(Science 4) God Always Fills the Gap! The only question is whether he uses natural science to do so
Reframing the God-of-the-gaps objection — and how quantum mechanics informs the argument
This is the fourth article in a series on science and faith. {You can see the first three here; the first is at the bottom.} The first argued that the scientific method rests on foundational premises it cannot justify by its own methods, and that those premises are historically derived from a Christian worldview, making science and faith not merely compatible but deeply related in their structure. The second and third engaged with the work of Catholic physicist Stephen Barr, arguing that quantum mechanics rules out physical determinism and is incompatible with a purely materialist account of mind, and that the quantum indeterminacy that physics cannot close from within is perhaps most coherently explained by a divine First Cause who is continuously present to and sustaining every event in creation.
Those arguments have attracted a common objection, which I want to address here. The objection is that I am making a God-of-the-gaps argument, especially in my second article on quantum mechanics. This is an objection that should be taken seriously. But rather than simply defend the quantum argument against the charge, I want to reframe the question more fundamentally. The issue is not really whether God fills the gaps in scientific knowledge. He always does so, as I will explain. The only question is whether he does so through explanations that rest in natural causes that science can describe or through causes that lie beyond what physics can account for.
The Objection
The ‘God of the gaps’ objection runs as follows. When science leaves a gap in knowledge, believers are tempted to fill it with God as an explanation. It argues that inserting “God did it” into the gaps in our scientific knowledge is weak, temporary, and ultimately flawed. As science advances and fills those gaps with natural explanations, the role left for God keeps shrinking. This makes the argument dependent on ignorance rather than positive evidence, and it risks portraying God as a “stopgap” that retreats further with every discovery. People of faith are as quick as those without to raise this objection because they feel that ultimately, such an approach distracts people from genuine arguments for the existence of God.
But this has always been a losing strategy, so the argument goes: every gap once attributed to divine action has eventually been closed by a scientific explanation. The orbits of the planets were once thought to require the continuous intervention of angels; lightning and thunder were thought to arise from the wrath of God or gods; there was thought to be an inherent instability in the system of planetary orbits which God corrected periodically (even Newton thought this), but in each case natural explanations developed by scientists supplanted them. On past performance, the assumption that any gap in scientific knowledge will eventually be filled by a natural explanation seems well-founded; and the assumption that God is the explanation is no more than an appeal to ignorance dressed up as theology.
Stated like this, the objection has real force, and I, as one who believes in God, am not going to deny it. The history of science really has closed many gaps that theology was too quick to occupy, and the serious believer should acknowledge this. It is a mistake to locate God’s action specifically in whatever science has not yet explained, because that implicitly suggests God steps back whenever a natural explanation appears. That is bad theology, and it invites the conclusion that God is shrinking as science advances.
A Better Framing: God Always Fills the Gap
But the usual way of presenting this argument, on both sides, starts from a false opposition. God and natural science are framed as rival candidates for the same explanatory slot, competing to fill the same gap. They are not.
As I argued in the first article, God is the author of the order that natural science describes. The regularity of the natural world, its mathematical intelligibility, its conformity to laws that hold everywhere and always, are not features that science discovered independently of God and then handed back to him as a concession. They are features of a creation that is ordered by a Creator, and they are what make science possible in the first place. Natural science is the systematic description of the order God has established in the world. Its laws are, in that sense, a description of God’s habitual activity in sustaining creation.
When there is a gap in scientific knowledge, therefore, God is not one possible answer among others, waiting to see whether science gets there first. He is already the answer, in the sense that he is the source of whatever order underlies the phenomenon in question. The only open question is whether the order through which he is acting in this particular case is one that natural science can describe, or one that goes beyond what physics can account for. To put it plainly: God always fills the gap. The question is only whether he does so with a natural explanation or without one.
This reframing changes how the God-of-the-gaps objection should be assessed. The objection assumes that invoking God is a way of giving up on finding a natural explanation. But on the account I have just given, finding a natural explanation and finding God’s action are not alternatives. They are different levels of the same description. Newton’s laws did not displace God from planetary motion; they described the order through which God sustains planetary motion. The theologian who says God guides the planets and the physicist who says gravitational attraction guides them are not contradicting each other, any more than saying ‘this painting is beautiful because Vermeer painted it well’ contradicts saying ‘this painting is beautiful because of the arrangement of one, tone and color on its surface.’ Both are true, at different levels.
The Only Real Question: Natural or Non-Natural?
Once the framing is corrected, the genuine question comes into focus. For any given gap in knowledge, we need to ask: is this the kind of phenomenon that is likely to have a natural scientific explanation, or is this a case where even completed physics would not provide one?
As I argued in the first article, until a scientific proposal makes the transition from hypothesis to theorem, what we have are competing hypotheses. A hypothesis is a proposal that a particular phenomenon can be explained in a particular way; a theorem is a hypothesis that has been tested against reality, has been found to predict correctly in domains not previously tested, and has been confirmed repeatedly. The two are very different things, and the language of science tends to blur the distinction. When a scientist says that a natural explanation will surely be found for some gap, that confidence is itself a hypothesis, not a finding. It is also an article of faith - faith in natural science to explain all phenomena - not a theorem, and as such it is no more privileged, in the absence of confirming evidence, than the proposal that the cause is non-natural.
The question of which is more reasonable in any given case has to be decided on the evidence available. And the evidence is not always neutral. For the planetary motions before Newton, the mathematical regularity of the phenomena was already a strong indicator that a natural order-governed explanation existed. Even without Newtonian mechanics, we could have said: these motions are ordered and consistent; their pattern looks like the product of a physical mechanism, not of moment-to-moment non-physical intervention. The believer who invoked angelic drivers was not wrong to invoke God, but he was wrong to conclude that God was not also acting through a natural mechanism that science had not yet described. History confirmed that he was.
It is worth adding a further point about the status of theorems, since it bears on the question of gaps more broadly. Even when science elevates a proposal to the status of a theorem, that represents the highest level of confidence the scientific method can offer, but it does not constitute absolute proof. Theorems remain in principle revisable if fresh evidence demands it, and this means that even where science appears to have filled a gap, that gap is not necessarily closed permanently.
The theory of evolution is a case in point. As a Christian, I have no personal difficulty with the idea that natural selection describes, at least in part, the mechanism through which God brought about the diversity of life; as I have argued throughout this series, he can act through natural causes, and if evolution is the mechanism he used, faith is entirely untroubled by that. But the theory matters considerably more to the atheist materialist than to the Christian, since, for over a hundred years, it has served as the principal natural explanation for the origin of species and has relieved the materialist of the apparent need to invoke direct divine action in the history of life. It has been treated not merely as a theorem but as an unquestionable foundation of biology. Recent developments in natural science are now casting serious doubt on aspects of the theory. I do not say this to suggest that any particular alternative must therefore be true, or that whatever gaps a weakened evolutionary account leaves behind must be filled by God in any direct way. But if the theorem turns out to be less secure than has long been assumed, the consequences are not symmetrical. For the Christian, the loss of a natural mechanism leaves everything intact. For the materialist who has relied on evolution as the answer to the question of origins, the absence at this stage of a viable scientific alternative is a more significant difficulty. The gap, as always, remains. The only question is whether confidence in a natural explanation for it is as well-founded as it has appeared to be.
When the Answer is Not Through Natural Science: The Quantum Case
The quantum case, which I discussed in the previous two articles, is structurally different, and this is why I used it as my main example. Here it is not that we lack a physical explanation for the time being. The mathematical structure of quantum mechanics, as it stands at the moment, itself tells us that the individual outcome of a quantum event is not determined by any prior physical state. As Barr argues, the indeterminacy is not a gap in our knowledge that better instruments or cleverer theory might one day close. It is built into the physics. The pattern of individual quantum events is mathematically inconsistent with any pattern that would indicate an underlying physical cause. Physics does not merely fail to find a cause; its own mathematics tells us there is no physical cause to find.
This is not, therefore, a God-of-the-gaps argument in the usual sense. The gap I am pointing to is not a temporary absence of a natural explanation. It is a space that physics itself, on its own account, says it cannot occupy. In asking what fills that space, I am not appealing to ignorance; I am taking the physics seriously and asking what kind of cause could be operating in a domain that physics has genuinely, and on its own terms, excluded itself from. Of course, the science might develop and fill the gap, but at the moment all we have are two competing hypotheses, and the most reasonable one appears to be that natural causes do not apply and science will not fill the gap.
God fills this gap too, as he fills every gap. The question is how, and on this I argued in the previous articles that the most coherent account is divine action as First Cause, operating through the quantum indeterminacy that physics leaves genuinely open. Free will, as Barr argues, may operate through the same medium in the human brain. Both proposals are reasonable given what else we know. What cannot be said — though it often is — is that it must be a natural explanation, because God does not exist and the physical is all there is. No scientist, as a scientist, can establish that. The assumption that every phenomenon has a natural explanation is a premise of scientific inquiry, not a conclusion of it. To assert it as a proven fact is to commit the error of scientism, which is not a scientific position but a philosophical one, and a self-defeating one, since it cannot be verified by its own criterion.
On the Weaker Parts of My Earlier Argument
I should be honest about the limits of what I argued in the previous two articles. The extension of Barr’s argument about the human mind and free will to God as a universal observer is, I think, the stronger part of my contribution. The further extension — the analogy between Thomistic claritas and the quantum requirement for a knower — is the most speculative. I find it suggestive and consistent with the philosophical tradition I draw on, but I am aware I am extending Aquinas into territory his account was not developed to address, and a reader who finds that extension unconvincing has not thereby been given reason to reject the more basic argument.
The more basic argument — Barr’s, which I accept — is this: quantum mechanics is incompatible with physical determinism; the measurement problem cannot be resolved without a non-physical knower; the Many-Worlds Interpretation, the most widely discussed materialist alternative, has never made the transition from hypothesis to theorem and contains strong arguments against it, some of which can be pressed without invoking God at all, as philosopher Robert Koons has shown. As long as mind is necessary to resolve the measurement problem, the theistic account is stronger than any hypothesis currently on offer from the atheist materialist side. The Many-Worlds Interpretation has existed since 1958 and remains a hypothesis. Healthy skepticism is warranted whenever a proposal that conveniently eliminates the need for mind has not made this transition, I would argue. We should be aware that scientists are not always well equipped to assess metaphysical and philosophical arguments on their own terms, and their authority does not automatically extend to conclusions in those domains.
A Note on Faith
One final point, which is worth stating plainly. My faith does not rest on the arguments in these articles. I did not become a Christian because I was persuaded by a philosophical case for a divine First Cause in the quantum field, and I would not cease to be a Christian if a version of the Many-Worlds Interpretation were one day vindicated. Accepting any description of the natural order by natural science can never contradict faith in God, as I argued in the first article, for it is beyond the scope of natural science to do so. For example, knowing what is happening at the quantum level is a different question from knowing why it is happening, and these two questions belong to different kinds of inquiry.
What I have been doing in these articles is more modest than a proof. I have been arguing that the findings of natural science, when examined carefully, do not support the confident materialism that is often assumed to follow from them, and that a worldview shaped by Christian faith is more coherent, not less, than one that excludes the non-physical from the outset. A scientist does not need to accept any of Barr’s arguments or mine to be a good scientist. But the scientist who thinks his science requires him to deny that God fills every gap in knowledge — whether through natural means or otherwise — is claiming more than his science has given him. The gap is always there. God is always the answer. The only open question, in any given case, is the means.
