The Bill, the God of the Gads, Fallisie, came up again in our podcast discussing a dialogue between

Neil Degrass Tyson and Sean Carroll.

Let's look at an article by Canadian professor Kirk Durston

who says he's noticed something similar that secularists do.

He calls it the fantasy of the gaps.

Before we look at the article, review for us what God of the Gaps reasoning is.

This is a form of reasoning whereby the Theist uses God to plug up the gaps in our

scientific knowledge. So if there is something that we cannot currently explain

scientifically, the Thea says, oh well God did it, God is the explanation for that.

And the unfortunate thing about that type of argument

is that as science then progresses and closes the gap, God gets squeezed out and looks more and more

irrelevant. This is not an argument against the existence of God, I think you can see, but it would be, I guess a form

of advice to the Theist not to simply use God as a stopgap. the the

not to simply use God as a stop gap for the gaps in our scientific knowledge.

The article begins, quote,

several weeks ago I was invited to participate in an atheist's live stream discussion on the topic of the God of the Gaps, fallacy.

Afterward, as I reflected on our discussion, I noticed something rather remarkable.

Just as some theist may be tempted to invoke a God of the Gaps argument as an explanation for something that we may not yet understand.

So a non-theist is often prone to making a fantasy of the gaps move when the science and

logic begin to actually point to God.

For the fantasy of the gaps move, a person denies what science and logic say and instead

appeals to various imaginary scenarios that sound scientific but do not

...