Re: God of the Gaps
George Murphy (gmurphy@raex.com)
Tue, 14 Dec 1999 21:37:19 -0500
glenn morton wrote:
>
> Someone a few months ago was looking for the origin of the term "God of the
> Gaps". George Murphy, on Oct 12, 1998 suggested that it came from
> Bonhoffer in 1951. I think I found an earlier source. Henry Drummond
> _Ascent of Man_, (New York: James Pott & Co. Publishers, 1894), p. 333. He
> says
>
> "There are reverent minds who ceaselessly scan the fields of Nature and the
> books of Science in search of gaps--gaps which they will fill up with God.
> As if God lived in the gaps? What view of Nature or of Turth is theirs
> whose interest in Scince is not in what it can explain but in what it
> cannot, whose quest is ignorance not knowledge, whose daily dread is that
> the cloud may lift, and who, as darkness melts from this field or from
> that, begin to tremble for the plae of His abode? 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.
> "If by the accumulation of irresistable evidence we are driven -- may not
> one say permitted-- to accept Evolution as God's method in creation, it is
> a mistaken policy to glory in what it cannot account for. The reason why
> men grudge to Evolution each of its fresh claims to show how things have
> been made is groundless fear that if we discover how they are made we
> minimize their divinity. When things are known, that is to say, we
> conceive them as natural, on Man's level; when they are unknown, we call
> them divine--as if our ignorance of a thing were the stamp of its divinity.
> If God is only to be left to the gaps in our knowledge, where shall we be
> when these gaps are filled up? And if they are never to be filled up, is
> God only to be found in the disorders of the world? Those who yield to the
> temptation to reserve a point here and there for special divine
> interposition are apt to forget that this virtually excludes God from the
> rest of the process. If God appears periodically, he disappears
> periodically. If he comes upon the scene at special crises he is absent
> from the scene in the intervals. Whether is all-God or occasional-God the
> nobler theory?"
>
> That, I think, is the origin of the term 'God of the Gaps."
That sounds likely, though Drummond doesn't seem to use the precise phrase
"God of the gaps."
Bonhoeffer's original letter (which is in _Letters and Papers from Prison_) to
which I referred is from 1944. He says:
"Weizsäcker's book The World-View of Physics is still keeping me very busy. It
has again brought home to me quite clearly how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for
the incompleteness of our knowledge. 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; God wants us to realize his presence, not in
unsolved problems but in those that are solved. That is true of the relationship
between God and scientific knowledge, but is also true of the wider human problems of
death, suffering, and guilt. It is now possible to find, even for these questions,
human answers that take no account whatever of God."
(I can't lay hands on the German right this momemt but I think "stop-gap"
translates Lueckenbuesser.)
There is a great deal of similarity between this & what Drummond says but
Bonhoeffer gives greater emphasis to the inevitability of "filling" the gaps - the term
"stop-gap" brings out the temporary character of the answer.
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
gmurphy@raex.com
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/