God of the gaps... again.
A commenter writes in response to my recent book announcement:
“Which God. I hope it’s not just the god of the gaps arguments that have been given so far and actually links the arguments to a specific deity.”
His complaint is twofold (though he might be unaware of the fact). First, against god of the gaps reasoning, where we wantonly stuff holes in our (presumably scientific) knowledge by punting to God. A fair complaint, in certain instances, but that is not the same thing as saying an argument for theism fails to answer the question of “What god is it?”
For example, one might have an argument against naturalism that leaves quite a bit unspecified about ultimate reality, leaving open a range of theistic options (classical theism, neo-classical theism, pantheism, panentheism, etc.) Nevertheless, the argument itself may be sufficient to rule out naturalism — and that is by no means insignificant! — even if further questions remain concerning the nature of fundamental reality. Moreover, no such argument need run afoul of appealing to ignorance (god of the gaps): it need only identify some necessary (as opposed to merely contingent) explanatory limitation for naturalism. Now, whether anybody thinks there are any successful argument along those lines is, for our current purposes, irrelevant. I’m just pointing out that User Cyrax has not keeping distinct issues sufficiently distinct.
More importantly, his complaint exposes some ignorance. After all, most of the traditional arguments for God (Aquinas’s 5 Ways, De Ente, etc.) specifically aim to demonstrate the God of classical theism and much contemporary philosophy of religion does the same. That is, such arguments aim to demonstrate that only something matching a particular description (absolutely simple, immutable, etc.) can possibly explain some phenomena under consideration (composite things, changing things, etc.) and that conceptual analysis of such an entity inevitably turns out the classical divine attributes. Again, whether anyone thinks these arguments are successful is irrelevant at this point. The point is just that for anybody who has studied the matter, it’s clear that the question of “which god is it?” is hardly left unanswered.
Finally, because such argument are claiming to have identified a necessary limitation concerning any alternative explanation (naturalistic or otherwise), they could not be rightfully accused of arguing from ignorance, either. The god of the gaps fallacy does not apply.
- Pat
PS - Twitter User follows ups: “I'll give you an example. Let's take the fine tuning argument. So, if the universe is fine tuned is an all knowing, all powerful, and most loving God of the only explanation? If there are other explanations and we have a gap in our understanding, then that's not the evidence.”
But this isn’t quite right. Most proponents of FTA (which is not a traditional argument for God of the sort discussed above) don't claim God is the only possible explanation. Rather, they make use of inference to the best explanation and claim evidential confirmation of theism, not proof. No god of gaps fallacy there.
For more on FTA, see here.