{"quotes":[{"text":"To base the unexplainabilty and the immense wonder of nature onto an other miracle (God) is unnecessary and not acceptable for any serious th.","author":"Fritz Zwicky","tags":["fallacy","god-of-the-gaps","miracle","nature","science","science-vs-religion","serious","thinking","unexplainable","unnecessary","wonder"],"id":98342,"author_id":"Fritz+Zwicky"},{"text":"Scientists rightly resist invoking the supernatural in scientific explanations for fear of committing a god-of-the-gaps fallacy (the fallacy of using God as a stop-gap for ignorance). Yet without some restriction on the use of chance, scientists are in danger of committing a logically equivalent fallacy-one we may call the “chance-of-the-gaps fallacy.” Chance, like God, can become a stop-gap for ignorance.","author":"William A. Dembski","tags":["biology","chance","coincidence","darwinism","evolution","god-of-the-gaps","ignorance","science","serendipity","supernatural"],"id":98572,"author_id":"William+A.+Dembski"},{"text":"The God of the gaps argument for God fails when a plausible scientific account for a gap in current knowledge can be given. I do not dispute that the exact nature of the origin of the universe remains a gap in scientific knowledge. But I deny that we are bereft of any conceivable way to account for that origin scientifically.","author":"Victor J. Stenger","tags":["atheism","big-bang-theory","cosmology","explanation","god","god-of-the-gaps","ignorance","knowledge","naturalism","nature","origin-of-the-universe","science","the-big-bang"],"id":137990,"author_id":"Victor+J.+Stenger"},{"text":"People think that epilepsy is divine simply because they don't have any idea what causes epilepsy. But I believe that someday we will understand what causes epilepsy, and at that moment, we will cease to believe that it's divine. And so it is with everything in the universe.","author":"Hippocrates","tags":["epilepsy","fallacy","god-of-the-gaps","ignorance","knowledge","superstition","understanding"],"id":156677,"author_id":"Hippocrates"},{"text":"Atheism is the default position in any scientific inquiry, just as a-quarkism or a-neutrinoism was. That is, any entity has to earn its admission into a scientific account either via direct evidence for its existence or because it plays some fundamental explanatory role. Before the theoretical need for neutrinos was appreciated (to preserve the conservation of energy) and then later experimental detection was made, they were not part of the accepted physical account of the world. To say physicists in 1900 were 'agnostic' about neutrinos sounds wrong: they just did not believe there were such things.As yet, there is no direct experimental evidence of a deity, and in order for the postulation of a deity to play an explanatory role there would have to be a lot of detail about how it would act. If, as you have suggested, we are not “good judges of how the deity would behave,” then such an unknown and unpredictable deity cannot provide good explanatory grounds for any phenomenon. The problem with the 'minimal view' is that in trying to be as vague as possible about the nature and motivation of the deity, the hypothesis loses any explanatory force, and so cannot be admitted on scientific grounds. Of course, as the example of quarks and neutrinos shows, scientific accounts change in response to new data and new theory. The default position can be overcome.","author":"Tim Maudlin","tags":["agnosticism","atheism","cosmology","deity","evidence","experiment","explanation","god-of-the-gaps","hypothesis","inquiry","philosophy","science","superstition"],"id":162719,"author_id":"Tim+Maudlin"},{"text":"The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exist as an independent cause of natural events. To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with the natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot. But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress.- Science and Religion (1941).","author":"Albert Einstein","tags":["belief","fallacy","god-of-the-gaps","knowledge","myth","natural","naturalism","nature","progress","science","superstition"],"id":263800,"author_id":"Albert+Einstein"},{"text":"Increasing knowledge lessens the sphere of the supernatural.","author":"Edvard Westermarck","tags":["answers","god-of-the-gaps","increase","knowledge","sphere","supernatural","understanding"],"id":274633,"author_id":"Edvard+Westermarck"},{"text":"No one infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, from the unknown, and incomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.","author":"Robert G. Ingersoll","tags":["complex","god-of-the-gaps","ignorance","incomprehensible","science","unknown"],"id":319848,"author_id":"Robert+G.+Ingersoll"},{"text":"I've spent a life-time attacking religious beliefs and have not wavered from a view of the universe that many would regard as bleak. Namely, that it is a meaningless place devoid of deity.However I'm unwilling simply to repeat the old arguments of the past when, in fact, God is a moving target and is taking all sorts of new shapes and forms. The arguments used against the long bow are not particularly useful when debating nuclear weapons, and the simple arguments against the old model gods are not sufficient when dealing with the likes of Davies et al.For example, the notion that God didn't exist, doesn't exist but may come into existence through the spread of consciousness throughout the universe is too clever to be pooh-poohed along Bertrand Russell lines. And if I had the time I could give you half a dozen other scientific theologies that will need snappier footwork from the atheist of the future.","author":"Phillip Adams","tags":["argument","atheism","bertrand-russell","fallacy","god-of-the-gaps","moving-the-goalposts","russell","truth"],"id":342605,"author_id":"Phillip+Adams"},{"text":"What I'd like to read is a scientific review, by a scientific psychologist--if any exists--of 'A Scientific Man and the Bible'. By what route do otherwise sane men come to believe such palpable nonsense? How is it possible for a human brain to be divided into two insulated halves, one functioning normally, naturally and even brilliantly, and the other capable only of such ghastly balderdash which issues from the minds of Baptist evangelists? Such balderdash takes various forms, but it is at its worst when it is religious. Why should this be so? What is there in religion that completely flabbergasts the wits of those who believe in it? I see no logical necessity for that flabbergasting. Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for. In other fields such hypotheses are common, and yet they do no apparent damage to those who incline to them. But in the religious field they quickly rush the believer to the intellectual Bad Lands. He not only becomes anaesthetic to objective fact; he becomes a violent enemy of objective fact. It annoys and irritates him. He sweeps it away as something somehow evil...","author":"H.L. Mencken","tags":["a-scientific-man-and-the-bible","badlands","balderdash","baptist","baptists","belief","brain","damage","enemy","evangelicals","evangelists","evidence","facts","funny","god-of-the-gaps","humor","hypothesis","logic","necessity","nonsense","psychologist","psychology","religion","religious","sanity","science","scientific","scientific-review","superstition","superstitious","unknown","violence","wit"],"id":347985,"author_id":"H.L.+Mencken"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":13,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}