the German priest Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, it is better not to do so. Bonhoeffer, who lived and worked in the middle of the twentieth century, identified Hitler as one of the central focal points of evil in the world. During the Second World War he was involved in an attempt on the Führer's life. The attempt, unfortunately, failed, and Bonhoeffer was thrown into a dungeon for two years and executed shortly before the end of the war. During his time in prison Bonhoeffer developed an exceptional view of religion and God, and arrived at insights that he described in his writings.

"How wrong it is to use God as a stopgap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If the frontiers of knowledge are indeed pushed forward constantly (and that is indeed what happens), then God is pushed backward along with them, and is therefore in constant retreat. We must find God in what we know, not in what we do not know[m7]."

With regard to the creation of the universe – if that indeed ever happened – we must humbly admit that we cannot know whether it has a creator. There is no shame in that. Scientists admit their lack of knowledge every day, and continue to investigate the universe in the hope of filling the gaps with knowledge. To that end they conduct meticulous and careful experiments, out of a desire to understand and decipher the laws that operate the cosmos – and perhaps to find God in them one day[m8].

[m1]Here lies the first mistake (or misrepresentation) of my position.

In my book I explain the Kantian division of the proofs of God's existence into three kinds: ontological, cosmological, and physico-theological.

Tzazna cites me here as one who advocates the cosmological proof, whereas I dealt with the physico-theological proof.

The physico-theological proof, in the version I proposed, is based on the fact that the entire universe known to us operates within a framework of rigid laws of nature (the four fundamental forces of physics). My question is: who created these laws? I further argued that their random formation is manifestly improbable. And I further argued that science will never be able to provide an answer to the question of that formation.

The reader is now invited to go back and read Tzazna's claims and see whether he addresses these three claims, or only the argument he puts into my mouth. Incidentally, even that argument he does not answer, and more on that later.

[m2]The fact that there are scientific results that contradict our logic is indeed true. But Tzazna's conclusion, according to which the necessary conclusion is that we should abandon our logic, is absurd. After all, he himself uses our logic to make his claims. The more correct conclusion is that we indeed need to be more cautious with conclusions that are not supported by experience and observation.

[m3]There is no bypassing of the forces of nature here, since I am asking who created them themselves, not who acts in their place. This is true of the physico-theological proof with which I dealt, but also of the cosmological proof of which Tzazna speaks.

[m4]Here there is an assumption that if the universe is eternal, no first cause is required. But here too there is a very problematic assumption. Even an eternal phenomenon or object requires sufficient reason. The principle of sufficient reason applies to an eternal universe as well. See on this the book Metaphysics by the American philosopher Richard Taylor, in the chapter on God and the principle of sufficient reason.

[m5]The infinite number of universes is a hypothesis whose degree of speculation is greater than the speculation of the God hypothesis. But when its source is physicists, we are all supposed to stand at attention. They are not required to provide empirical proof for their claims.

And I have not yet mentioned the problematic nature of the hypothesis that infinitely many universes are created for no reason at all, just like that, from the vacuum. It seems to me that this is a worse hypothesis (far less parsimonious) than the hypothesis that our one universe was created just like that. So what have we gained?

[m6]Identifying the physico-theological or cosmological argument with the God of the gaps is a common atheist misrepresentation, but a very mistaken one. These arguments are not speaking about a lack of knowledge that can be completed by further research. There is a fundamental gap here that science cannot answer (where did the laws themselves come from? After all, every scientific answer is within the framework of the laws). The claim that if there are laws, there is someone who created them, is a claim of plain common sense, and has no connection whatever to the God of the gaps.

The gap-based argument is the argument of the fundamentalist creationists, who attack the theory of evolution on the grounds that there are gaps in scientific knowledge within it (irreducible leaps), and from that prove the existence of God. That is indeed a faulty and defective argument. But the physico-theological argument is the complete opposite: the perfect theory, without any gap at all, proves the existence of God.

Tzazna is indeed right that the primordial factor that created the laws or the world is not necessarily the God of the Hebrew Bible, but the physico-theological and cosmological proofs do not purport to prove the God of the Hebrew Bible. The conclusion of these arguments is that some factor exists – call it God or Satan or a salvation-universe – that brought reality and the laws governing it into being.

[m7]Indeed true. Every word is solid as rock. The claim is the opposite: the more scientific knowledge advances and becomes more complete, the more it proves the existence of God. That is also the Pope's claim with which Tzazna opened the article (that evolution and the Big Bang prove the existence of God). So how did we arrive at the claim about the God of the gaps? Tzazna and his atheist friends may explain.

[m8]When they find him, Tzazna will tell them that they are no longer scientists but theologians building on lack of knowledge.

Incidentally, the Pope's claim and mine are that they have already more or less found him.