Let’s state explicitly humanity’s most closely guarded yet widely known secret: the gap between what we know and what we don’t is widening, not narrowing, as our knowledge increases. There is a great deal we don’t know.

Science is awesome.

Science, more than any other human discipline has lead to unprecedented technological advancement in the last century. It has enabled us to produce conditions that have reduced poverty, hunger and preventable disease for billions of people.

The scientific method attempts to explain, through repeated observation, the systems that cause our natural universe to function. It deals in probabilities. Given that we’ve observed specific conditions produce expected results a sufficiently convincing number of times, we can conclude with high confidence that given the same conditions, we will see the same result. Bounded by these constraints, that methodology is unparalleled in producing practical understanding of the natural universe. Unfortunately, that practical effectiveness has lead to a general misunderstanding of its utility.

Only one theory in the hard sciences stands immune to refutation: reality as we know it has required no supernatural intervention. As is the case with true science, all visible signs point to the correctness of that assertion. We as humans, however, have an overwhelming propensity to overstep our bounds. This instance is no exception. The lack of detectible divine intervention in natural processes speaks nothing toward the existence of the supernatural. Science, with this a priori methodological naturalist supposition, has absolutely nothing to say about the existence of God, it simply can not. Any attempt to state otherwise is either disingenuous or blindly dogmatic.

But surely, in this scientific age, an era of unprecedented technological advancement and human flourishing, we can finally shed our unscientific explanations for natural phenomena. We can, but we won’t. In order to do that, we would have to humbly lay bare our lack of understanding, both of the natural world and theology.

Theists are often accused of putting forth a god of the gaps argument to cover this inadequacy. Popular atheistic explanations somehow seem to generally elude this moniker, though in reality they are often merely advocating a thinly veiled alternative of this scientific fallacy.

The explanation of extraordinary opportunity

Humanity has long had a few major, existential questions that are blindly obvious and painfully beyond our ability to explain naturally. Namely:

• Why does the universe appear finely tuned for life?
• What is the origin of life?
• How did humans come to be?
• How does consciousness manifest?

I’m sure it wouldn’t surprise you to hear a single “unscientific” answer to all of those questions from a well meaning theist: “God did it”, being the expected reply.

You may be surprised to hear that current proposed “scientific” naturalistic solutions to all of these questions have a single explanation as well: an explanation of extraordinary opportunity. Of course, it’s not put forth as such and each question has its own variation of that theme, but let’s take a look:

Why does the universe appear finely tuned for life?

The multiverse hypothesis was proposed as an attempt to explain the apparent fine tuning of various fundamental properties in physics that are required for intelligent life to exist. Theists point to the fine tuning as an indication of an intelligent designer. The materialist explanation? There must be a near infinite number of universes and since we’re here to observe this one, we’re in “the lucky one” that has the right values. The evidence for even a single additional universe existing? None whatsoever. Given sufficient universes, one would eventually sustain life, no matter how specific the requirements.

What is the origin of life?

To origin of life scientists’ credit, an honest answer has been given: we have no serious scientific theory on life’s origins. That’s not what’s conveyed publicly from the science “communicators” of our day, however. Richard Dawkins asserted that the origin of life was a “happy chemical accident”. Apparently, with the just the right “prebiotic soup” our single celled progenitors defied all odds and self organized out of nothing but chemicals and energy. Given just the right conditions, life just popped into existence.

How did humans come to be?

Even 150 years after Darwin, who had no idea the complexity we would discover in modern genetics, the majority materialist consensus is that humanity arose from the first single celled organism through only a process of random mutation and natural selection. The odds against this are confounding. Nevertheless, most biologists hold that given enough time, the complexity of human biology developed entirely through a process of highly improbable events occurring slowly over eons. Given enough time, the improbable becomes possible.

How does consciousness manifest?

Emergence theory is a current scientific contender for the explanation of consciousness. A fruit fly has one hundred thousand neurons; humans: 86 billion. Given enough complexity in a neural network, consciousness simply emerges as a property of that complexity.

How to “win” the lottery

So as we’ve seen, prominent materialistic theories assert a near infinite number of universes, spontaneous origins made possible by billions of years, human beings from uncountable random mutations, and consciousness from 86 billion neurons. Everything is explained and nothing is.

You can “win” the lottery every time by buying all the tickets, but that doesn’t make you smart, it makes you broke. The intelligent mind that designed the lottery assures the revenues exceed the winnings.

Proposing extraordinary quantities of opportunities doesn’t make the impossible possible, it only obfuscates the problem. Just as you can’t solve an arithmetic problem with the alphabet, you can’t solve an information problem with time and randomness. The wrong class of solution is being proposed.

Materialists are proposing untestable solutions that assert effects that have never been observed while theists are asserting a known, observable causal force, albeit more powerful and ancient than we’ve encountered thus far.

A Divine foot in the door

Why are these scientists so willing to stray so far from science itself? Materialist Richard Lewontin made the motivation clear:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

So it seems, the god of the gaps still holds sway over us all.