Is your “God” really “The God of The Gaps”?

What if I told god’s domain was shrinking because the god many people believe in is really just “the god of the gaps”. But what does that actually mean? I’ll walk you through it and by the end of this show, you’ll be able to spot the god of the gaps for yourself.

A long, long time ago, humans didn’t know how things worked but they still had many questions.

Why does the sun rises and sets each day. Where does it go when it’s away?

What are the stars? Why does the moon have cycles?

Odds are, you know all the modern answers to these questions… but thousands of years ago, humans had no idea. That was where god stepped in.

Why does the sun rise? I don’t know. god.

Why does the sun set? I don’t know. God must have plan.

Where does the sun go at night? I don’t know. I guess god only knows.

I don’t know how this works, so let’s just say it’s god. God and god’s domain is literally born out of ignorance.

Over time, humans have been using science to discover more and more about how our reality works.

Now we know that the sun is at the center of our solar system and it rises and sets because the earth is spinning. The sun is simply lighting the other side of the world while our side of the planet is in shadow. The moon circles the earth, as it does so, the sun hits it and we see that reflection from different angles, creating the visual cycles of the moon.

We also know that our solar system is held together by your sun’s gravity, which is also a star. And we know that the stars we see at night are all much like our sun.

Science has discovered all this through careful observation, evidence, experimentation, and ultimately launching things into space to get a better look for ourselves.

When we didn’t know how to explain something, it was god, but once science explains it, god’s domain shrinks a little to the questions that are just beyond the answers we’ve discovered.

The “gaps” between what humans know and don’t know is where god gets invoked as an answer; that’s “the god of the gaps”. ‘the god of the gaps” lives in a realm that is just outside human understanding.

It a tricky place because as science expands to explain more things, god’s realm tends to recede along with the gaps in our knowledge. God is the “answer” to anything we haven’t figured out yet. As science explains more, god seems to rule of less.

At the same time, as science explains more it often leads to new questions. New gaps, if you will. This is super convenient for religion because God doesn’t get replaced, he/she/it just gets move into the new gap that is once again on the edge of our understanding.
For example, now we know what the sun is and how our solar system is held together by gravity.

But now the next question arises, Where did our solar system come from. What set it into motion?

Clearly something set the universe in motion. Must be god. –and boom, we just did it again. We just fell into the god of the gaps domain.

Now religion can say “ah-ha!, see! Science doesn’t know all the answers. We have all the answers. The answer is god”

As George Carlin once said, “The God excuse, the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument.”

Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. Once again, I have to point out that the solar system is evidence of a solar system. the universe is evidence of a universe. The bible is evidence of a book written and rewritten by men for thousands of years. God would be evidence of god. The god of the gaps is evidence of the god of the gaps.

Where do you use religion using the god of the gaps? Drop that in the comments to we can educate eachother.