Closing the Gaps

Closing the Gaps

Rob Imbeault

HarvardUniversity

Essay 1: February 19, 2009

The argument for or against the existence of God has been debated at great length throughout human history. Thomas Aquinas’s “Proofs” for the existence of God and Bertrand Russell’s argument refuting these proposed proofs demonstrate that Russell’s arguments suggest the belief in God will decrease as we discover more about ourselves and the universe. Russell makes mention of what Richard Dawkins calls the God-of-the-gaps phenomenon that states believers fill in the absence of knowledge with the idea of God. As we learn more the gaps close leaving fewer spaces of the unknown in which God can be used to explain. Inevitably, this will lead believers to question their belief in the diminishing likelihood of God’s existence. The two main arguments on this subject are; the argument of motion and natural law and the argument of perfect morality.

Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) was a priest in the Roman Catholic Church in the Dominican Order from Italy. He was an influential philosopher, theologian and a proponent of Natural Theology, a subdivision of theology that expresses the belief in a God living among us in our ordinary daily experience. Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970) was a British philosopher, mathematician, historian, advocate for social reform and Nobel Prize laureate in Literature. On the subject of God’s existence, Russell states the Catholic Church’s submission for reasonable “proof” was a result of Freethinkers regularly asserting that reason urges against the existence of God.

The bulk of Russell’s essay “Why I am not a Christian” dismantles the common misconceived notion of morality as a religious construction. Thomas’s thoughts on this matter were in observance that among human beings “there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like.” And since some can be less and some can be more there must therefore be one of perfection and that, of course, is God. To be in His graces, we must try to be like Him, the noblest and most moral we can be. This begs the question; can we be good without God? From a naturalistic standpoint, science is now discovering reasons why we are moral and good on a genetic level. Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene and Oliver Curry’s Morality As Natural History , both describe how, on behalf of our “selfish” genes and their motivation to duplicate, we are predisposed to kin altruism, coordination to mutual advantage, reciprocity and conflict resolution. We are now coming to understand why we do the things we do without God inspired morality, which would be more accurately described as obedience. This demonstrates how the increase in knowledge and understanding of our natural world, even our morality, removes the hypothesis of God that previously filled these pockets of the unknown.

Thomas’s argument of motion submits that the things we find in motion could not have always been in motion and must therefore have had an initial “push” and that was done by the hand of God. Russell, in his Argument of Natural-Law, not only acknowledges, but updates Thomas’s point in alluding to the influence of Newton’s opinions when observing the planets circling the sun, “and thought that God had given a behest to these planets to move in that particular fashion.” I submit we can take this argument even further to include that everything we know in nature behaves in a manner in which it was “designed” and in such a way that sustains and provides us with an environment in which we can thrive. This argument has evolved in to what is known as the Fine Tuning Argument where it is implied that God tweaked the cosmos giving us the delicate conditions we required to live; that if the force of gravity was ever so slightly different stars would not be formed and if the weak force in the nucleus of the atom were a small fraction weaker, there would be no hydrogen in the universe, thus no water. Russell presents Newton’s example of how our earlier understanding of the laws of gravity where we observed the planets revolving around us and presumed this behavior to be at the behest of God, but we now understand the natural role of gravity in the paths of the planets. Russell suggests that in the absence of factual knowledge many fill these gaps with God. In The God delusion, Richard Dawkins’s issues a similar submission with his God-of-the-Gaps argument where he states that the religious knowingly keep God in the quickly diminishing gaps of scientific evidence stating “Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge and understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it.”

More to the point refuting the assertion that the cosmos was put in motion for us and “tweaked” on our behalf, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, a Director of the Hayden Planetarium and PhD in Astrophysics, illustrates how dangerous our universe truly is to us. “Our own cosmic neighborhood—the inner solar system—turned out to be a shooting gallery, full of rogue asteroids and comets that collide with planets from time to time. Occasionally they've even wiped out stupendous masses of Earth's flora and fauna. The evidence all points to the fact that we occupy not a well-mannered clockwork universe, but a destructive, violent, and hostile zoo.” Tyson refers to the argument as stupid design and asks us to just consider the size of the universe and how much of it we can’t live in, the sheer amount of space that would kill us instantly if in it we were emerged. Further, look at the space we are able to live in; earthquakes and volcanoes destroy villages, tsunamis kill millions, can’t live on 2/3 of our surface and we can freeze or starve on half of what remains, 90% of all life that ever lived is now extinct, human disease, birth defects and so much more that blatantly defy the notion we and the cosmos are “designed” for our benefit. We do, however, now know we are a product of a single cell organism and we understand the fact and theory of evolution by natural selection and how it reveals the previously unknown understanding of our natural history. This is arguably the most potent demonstration that knowledge can squeeze God out of the gaps of the unknown. The more we understand the truth about our environment the more we realize the dwindling likelihood it was designed for us by God.

Many of us still fear the unknown and still looking for answers to important questions; who am I? Why am I here? What will happen to me when I die? Religion is humankind’s voice in attempting to answer these questions, but it’s tragically done with an untruthful certitude and when those untruths are exposed the likelihood of the rest remaining true shrinks like a balloon losing air. There still is much to learn about ourselves and our universe and many people fill that unknown space with God, but the spaces are shrinking and at some point that gap in which you held God may be gone. I submit we will love each other more once the fairy tale is recognized for what it is.