The God of the Shadows

God of the Gaps

In the New Atheism Wars the correct side often commented on the theistic practice of using their god as an explanation for that which we do not know. How did the universe get here? We don’t know. So most likely god did it!

This was referred to as the “God of the Gaps” argument. There are gaps in our knowledge of reality, and those gaps are filled in with the catch-all “it was god” explanation.

The problem being of course that as humans learn more and more about the nature of reality there are less and less gaps in our knowledge. God keeps shrinking because there is less unknown stuff. The implication being obviously we’ll one day have no use for the god hypothesis at all.

God of the Shadows

In our recent podcast Bentham’s Bulldog (Matthew) stated that his god wants to remain hidden. This allows for a fun reframing of the God of the Gaps.

Matthew says his god was willing to miraculously regrow limbs in the 1600s because at the time that still allowed people to not believe in god. (It’s hinted that this is a combination of science kinda sucking, lack of visual records, the spotty diffusion of this news, and competitors to god-belief as explanations) Thus god could sometimes make the world better through good miracles while remaining hidden.

But now this isn’t possible! Video recordings, modern science, and the internet mean that such a miracle would instantly out his god. Human progress has grown ever brighter, shining lights deeper into the gloom of ignorance, and unfortunately for god also chasing away many of the shadows he used to preserve his anonymity.

This is OK, actually. We humans get to keep thinking we live in a naturalistic world without a god. And he gets to up his game, finding ever deeper shadows to sneak around in, and ever more subtle ways to remain hidden despite our OP detecting tools. Most of human history was a tutorial, or maybe the first few levels. Now things are really getting challenging and god gets to try out all sorts of new strats and combos. Heck, maybe he’s inventing ever more complex and confusing physics on the fly as we get more precise instruments, as a response to the increasing difficulty curve! It’s entirely possible that relativity simply wasn’t real in the caveman days, because god didn’t need it to hide in it. Quantum effects could be less than two centuries old! It’s gotta be a fun game, and I look forward to what he’ll come up with next.

It’s neat that what was once a weakness (A god of the shrinking gaps) is now a strength (my god is hidden and always will be, and this explains why he’s gotten ever more sneaky as our understanding and tools grew ever stronger).