THE GOD OF THE GAPS
15th January 2004
The phrase, which was coined some decades ago, expresses the point that while our knowledge (comprising both knowhow and knowthat) has increased there has been an evident restricting of what believers can attribute credibly to God's direct intervention in the human world - assuming of course that the totality of things is the Creation of a being called God..
Theology (the study and 'knowledge of god/gods) is the parlour game that antedates parlours by a very long time. It has, by turns, been a wishful route to needed knowhow and often a blind ally luring us away from illuminating knowthat.
The first thing to assert is that any god-idea is, so far as I can see, both unverifiable and unfalsifiable. Faith can make incoherence and contra-factuality alike count for nothing in the minds of the faithful. Anything whatever can/cannot be explained by supposing that a Creator did it or by supposing that anything can/cannot be fully explained by supposing that the universe - the totality of all things ....... is a self-sufficient extant entity. Believing the unbelievable is rated as the supreme authentication of faith. Atheists claim to have better things to do.
The purpose of this essay is to try to identify, in merest outline and from an atheist (i.e. godless) standpoint, the trace that theology has made on the printout of history. It is a fascinating squiggle that emerges from the printer; the abstract and the concrete waltz around each other interminably. But thinking believers, faced with the shrinking gap have to make out their God either to be increasingly abstract or to increasingly banal.
Incidentally I use the word 'concrete' in a metaphorical sense but, possibly, a future frankly idolatrous belief--product may be literally a concrete statue or something of the sort. In one of the New Towns (Milton Keynes) built some decades ago in the UK, there are life-size models of cows, made literally of concrete, in some of the many open spaces . (We can't seem to afford a Golden Calf - but I digress).
Before going any further it is perhaps useful to reflect a little on knowhow and knowthat. The distinction is useful even though these categories sometimes overlap.
Knowhow is necessary for survival. Early man had to find out how to hunt animals, gather plant food, and to domesticate both plants and animals for human use. This basic knowhow had, faute de mieux, to come from experience, observation, experiment and inference from the very limited data then available. Early humans were necessarily early scientists in search of knowhow. They found it, in rudimentary form and, as the saying goes, the rest is history.
We are here precisely because they found out enough knowhow and, subject to the ups and downs of life, we have acquired enormously more and more knowhow. Necessity has been the mother of Invention but the converse has also been the case.
As has been pointed out in various famous stories - Frankenstein, Brave New World, 1984 - there is some conceivable knowhow that we would be the better off without. Brainwashing, subliminal advertising, exquisite tortures that leave no marks but elicit 'confessions', genetic reconstruction to breed a servant class and a master class as separate persistent social segments ...... are examples of knowhow we would do better to not have. Progress is best seen as a morally neutral word (such as 'innovation') rather than as one of the countless false gods that we have identified erroneously.
Knowthat is rather a different matter. To seek it is not a direct physical necccessity but an instinctive aspiration; people are almost always unwilling to say "I do not know " and the legitimate pursuit of meaningful knowthat has been plagued by pretence. Any old nonsense will do to satisfy the less sophisticated aspects of human curiosity. But this does not need to be so; when we see a glorious Orkney sunset, when we hear Schubert's String Quintet, we then have no need for Harry Potter and Tolkein, the Immaculate Conception and Transubstantiation. The wonders of nature and of of human creativity are such as to leave us in no need of contrived wonders.
In respect both of knowhow and knowthat it is simply not the case that there is a ubiquitous "need to know'. Superfluous or even harmful knowhow and spurious knowthat are perennial traps in the path of the good life.
The first gods - invented in face of daunting ignorance - were nature gods. The god of rain, the god of fertility, the god of protection from enemies were all seductive examples of morale boosting spurious knowthat There is also the invented god of punishment who caused, it was thought, disease and disaster. All such items of spurious knowthat have been superseded by science.
The more wily individuals among primitive people began to see that knowthat - be it true or false - was an instrument of power if, and only if, you could get people together to intercede collectively with some god or other. An artifact to symbolise a god was a material rallying point, much as a flag is a military rallying point, and the relevant religions became public rather than familial and hence lent themselves the more readily to manipulating people. Priestly power centred upon visible representative symbolic artifacts subsequently deified as idols.
But artifacts of any size are inconvenient particularly in a way of life that was, at least in part, nomadic. Who wants to hump a great statue around in a semi-desert land?
The Jews were the first people to make the next breakthrough in spurious but politically efficacious knowthat. They invented an invisible omnigod who did not constitute a major burden upon their meagre freight carrying capabilities. They also presumed to identify a bit of real estate 'The Promised Land.' They 'knew' it was destined to be theirs because they endorsed the title deeds themselves - sheer chutzpah - and they pioneered genocide to clear the Promised Land of its inhabitants.
The old Judaic religion was later admixed with much of classical Greek philosophy and so Christianity emerged as a recognisable belief-product about eighteen hundred years ago.
But the great Jewish invention of monotheism became quasi-polytheistic by the invention of the Trinity and the cults surrounding Mary and many saints. These saints were seen as a division of labour under Omnigod. Monotheism was retained by the Jews and recast, revitalised for a time, by The Prophet who invented Islam in the seventh century of the CE.
The great strategic error made by the various religions was to tell unsubstantiated stories about the way the universe originated and functions. Broadly, they got it wrong (a statistical inevitability if you are mostly only guessing wishfully) as area after area was cleared of superfluous error and colonised by science. Gaps where filled progressively leaving 'god' less and less predominant in the human mind.
Then there was a failed Christian Reformation - failed in the sense that it did not generate a ubiquitous Reformed Church in place of the old church but, instead, it generated numerous splinter groups leaving the old church as still the biggest. Some of these offshoots are interesting - Quakerism, Pantheism, Immaterialism and, finally, Non Realistic Theism.
Quakerism is a comprehensively de-ceremonialised offshoot, historically speaking, of the reformation. It is, in effect, Religious Humanism and has been the subject of favourable comment a recent issue of Atheist Thought.
Pantheism asserts that God is the totality of all things - material things - neither more nor less. It has useful Green mileage in that if you deifiy the real world you have ipso facto an obligation to take care of it. I don't think I have ever met a professing Pantheist.
The philosophy known as immaterialism has three notable features: incredibility, unfalsifiability and it is contra-Christian. It is worth a closer look. Our starting point is the assertion attributed to William of Occam - do not multiply entities beyond necessity. The entity that George Berkeley (later Bishop George Berkeley) deemed to be beyond necessity was matter itself - no less.
Berkeley floated the notion that to be is to be perceived and that matter was simply an idea in the mind of the perceiver. This notion causes an immediate reaction of incredulity neatly summed up - and overcome - in the often quoted words of Ronald Knox. ("Quod' is a slang abbreviation of quadrangle - a feature of many acamdemic sites in the UK and elsewhere).
There was a young man who said "God
I find it exceedingly odd
That the tree I see should
Continue to be
When there's no one about in the quod".
On the face of it this knocks out immaterialism with one blow.
God's reply (says Knox) might have been
"Dear Sir
Your astonishment's odd
I am always about in the quod
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by
Yours faithfully
God".
So immaterialism can be reinstated by asserting that reality exists not in material things (and their interactions) but solely as linked thoughts in the Mind of God. The Mind of God is indeed the only true reality according to the immaterialist.
I don't think anyone actually believes this immaterialist hypothesis to be true - unbelief in it is, apparently, an empirical fact. Find me someone who believes it - it is simply incredible. I have never met anyone who believes it. We all believe that material things and material processes actually exist - or at least we practically must act as thought they exist.
But try to falsify it.
Dr Samuel Johnson tried to but, in the process, he simply missed the point. He exclaimed "I refute it thus" - and kicked a stone. The whole point of immaterialism is that, in this instance, God's thoughts comprise 1) Dr Johnson, 2) the stone and 3) Dr Johnson's feeling the impact of his foot on the stone. Likewise, Eric Stockton is, immaterially speaking, neither more nor less than a thought in God's Mind and God is also, at this present moment, thinking that Eric is working at what God thinks of as Eric's word processor. He is not thinking, say, of Eric Stockton killing an elephant with his bare hands. He is probably thinking that Eric Stockton, in that role, is not likely to feature in His thoughts.
Any allegedly material event, any allegedly material process, can be deemed to be immaterial by insisting that it is simply God having the relevant thoughts. There is simply no way of showing Immaterialism to be false; all attempted falsifications of it (or at least all those that have come to my notice) rest upon materialist assumptions and are, ipso facto, circular.
Thus far, the doctrine of immaterialism is simply a philosophical parlour game which is unintelligible to the likes of Dr Johnson and pointless to those who can understand it. But what does it do to Christianity? It demolishes it - that's what!
The demolition is of no comfort whatever to atheists because it leaves a version of the God Idea as the one indispensable underlying truth.
The immaterialist demolition of Christianity is three pronged: it denies creation, it denies miracles and it denies morality.
Creation - according to Christianity - was two sided comprising "Let there be light and there was light" and similar two-part items. Christianity does not present creation as God saying "I contemplate light" etc ..... but "Let there be light". Christian creation ideas are a package of statements by the Creator such as "Let there be xyz" and then, lo, xyz came into being in the cosmic package. The Creator is, in Christianity, distinct from His Creation even though He may intervene in it once it had been created.
According to immaterialism God simply thinks of all the items that, materially speaking, Christians experience as the Creation. According to immaterialism there is no Creation; there is just God's mental furniture and reality is simply that - neither more nor less - and God is often moving his furniture around, scrapping bits of it and adding new bits to it.
Miracles - according to Christianity - are material events that are different from the way material events normally occur. A miracle is an intervention by God in the workings of the normal laws of nature that He has Himself ordained - a divine countermanding of the laws of nature. Whether the Christian notion of the miraculous holds up is not the point; Christianity sees miracles as special material events different in kind from the usual run of material events.
According to immaterialism, there is no difference in principle, for example, between Jesus walking along the shore and Jesus walking on the water. If both are simply thoughts in God's Mind then the one thought is as easily entertained by Him as the other. The distinction between the mundane and the miraculous simply collapses in the immaterialist scenario.
Morality, based upon the right exercise of free will, also simply collapses in the immaterialist scenario. If I am tempted to do wrong it is not up to me to do it or to refrain from doing it. If I and my actions are simply what God happens to be thinking then I, as a responsible agent, simply don't come into it. My yielding to, or resisting, the temptation to, say, commit theft is simply God thinking of my doing or not doing it as the case may be. Immaterialism erases individual responsibility for one's actions simply because one's actions are neither more nor less than God's possible thoughts.
So immaterialism demolishes the customary Christian ideas of Creation, Miracles and Morality.
Its having been promoted by an Anglican Bishop in the eighteenth century need cause no surprise to Christian-watchers - there have been many Christian oddballs both before and since including some who have almost written God out of the plot altogether. (For example, the Sea of Faith people think that "God is not a being but "the sum of our values" or "God is not a being but a moral focus" - my italics - more of this later).
Perhaps it is a fair summary to compare both pantheism and immaterialism with the ordinary Plain View of things. (H J Blackham's Plain View) as follows. All of them are essentially not dualistic; in each of them 'it is all one" . God is ubiquitous and material (Pantheism) God is ubiquitous and Immaterial (Immaterialism) or there is no god but only s self-sufficient material realty which is, in the words of JBS Haldane "not only more mysterious than we know but probably more mysterious than we can imagine".
All three acknowledge reality - that there are things and processes, that are not mere dreams, illusions etc but extant entities independent of ourselves. All are empiricist in that we depend upon what we perceive as sense experience - either mataerial or simply bits of God's Mind God thinking of us with senses and brains to receive sensed messages and drawing inferences. To put it crudely, the world is God's pretend teddy bear, living a life of its own in the Great Beholder's imagination. But the Plain View makes theism optional as a general explanatory hypothesis of material things and material processes while immaterialism does away with material things and processes and rests upon God as strictly not optional. Leave out God ....... the Plain View remains ....... Leave out God and immaterialism collapses and so does pantheism.
This Plain View process of God being confined to the Gaps is continuing; it leaves intact an unsinkable God's inalienable opportunity to fill the Gaps. Even if you believe in the Big Bang and Evolution by Natural Selection ...... believe in them with pseudo-religious dogmatism as some fanatics seem to do ...... you can still have God the Great Detonator who let off the Big Bang and God the Great Mutator who drives Evolution by Natural Selection.
It matters not one jot or one tittle whether you do or do not have an idea of God as the Basis of All Things. We still hope to find out the knowthat and the needful knowhow of the world we have inherited. Why bother with a God-idea that sheds no light on anything and often triggers people to fight for one bit of spurious knowthat rather than another.
Some of the vacuous abstractions that are modern coffee table gods are God is the ground of our being or We cannot know what God is; we can only know what He is not. The prize for sheer meaninglessness must go to the author of "God is the Wholly Other.
Perhaps the neatest position is that of the non-realist theists (they of the Sea of Faith). As has already been mentioned, they say that God is not a being but a moral focus; God is the sum of our values. The interesting idea arises that Jesus might be the incarnation of our moral focus, the embodiment of the sum of our values. Well what a clever idea - Christian Atheism no less. What will they think of next?
E.S.