The God of the Gaps

 

        By The Reverend Wilbur

 

Watched not one but three videos from Neil deGrasse Tyson last night. Articulate man! Love his physics. Question his ideas on some other things. He is, of course, an atheist. There’s nothing wrong with that. We all look up at the stars and wonder. He was big on something called the God of the gaps. Goes like this.

A Hebrew about yada yada BC looks up at the stars and figures the sky is a covering with pinholes punched in it. His logic is simple. Little points of light means they are substantially smaller than the earth, which, of course, is the center of the universe. It even goes as far as to say that in the end times these little points of light are gonna come loose and fall into Lake Tahoe or somewhere. Don’t laugh! There are people in Mississippi who still believe this. Telescopes came along and put this to bed.

Man sees, he speculates, and he lives with the speculation until something comes along that corrects the understanding. Whenever early man ran into something that he couldn’t understand he would posit some supernatural cause. As he evolved and found logical answers, he would replace that explanation with the new facts. The distance between awe and explanation produced a space, a gap if you will. And God was replaced by science. And the God of the gaps moved onto other questions.

Neil had this tied up in a pretty bow. Early man thought stars were pin pricks. Telescopes came along and showed that when magnified using simple glass these points of light were not pricks at all but entire systems spinning around out there millions of miles away. Man made a mistake, therefore there must be no God because science had proved God wrong.

Let’s go one step further. In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth. Seems simple enough. Then the Big Bang came along which seemed logical because the universe is still banging. So where did all the material come from? I mean, there’s a lot of stuff out there, going at every direction it can whizz at an ever-increasing speed! To complicate the matter more, scientists have tried to explain the unexplained matter with dark matter! Ok! Stuff you can’t see. I’ll buy that. But then they had to figure out what went “bang!” For reasons beyond me they theorized that the stuff was all squeezed into the size of an atom. Like a cosmic MRE. Then, at some point it reached critical mass and blew up making all the galaxies, space, planets, time, and Taylor Swift! Taylor came about as an after thought. And, in true scientific intellectual style God, or any reasonable facsimile thereof had absolutely nothing to do with this.

Remember the Bible story where Jesus talked too long and everyone missed lunch? Five thousand men, not counting wives, kids, ex-wives, and stepkids? And Jesus took a short stack of pancakes and one order from Long John Silvers, and everyone had a real good time. Remember that? It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. The truth being demonstrated here is man can't create matter. We can rearrange. Make a car out of rusty dirt. Make water heavier. But try as we may the smartest physicist in the world cannot create a maple leaf in an empty petri dish. The writer was making a point about the nature of Jesus. If the universe came from one golf ball, and Jesus fed all them folks what does that tell you about the gospel writer’s opinion of Jesus?

Whether or not Jesus was God is irrelevant. The writer thought He was and said so through demonstration. That is for speculation. What is important is while a bunch of Baptists are pouring over Genesis, counting six day work weeks and imagining Eve in a fig leaf everyone, including Neil miss the whole point! Someone or something made the universe out of nothing. Tyson agrees with that. He buys the Big Bang. But who made the Bang? Evolution is a very logical idea. But who made us the complicated being we are. If we evolved or were made out of Play Dough doesn’t matter. We are here now. There is no gap. You just set the marker too soon.

God makes his plans. This information is unavailable to the mortal man. So said the Prophet, Paul Simon. Man will forever be searching for answers. They will only lead to more questions. It is said that no man has seen God, yet I see Him every day. I see Him in the sunrise. In a clear sky. I see him in Rabbis at the Wailing Wall, and in a cappuccino. I see Him in an old man’s face, and a little girl’s smile. And I see Him in the leaf I cannot create. The garden has always been there. You could have seen it had you only looked.