Re: [asa] Cosmologial vs. Biological Design

The fundamental problem of a god of the gaps is its claim that something
happened either by "natural" processes or by God, making the two mutually
exclusive. As such it is not a necessary part of antievolutionary ID, much
less of fine-tuning, but it is easy for either to fall into that error.

Related to this is the fact that inferring about God from general revelation
is fraught with problems, not only our sinful tendency to worship other
things but also the fact that it's not a very useful or clear guide on a lot
of points. Scripture needs to be the basis of our understanding of God. We
can then see that both everything that does have a scientific explanation
and everything that doesn't can be explained at a fundamental level as God's
work.

In the focus on arguments over whether good natural explanations exist,
underlying philosophical assumptions are rarely explicit. This keeps the
real issues concealed, preventing progress in discussion and also making it
difficult to tell exactly what premises a person is operating under.

ID and young earth advocates typically recognize the god of the gaps as an
error when put in this way; in fact, I suspect only thoughtless atheists
would claim such a statement was true. (thoughtless being a noisy subset of
atheists, not a universal characteristic). However, the frequent "God or
evolution" arguments made show that antievolutionists often fall into the
error of god of the gap thinking.

Fine-tuning and morality issues are slightly different in that they are not
entirely within the realm of science. However, inference about God based
solely on these is still risky.

There's a difference between "Given these unexplained factors, it makes
sense to consider the possibility that God is behind them" and "Given these
unexplained factors, I have proved God's existence." There's a difference
between "I find all known scientific explanations for X unsatisfactory and
suspect God did it in a way not following the patterns of scientific laws."
and "X is clearly impossible to explain scientifically and proves that God
must have done it in a way not following the patterns of scientific laws";
even the latter is different from though easily slipping into "Claims that X
is explicable by scientific laws remove God from the picture."

-- 
Dr. David Campbell
425 Scientific Collections
University of Alabama
"I think of my happy condition, surrounded by acres of clams"
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