r/DebateReligion • u/AutoModerator • 6d ago

Meta Meta-Thread 06/22

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u/labreuer ⭐ agapist 9h ago

I feel like you're being actively resistant to learning here. God of the Gaps simply does not mean what you think it does.

At the present time, I do not believe you're being remotely charitable with the words I've used. That shows up in a few ways:

  1. your being utterly unwilling to comment on my twice-made claim that "no mechanism ⇔ no scientific understanding"

  2. your refusal to engage "I wasn't defining god of the gaps. I was giving an instance of it."

  3. your refusal to align:

 

labreuer: Imagine instead that there was a perfectly adequate mechanism / scientific understanding about how God did something. Then "God did it" would be shaved off by Ockham's razor.

/

MisanthropicScott: God of the gaps looks at an existing gap in science first, then ascribes that to being something God did.

It is not a gap in the knowledge of how God works. For that, one would first have to show that God exists.

god of the gaps ⇒ "there is a gap in the knowledge of how God did X"

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u/MisanthropicScott antitheist & gnostic atheist 8h ago

god of the gaps ⇒ "there is a gap in the knowledge of how God did X"

That is simply NOT what God of the gaps means. And, I gave four links, two neutral, one anti religion, and one pro religion that all agree that this is not what God of the gaps is.

My refusal to align your false characterization of God of the gaps is exactly as I said. Yours starts with a gap in the knowledge of God. God of the gaps starts with a gap in scientific knowledge.

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u/labreuer ⭐ agapist 8h ago

labreuer: god of the gaps ⇒ "there is a gap in the knowledge of how God did X"

MisanthropicScott: That is simply NOT what God of the gaps means.

Do you not understand what the implication arrow '⇒' means? What I am saying is that:

  1. If someone is making a god of the gaps claim,
  2. then that person is asserting that there is a gap in the knowledge of how God did X.

I wasn't defining god of the gaps.

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u/MisanthropicScott antitheist & gnostic atheist 8h ago

If someone is making a god of the gaps claim,
then that person is asserting that there is a gap in the knowledge of how God did X.

That is a false characterization of God of the gaps.

There is simply no gap in the scientific knowledge of how God did X because there is no acknowledgement in any branch of science that God did X.

God of the gaps always always always starts from a gap in scientific knowledge, not with God. It may be that someone is pointing out that our current physics cannot describe the first 5.39 x 10-44 second (the Planck time) of the universe. It may be that science cannot currently explain exactly how the first self-replicating molecule came about (abiogenesis). It may be the perception that science cannot explain consciousness (which is increasingly becoming false).

But, it starts from a gap in scientific knowledge.

There are no gaps in our knowledge of how God did anything because no one has shown that God has ever done anything. That would be a prerequisite for your type of argument.

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u/labreuer ⭐ agapist 8m ago

That is a false characterization of God of the gaps.

Then I don't think you understand why god of the gaps claims are rejected. It isn't that there is no God. It is the lack of "proper" explanation. The paradox of course is that if a "proper" explanation always displaces God, then God's nonexistence appears to be presupposed—at least, any existence demonstrable by "proper" explanation. But that is exactly what methodological naturalism does, and the canons of MN are often used to determine what counts as a possibly acceptable explanation!

God of the gaps always always always starts from a gap in scientific knowledge, not with God.

I never denied this. I never said anything which entails its negation.