> Anyway, I've never quite understood why "God of the gaps" should be such a
> nasty concept. We have gaps all over the place--such as the origin of
> matter and the appearance of consciousness. It has been revealed just Who
> filled those gaps. What's the problemo?
Was Sir Isaac Newton wrong to propose that God occasionally sent comets
to re-stabilize planetary orbits. I don't think so.
Were theists after Newton wrong to look for an explanation of planetary
orbit stability in terms of natural mechanisms. I don't think so. It
need not be a "problemo" for theists to disagree about the details of
how God does or did something.
I don't believe that Newton held up his calculations (which predicted
unstable orbits) as proof of God's existence and intervention. But if
he had done so, would that have been a problem? I think yes -- at the
very least, it would have been premature.
When it was shown that planetary orbits were "naturally" stable over very
long periods of time, and some tried to extrapolate the success of
Newton's mechanics to exclude "gaps" in *everything* ... this, too, was
a problem.
Loren Haarsma