<< 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>>
Drummond's work was wildly popular at the turn of the century and translated
into many languages, including German. I wonder if Bonhoeffer had read any
of his work or possibly heard the phrase second-hand.
Just to add a little bit on Drummond, there is an excellent article by
historian Jim Moore entitled "Evangelicals and Evolution: Henry Drummond,
Herbert Spencer, and the Naturalisation of the Spiritual World" in the
Scottish Journal of Theology, v. 38, p. 383-417 (1985). Drummond worked with
D.L. Moody on-and-off for years but the two were moving in very different
theological directions. As Moore puts it:
"Drummond's mediation of Spencer to evangelical audiences depended on a
shared fund of living metaphors to which he added the concept of natural law.
Evangelicals, in turn, thanks to Drummond, could deceive themselves by
thinking that their faith was natural, lawful, and scientific, when in
reality what had begun was the secularisation of their soul. When Moody
preached that 'modern research steps in' and shows that 'the laws of the
spiritual world' are largely 'the same laws that exist in the natural world'
he was clutching a viper to his bosom".
<<"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."
glenn
>>
You may be right about Drummond first using the term, but these issues keep
reappearing through history. I suspect that someone in the
Boyle-Newton-Leibniz era probably dealt with the concept and may have come
close to using the precise phrase. Leibniz or Descartes would be my guess.
Similarly, it wouldn't surprise me if one of the medieval nominalists
addressed the problem. [But in the spirit of truth-in-advertising, I must
admit that I'm way out of my league in even speculating on this!]
Karl
**************************
Karl V. Evans
cmekve@aol.com