I very much enjoyed this video on ‘gaps’. I think that a couple of comments on Professor John Lennox’s understanding of the gaps may be helpful here.

(Note: My comments are merely an attempt to clarify; I’m not really disagreeing with Lennox. In fact, I generally agree with Lennox and I think Lennox’s work is excellent!)

Lennox distinguishes between ‘bad gaps’ and ‘good gaps.’

The BAD gaps are gaps in our knowledge about the world, gaps that get filled as we investigate the world. I think Lennox labels them ‘bad’ because sometimes we mistakenly fill them with God. That is, we don’t know how it happened, i.e., we are ignorant of how it happened, so we conclude that God did it. This would be an argument from ignorance, a.k.a. the god-of-the-gaps fallacy. At is turns out, the more science discovers, the more the god of the gaps is squeezed out of the gaps.

Lennox’s GOOD gaps, on the other hand, are gaps in reality, not knowledge. That is to say, these gaps are the actual limits to what natural causes can in fact do. This is not based on an argument from ignorance. Rather, we examine an event or phenomenon (say, a written message or DNA), and we discern from what we know of nature, that natural unintelligent causes don’t have the causal capacity for producing this. I think Lennox labels them ‘good’ because these gaps are real and we have positive knowledge about them.

I think that Lennox’s distinction between the gaps is crucially important. But I wonder if the labels ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are really helpful. It seems to me that the gaps per se are neither good nor bad; rather, the goodness or badness enters into the picture by how we use/misuse them. No one likes to be ignorant, but sometimes admitting ignorance is a virtue. Saying ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I have a gap in my knowledge’ isn’t bad in itself; it’s being honest. The badness enters when I mistakenly or deliberately base my argument on this ignorance (there would be more badness if it’s deliberate). Also, the actual gap or limit to nature’s causes isn’t a good per se; it just is. (I suppose that in a general sense it’s good because nature is a creation by God, but that would be a background sense, it seems to me.)

Maybe instead of good gaps and bad gaps we should simply say, respectively, gaps in nature’s capacities and gaps in our knowledge?

At any rate, I may be nit-picking here. For the record, I especially appreciate Professor Lennox’s important point made at the beginning of the video, i.e., that ‘the major evidence for God is not in what we don’t understand, but in what we do understand,’ and restated near the end of the video, ‘It’s the science I do understand that points me towards God, not the science I don’t.’

I appreciate too, Professor Lennox’s two dimensions of what the aforementioned understanding consists: (1) the very fact that we can do science (which is evidence that there’s a mind behind the universe); and (2) the whole show (i.e., ‘the heavens declare the glory of God’, as the Hebrew poet put it, and as discovered by the likes of Newton and Kepler when they discerned the heavens’ brilliant mathematical structure).