I like this fellow too, who is a believer, Dr Steven Dutch (Wisconsin Univ), Natural and Applied Sciences specializes in precambrian geology, just takes Behe's pseudo science apart in evry rational way
uwgb.edu
God of the Gaps
On the origins.org site, Robert DiSilvestro offers Rebuttals to Common Criticisms of the Book "Darwin's Black Box. There are far too many such sites to critique them all, but this one contains such a flagrant historical deception it deserves mention.
There is another reason why Dr. Behe's ideas should not be equated to the God of the gaps idea. In the past, the gaps were generally due to lack of information about certain natural processes. In contrast, Dr. Behe's ideas involve processes where we do have information. That information, though not complete, is sufficient to indicate problems with postulating completely naturalistic explanations. There are two problems with this assertion. First of all, the only difference between Behe and the classical God of the Gaps idea is that Behe's gaps are tinier. He still points to places where there is no information. He never points to a specific chemical reaction and says "We know this happened, but it happened supernaturally."
Second, the God of the Gaps was never about explaining anything and was never about information or the lack of it. The God of the Gaps is the steady retreat of supernaturalism in the face of science.
When little was known about the world, everything was supernatural. As early as 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council forbade trial by ordeal because even then, people had realized it was simply silly to expect God, in effect, to answer a subpoena and intervene miraculously in a human court. As more and more phenomena were explained by science, God was pushed into the remaining gaps. Actually, what was pushed into the remaining gaps was not God but the hope that some natural phenomenon would have an inescapably, irrefutably supernatural component that believers would be able to rub their opponents' faces in. Vitalism, the idea that some unexplainable force explained life, was the last significant bastion of possible supernaturalism. Behe simply crams the supernaturalism into very tiny gaps.
So what do we do with God now? Speaking as a religious believer myself, we need to face these realities:
- Every question that can be expressed in wholly naturalistic terms can be answered in wholly naturalistic terms.
- There are no physical phenomena that require supernatural forces for their explanation.
- Supernatural interventions, if they occur, are extremely rare point perturbations and, even if observed, will be impossible to claim unambiguously as miracles. If you see a quadriplegic suddenly able to walk again, there will also be a natural explanation that accounts equally well for it.
- You can believe in miracles but you can never prove them. If you have faith, not a problem. If you have other issues, it may be a problem.
meme |
