God of the Gaps? Not my God.

There are quite a few possibilities for posts bouncing around in my head right now, but I'll stick with this one for tonight. This was put in my mind this morning by Doug Eaton over on his blog (Doug contributes to Apologetics.com relatively regularly, and does a fine job there, too), though I confess that the gist of this post has been with me for a while.

The charge occasionally made by the naturalist that the Christian needs a supernatural explanation to fill in the gaps of knowledge (especially scientific knowledge, it seems to me). Forgetting for the moment that I am not aware of a Christian ever actually using God as a stopgap to plug up holes in our knowledge (though I suppose someone probably has), the argument nevertheless is fallacious, as Eaton points out:

The problem with the “god of the gaps’ argument is that it is a question begging argument since it assumes from the outset that God is merely an explanation to unknown things and not an actual being. As the argument goes, since we now understand so much more than we did in previous generations, we have less need to create a god to answer our questions, and we can now live without this myth called god. This may be a good way for the naturalist to side step the issue of whether God really exists or not, but pulling premises from your conclusion in order to validate your conclusion never makes for a good argument.

Eaton also quotes Bonhoeffer admirably:

How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know; God wants us to realize his presence, not in unsolved problems but in those that are solved.

Exactly! I see this in my own discipline (mathematics). Not many mathematicians have undertaken the task of articulating a distinctively Christian perspective of the philosophy of mathematics (though some have). Nevertheless, I do not believe that I am in error when I say that most Christian mathematicians see their discipline not in the formalist tradition of playing games within a formal system using pencil and paper, but as a extant, pure scientific discipline that can make meaningful statements about the world in which we live. All of the mathematics that is known currently, in addition to all the mathematics that will ever be known, has been known to God from all eternity.

I look at the grand structure of mathematics and see God's handiwork. The key here is that act of plugging the gaps in mathematical knowledge only serves to further the awe I have of God's mathematical creation. As useful as it is, the arithmetic known to the ancient Greeks does little shed light on the beauty of God's mathematical creation. Having had the chance to study even rudimentary abstract structures and begin to see the glorious beauty in them, I am more convinced of God's creative power than I ever would have been if I had simply learn how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. I see the same thing happening in the other sciences. As scientists have studied the Earth, its inhabitants, and our place in the solar system, galaxy, and universe, we see that we are...fortunate in our location (with respect to all of those locations). In other words, the more we know, the more we see God in our knowledge, and not in gaps in knowledge.

Knowledge

My posts are different (at least so far) than Jordan's. I don't know if this will always be the case (well, we're different people, so it probably will), but maybe not always thematically.

At any rate, I'm currently studying a book called Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, by J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig. The title fits the book perfectly, so I won't go into a detailed description. Instead, over the course of the next several months, I plan to slowly post my notes and thoughts about what I'm reading.

I'm currently mired in the study of epistemology, which the book breaks into five chapters:

• Knowledge and Rationality
• The Problem of Skepticism
• The Structure of Justification
• Theories of Truth and Postmodernism
• Religious Epistemology

I think I'm going to find all of this pretty fascinating. I am in the early stages of the "Knowledge" part of the chapter on knowledge and rationality, and would like to impart some of what I'm learning to the blogosphere. So here we go.

There are (approximately) three types of knowledge:

1. Knowledge by acquaintance (e.g., "I know the ball in front of me.")
2. Know-how (e.g., "I know how to play golf.")
3. Propositional knowledge, where someone knows that P, where P is a proposition (e.g., "I know that Ronald Reagan was a Republican president.")

Of the most interest to philosophers (at least in the study of epistemology) is the third. Since the time of the ancient Greek philosophers, people in and outside philosophy have offered definitions for propositional knowledge. Plato offered (though he did not completely endorse) what has come to be known as the standard definition of (propositional) knowledge: knowledge is justified true belief (or JTB), sometimes called the tripartite definition. This makes sense, by and large. To know something, one must believe it to be true, it must be true, and you must be justified in that belief (i.e., have a good reason for believing it). While these are fairly obviously necessary conditions, Edmund Gettier showed in 1963 and they are not sufficient. He constructed what are now called Gettier-type counterexamples to the JTB definition. Unfortunately, it's late, so I am going to leave you hanging without an example, but they are on the Interweb.

More later.