The Shrinking Gaps

The popular cosmological argument for the existence of God goes, "the universe didn't exist at some point, and now it does. Something must have made that happen. Therefore God." It's a silly argument and there are a lot of problems with it, but for a brief few decades one of the premises had some backing from science: we thought that the Big Bang started with a singularity, a point before which time did not exist. Apologists picked up on that and used it.

BBC Horizon had a great show about new theories (and evidence) that could shine a light on what the universe was like before the big bang. This video makes a potentially boring subject entertaining and accessible and makes me want Comcast to carry the BBC :(


(Via Debunking Christianity)

I have to ask though: how much of the curtain do we have to throw back before people will accept that no one is pulling the strings? It was excusable (not rational, but excusable) to believe that God was the puppeteer 1,000 years ago, when we had barely figured out the right questions to ask, let alone had good natural answers. God may have been a God of the Gaps, but the gaps were so big he had a huge role to play--he got to be the designer of all life, the creator of the universe, the one who made the light and the dark ...

But as we shine our light into these gaps, we keep not finding God: we find nature and natural law instead. Not only is God less likely with every discovery, he has fewer and fewer things to do. Now we know that the lights in the sky are stars, driven by natural fusion processes. Now we know that life was not designed deliberately but rather evolved naturally in response to its environment. Now we know that the universe begin in a giant explosion and subsequent expansion, proceeding by known physical laws.

As the gaps are closed, a Christian or Muslim who accepts scientific findings is reduced to saying "hey, you know those natural processes that produced everything you see today? Well, God made the PROCESSES and started them up! And every so often he tweaks them when you aren't looking." What an underwhelming deity. How suspiciously indistinguishable from a nonexistent one.

No wonder they're attacking science. Pretty soon there'll be nothing left for God to do.