Godlessness of the Gaps?

Last updated on: August 30, 2017 at 9:20 pm by Dan Peterson

Godlessness of the Gaps? 2017-08-30T21:20:42-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Mount Rushmore National Memorial, in South Dakota
(Wikimedia Commons)

The question of abiogenesis, the emergence of life from non-life, continues to be a major challenge for scientists and, in a different sense, for secular naturalists.

When I was a kid, we were still talking about the classic 1952 Miller-Urey experiments — conducted by the chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey at the University of Chicago and then by Miller at the University of California at San Diego — which famously demonstrated that amino acids could form under laboratory conditions thought to simulate those of the early Earth.

Subsequently, there have been other famous experiments and theories relating to the origins of life on earth. Leslie Orgel and Walter Gilbert, for example, have proposed theories involving RNA (and something called an “RNA world”). Gunter von Kiedrowski has worked with “catalytic closure” and Reza Ghadiri has gone even further with von Kiedrowski’s work. I don’t pretend to follow all of it.

But life hasn’t appeared. And the Miller-Urey experiments may have lost at least a bit of their luster with the realization that Earth’s early atmosphere was most likely rather different from what they presupposed.

Moreover, there seem to be a fair number of ad hoc assumptions involved in such experiments and theories and, anyhow, they plainly involve intelligent agency, not mere random chance.

Thus far, at least, abiogenesis remains elusive. After a very great deal of theorizing and experimentation. Perhaps scientists will eventually achieve it. (Even though, again — and rather ironically — they may only be demonstrating that it can occur under expertly controlled conditions.)

That’s not my actual concern, though. Here’s what’s really on my mind:

At what point does confidence that life can arise from inanimate matter via undirected natural causes become a kind of faith — a faith not all that different from religious belief or an ideological commitment? At what point might we plausibly begin to speak of a “godlessness of the gaps”? Will it ever be appropriate, here or with regard to analogous questions, to consider at least the possibility of an intelligent agent? If so, when will that time come? When might we be able to say — and, mind you, I’m not necessarily saying it now, with regard to abiogenesis — that scientific openness has become ideological rigidity?

Imagine a hypothetical scenario in which people and historical memory and all signs of human habitation have vanished from North America. Along come some intrepid explorers, though, and they discover a set of four huge granite faces appearing in what we now call the Black Hills of South Dakota. The place is Mount Rushmore, but these explorers know nothing of Gutzon Borglum, nor even of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt.

They’ve been collecting natural specimens and mapping out the geological features and landscapes of this, to them, totally new land.

An argument breaks out among them.

Some see the faces as manifest evidence of previous human civilization on a rather advanced level, upsetting all of their expectations and prior theories.

Others, however, are committed to the prevailing scientific view that no humans have ever lived in the area before. Accordingly, they insist that, astonishing as they are, the four faces are merely the result of natural erosion by wind and water. Given enough time, they say, literally almost anything can happen. And, remarkably, it plainly did happen here. These “faces” are the result of entirely random chance, and anybody who invokes intelligent agency as a causal explanation for them is thereby leaving genuine science behind.

Plainly, this second faction would be wrong. But when does that become indisputably obvious? And how do we decide?

Some argue that the apparent life-friendly cosmic fine-tuning that characterizes our universe is simply a result of chance. After all, we’re here to notice it, and we wouldn’t be here if things were different. Perhaps there are an infinite number of universes, the vast majority of them hostile to life, and we just happen to have won the cosmic lottery. Is that view science, or ideology?

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