Philosophical Critiques of the God of the Gaps

As seen in chapters five and six, ID argues that we do not know any good naturalistic explanations for some important features of the cosmos and biological life. Some critics have argued that this type of argument makes ID into an argument from ignorance, which is commonly understood to be a logical fallacy: “the mistake that is committed whenever it is argued that a proposition is true simply on the basis that it has not been proved false, or that it is false because it has not been proved true.”⁷⁷⁴For example, Neil Blackstone has criticized Behe’s design argument as a God of the gaps -argument based on ignorance.⁷⁷⁵ The problem with Behe’s argument, Blackstone argues, is that even if we do not know how something could be explained naturalistically, this does not necessarily imply that there is no natural explanation for this order. In scientific reasoning, the critique of different theories and alternative explanations is obviously important – scientific journals are full of such critiques. However, no matter how bad the prospects for finding a natural explanation for the origin of life seems, this does not in itself make supernatural design a good explanation. Rather, there have to be some sort of positive reasons for thinking that supernatural design is a good explanation for the origin of life. Like Pennock, Blackstone also argues that the progress of science is continually closing up such gaps in our understanding. Thus, in the absence of positive reasons to see something as a sign of intelligent design, we should rather wait for a

773 In the case of ID’s design arguments, describing them as “designer of the gaps-arguments” would take ID’s separation between the designer and God into account more clearly. Nevertheless, the term “God of the gaps” is commonly used by the participants of the debate and theological issues are also involved. I will use the term here with the caveat that it does not reflect the separation between the designer and God which ID’s argument includes.

774 Copi & Cohen 1990, 93; quoted in Walton 1992, 381.

775 Blackstone 1997. Pennock 1999, Peterson 2010. See also Giberson 1993, Reynolds 1998.

naturalistic explanation than believe in design.⁷⁷⁶ The point of this philosophical critique of the God of the gaps is then that the ID proponents have, in the critics’ estimation, failed to provide adequate positive reasons in favour of the design hypothesis. The ID movement’s conclusion of design seems, to these critics, to rest too heavily on just our ignorance of naturalistic explanations.⁷⁷⁷

Earlier, while analysing the design inference as an inference to the only explanation, I quoted Sherlock Holmes’ dictum: “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”⁷⁷⁸ However, for an explanation to be even

“improbable”, I argued, it must be possible and somehow explain the pattern in question. No matter how implausible natural explanations are, this does not help the design argument if design is also just as implausible as an explanation. Instead, design needs to be in and of itself a possible and plausible explanation. I think one general point of these critiques is sound: we need some positive reasons in favour of design, not just arguments against naturalistic explanations. It also seems very defensible that one should generally prefer naturalistic explanations within science – this type of weak methodological naturalism even seems to be accepted by proponents of ID, as I argued in chapters 3.4 and 3.5.

Nevertheless, I wonder if characterisation of the design argument as an argument from ignorance is very helpful. It is correct that the ID movement’s design argument includes a substantial amount of critique of naturalistic alternative explanations, but this is not logically improper if the argument is understood as an inference to the best explanation or an inference to the only explanation. In these modes of explanation, the critique of alternative explanations does play a large part. Furthermore, it is clear that analogies and inductive arguments based on our knowledge of intelligent design as a cause are also important for the ID movement’s design arguments.

Some critics making the God of the gaps -critique of ID acknowledge that ID proponents have attempted to provide positive reasons for belief in design, not just critiques of alternative explanations. Robert Pennock, for example, argues that it is simply the bad quality of all theistic and design-based explanations of natural history that makes them equivalent to fallacious arguments from ignorance.⁷⁷⁹ As Pennock recognizes, ID proponents themselves do not believe that they are presenting a God of the gaps-argument. Rather, they explicitly deny this and argue that they are making a good positive case for design.⁷⁸⁰ As I showed in chapters 4, 5, and 6, ID proponents argue that patterns in nature provide good evidence for design. The point is made succinctly by Gonzales and Richards: “It’s not simple improbability that leads us to believe there’s something fishy that needs explaining. It’s the presence of a telling pattern, a pattern we have some reason to associate with intelligent agency.”⁷⁸¹ In the ID

776 Blackstone 1997.

777 Pennock 2007.

778 Doyle 1892, “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet”, spoken by the character Sherlock Holmes.

779 Pennock 2007, 315-323.

780 Behe 2006a; Behe 2007f; Dembski 2002, Meyer 2009.

781 Gonzales and Richards 2005, 303. Similarly Behe 2000a.

movement’s arguments, the critique of alternative explanations is important, but the conclusion of design is not thought to follow purely from the failure of non-personal explanations.

Here the validity of the designer of the gaps -criticisms is linked to thoughts on the validity of design as an explanation. If the properties of nature the ID theorists discuss do not provide positive evidence for design, and if the postulation of a designer does not have any explanatory value in any realistic circumstance, then design cannot act as a competitor to naturalistic explanations. In this system of thought, believing in a designer is not better than ignorance. However, this is a different criticism from the criticism of design arguments as a

“God of the gaps”. The criticism is no longer based merely on the lack of a positive argument for design, but on the failure of these positive arguments.

Also, if belief in design has its origins at least partly in the intuitive perception of design in the universe, as seen in chapter 4.1, then this belief is not based primarily on the lack of naturalistic explanations, but on the typical operation of human cognitive faculties.

Proponents of ID do defend the reliability of this intuitive belief in design by criticizing naturalistic explanations, but the ultimate origin of their belief is not in these critiques. Thus the research from the cognitive science of religion supports the contention that there is more to ID than just an argument from ignorance. Given the way our cognitive faculties work, it may be that certain features of nature are fairly automatically seen as positive evidence of design. Even if it is impossible to express this intuition as a rigorous scientific argument, this does not mean that it is therefore an argument from ignorance. In this case, “a design belief based on design discourse, rather than arguments” or “a commonsensical non-scientific argument” would be more accurate labels of the ID movement´s ideas.

Clarifying the nature of “arguments from ignorance” further will help understand the crucial differences between proponents of ID and its critics better. Arguments from ignorance are commonly understood as logical fallacies. Our lack of knowledge about something does not yet prove anything, it is argued. Yet philosophers studying arguments from ignorance have questioned this simple characterisation. It seems that in the right conditions, our ignorance about something can indeed constitute evidence. Robert Larmer provides a story to illustrate the point:

If my son tells me that there is a Great Dane in the bathroom and I go look and find no evidence of a Great Dane, I conclude that it is false there is a Great Dane in our bathroom.

My lack of evidence of it being the case that there is a Great Dane in our bathroom is good evidence that there is not a Great Dane in our bathroom because I have knowledge that if a Great Dane were there, there should be positive evidence to confirm its presence.⁷⁸²

It seems that sometimes we are in a position where we should be able to discover evidence of something, if it indeed existed. Our lack of evidence for the existence of a Great Dane in the

782 Larmer 2002, 131.

bathroom, for example – in other words, our ignorance of a Great Dane – is actually good evidence that there is no Great Dane in the bathroom.⁷⁸³

It also seems that we are often able to discover the limits of natural processes, not just their capabilities. John C. Lennox makes a useful distinction between two types of gaps in natural science. First, there are “gaps of ignorance”, where our inability to explain something by reference to physical processes is merely a product of our ignorance. But there are also

“gaps in principle” which are a product of what we do know, and are only deepened as we come to further understand science. Lennox gives the example of writing: no matter how much we study the physics and chemistry of paper and ink, we will not find reductionist explanation which will help us explain writing without design.⁷⁸⁴ Other examples of gaps in principle include all scientific laws such as the laws of thermodynamics and the law of gravity. Based on our knowledge of empirical reality, we can argue, for example, that apples do not have the capability to start spontaneously levitating without the action of some force other than the Earth’s gravity.⁷⁸⁵

ID’s critique of naturalistic explanations in chapters five and six assumes that we can find limits of naturalistic processes, just as the gaps-based arguments just analysed. The ID theorists do not mean to argue merely based on ignorance, but based on things that they believe we are in a position to know. It is argued that based on what we know, processes unguided by intelligence do not have the capacity to create certain types of order in the cosmos. It is also argued that as science progresses, these gaps in naturalistic explanations have only widened, and that we now have a sufficient body of research to be able to conclude something about the limits of natural processes. The crucial question in the debate is whether the ID theorists are correct in these estimates about the state of scientific research.

If they are, then their argument about the limits of natural processes can be formulated as a valid argument from ignorance following the model of the “Great Dane”-argument.⁷⁸⁶ For example, Behe’s argument from irreducible complexity (chapter 6.3) could be formulated as follows:

(1) If there were a naturalistic non-design based explanation for irreducible complexity, we would probably know it.

(2) But we do not know any such naturalistic explanation for irreducible complexity.

(3) Therefore, there is probably no such naturalistic explanation for irreducible complexity.

Now we just need to add a few premises to infer that an intelligent designer was involved.

783 See Ganssle 2012 for further analysis of Larmer’s example and exact formulations of its logic. Walton (1996) provides a thorough analysis of arguments from ignorance in various fields of science.

784 Lennox 2007, 188-192.

785 Ratzsch 2001, Snoke 2001.

786 As Larmer (2002, 131) puts the point: “we can ask whether those who appeal to gaps in our scientific understanding as evidence of supernatural intervention in the course of nature do so solely or simply on the basis of ignorance of how natural causes operate or rather on the basis of presumed positive knowledge of how natural causes operate.”