"God of the Gaps"

Garry DeWeese (deweese@ucsu.Colorado.EDU)
Fri, 8 Mar 1996 13:24:11 -0700 (MST)

Recently Bill Dozier, Paul Arveson, and others, have lamented the
tendency of some Christians to hold out for explanatory gaps which they
assume God must fill. The motivation seems to be (i) a desire to keep
something on God's job description; and (ii) a desire to keep an apologetic
foot in the naturalists' door.

Rather than look for a gap in the scientific account, perhaps
what is needed is openness to another kind of causal explanation, viz.
agent causation (or "personal explanation"). Certainly archaeology is a
science where persoanl explanation features large in explanatory
accounts. And as Doug Geivett argues in _Evil and the Evidence for God_
(Temple Univ. Press), personal explanation can play a large role in
natural theology. While not philosophically uncontroversial (what is?),
agent causation/personal explanation would seem to be a non-naturalistic
kind of explanation which is perhaps too often overloked in the natural
sciences.