Since the very beginning of organised religion, there has been a nasty tendency among religious types to "prove" the existence of God using hitherto unexplained phenomena.
Before any kind of natural philosophy, it was everything - fire, rain, life, death, everything. To the Greeks and Romans, lightning was the weapon of Zeus or Jupiter; before Newton, gravity was the work of God; before modern medicine, disease; before modern biology, conception and the development of the child in the womb; today, the intricate workings of the universe at the quantum level.
It's called the "God of the Gap" argument - the "Gap" being the gap in human knowledge of the universe - and it's easy to see why it's an attractive argument, at least superficially. There's something nice and solid about it, about being able to point at something and say "That's God, right there."
But the God of the Gap, as comfortable as it might be for us at any one time, is very dangerous view to have of God, for three major reasons:
- Science marches on. This is the most basic reason. You'll notice that these days very few people attribute gravity to God manually pulling everything back down to earth. Every day, humanity rolls back the veil of the universe a little further. We have solved so many mysteries, discovered so much about creation, and so far we keep discovering that, in terms of the everyday running of the universe, it's physics, not constant direct intervention by the hand of God, that keeps everything from exploding. There's no evidence that that's going to change.
Science and religion are separate things. Georges Lemaître, a Belgian astrophysicist who contributed in a big way to the Big Bang theory of cosmology - and a devout Catholic priest - was a staunch opponent of the God of the Gap for exactly this reason. He once said that to "[try] to infer the existence of God from the supposed infinitude of nature" is to "[look] in completely the wrong direction."
Science and religion are linked, in a way - science is the study of God's creation, after all - but they are separate things. The awesomeness of creation hints, perhaps, at a Creator, but the two are necessarily separate things. As far as I'm concerned, expecting the universe to have God constantly tweaking it is much like expecting a book you buy at a bookstore to come packaged with the author himself, so that he can tweak the book even as you read it.
It trivialises God. This is the big one for me. Let's look at the book analogy again. Suppose that an author writes a book of which only a single copy is printed. Now imagine that the author must constantly haunt that single copy of the book, rewriting parts of it with every word that is read, simply so that the plot doesn't fall apart entirely. How terribly-written a book that must be! How incompetent an author!
And yet that is exactly what God of the Gap proponents are suggesting - that God himself must interfere constantly with the universe He has created simply for it to continue functioning. What's more, they're turning God, creator of everything that has ever been or will ever be, into the most prolific micromanager ever.
Take embryology - the development of an entire human being from a single cell. It's an incredibly complicated and utterly amazing process, one that we don't fully understand yet. It's easy to see why some people use it as their preferred Gap.
But to me, attributing it to divine micromanagement makes it not more amazing, but so much less. I find the image of God sitting there assigning differentiations to cells - *points* "You'll be Liver Cell #231792. No, not you. Yeah, you." *points again* "And you, you're Interneuron #22817, don't forget to synapse with #3324670 in the hypothalamus" - somewhere between disrespectful and just ridiculous. How much more amazing is a God who designs the human genome and the mother's womb so that by the most basic of processes billions of human beings grow from a single cell, all to His plan, without Him having to personally direct every single step of the process?
I'm not for a moment suggesting that God has no say in the running of the universe. But to say that "gravity is God", or anything similar, is very, very dangerous. Gravity is physics. It was designed, written, programmed - whichever metaphor you prefer - by God, and the fact that it works is to His credit, but He has better things to do than make sure that every single Higgs boson makes its trip okay. Likewise things like embryology. I'm sure He occasionally looks down and smiles when He sees a nicely-developing neural crest or sclerotome, but He is so much bigger than personally hacking the biochemistry of every single developing cell.
