An Atheist Paralell To God Of The Gaps Thinking

Lately I've noticed an atheist parallel to God of the Gaps thinking. I was in the blogosphere the other day when I stumbled on a piece called CSI Deuteronomy where the author takes the fifth book of the Bible to task. The reason was an awkward phenomenon the ancient Israelites were supposed to undertake for unsolved murders occurring outside of city boundaries.

The passage from the Revised Standard Version reads:

"If in the land which the Lord your God gives you to possess, any one is found slain, lying in the open country, and it is not known who killed him, then your elders and your judges shall come forth, and they shall measure the distance to the cities that are around him that is slain; and the elders of the city which is nearest to the slain man shall take a heifer which has never been worked and which has not pulled in the yoke."

"And the elders of that city shall bring the heifer down to a valley with running water, which is neither plowed nor sown, and shall break the heifer's neck there in the valley."

"And the priests the sons of Levi shall come forward, for the Lord your God has chosen them to minister to him and to bless in the name of the Lord, and by their word every dispute and every assault shall be settled."

"And all the elders of that city nearest to the slain man shall wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken in the valley, and they shall testify, 'Our hands did not shed this blood, neither did our eyes see it shed. Forgive, O Lord, thy people Israel, whom thou hast redeemed, and set not the guilt of innocent blood in the midst of thy people Israel; but let the guilt of blood be forgiven them."

"So you shall purge the guilt of innocent blood from your midst, when you do what is right in the sight of the Lord."

Now I'm not going to say this isn't totally weird, and I'm the first to admit that from a glance it appears totally nonsensical. The writer describes the phenomenon as,

"…hallucinatory bafflement. It makes so little sense that it almost doesn't parse at all… This sure blows to smithereens any ideas about the Bible being eternal, perfectly true forever, as useful a guide today as it was when it was written… How exactly would this principle operate for an unsolved murder today, in, say, New York City?"

Note that in this writer's opinion, the qualities of hallucinatory bafflement and nonsense detract from the validity of the idea. But there's a few points I'd like to make.

1) Why is it that when religion contains some apparently weird, counter-intuitive principles, atheists claim grounds for doubt? Isn't science full of phenomena that are totally weird and absolutely nonsensical, and don't atheists enthusiastically embrace weirdness and nonsense in the context of science? In fact, doesn't the writer's depiction of hallucinatory bafflement most perfectly describe quantum mechanics? The principle of nonlocality is pretty nonsensical to me, and the message I'm getting from this writer is that inexplicability is a virtue in science, but somehow anathema in religion.

2) Although the writer did list the particular version of the Bible the passage was taken from, it's burdensome when people quote scripture and don't list the section they quote from. I want to go and read the passage carefully for myself, even in the original languages where possible. I can't tell you how many times misquotes and semantics have caused unnecessary, unfruitful arguments between atheists and believers. For the sake of this argument, I will assume the passage is correct as cited.

3) The writer's analogy is woefully inaccurate. I feel pretty safe in saying no section of NYC qualifies as open country.

4) I feel the writer is unjustified in assuming a phenomenon intended for the ancient Israelites at a fixed point in history is somehow supposed to apply to us as modern Americans. I don't know of any believers who would argue that.

At any rate, these points are really just minor gripes, and here's what I feel is the atheist parallel to God of the Gaps thinking:

"How was this ever useful? Even at the time it was written? Even in the Bronze Age? What a weird version of justice this is. Somebody was murdered, you can't punish the person who did it — so you punish a cow? And what a weird vision of God it is. Why do the city elders have to explain to God that they weren't responsible for the murder? Doesn't God already know? Besides, is God really going to feel better about the injustice of an unpunished murder because an unworked cow gets slaughtered in an unplowed river valley? And if they didn't perform this ritual, would God really punish an innocent city just because it happened to be the closest to where a dead body was found?"

There are several unjustified assumptions in the above, and the question of how the phenomenon was ever useful certainly deserves to be answered, but we'll have to save these for the next post so I can make my point.

God of the Gaps is a believer's argument typically based on gaps in evolution that only God could have filled, for example, the transition from primates to hominids, or from non-life to life. Whenever believers encounter some intellectual gap they cannot bridge, they'll often attribute it to God, but skeptics say that lack of satisfactory explanation for a particular phenomenon is no reason to invoke God. A common rebuttal is that the God of the Gaps argument is based in ignorance, and that ignorance is not suitable grounds for belief.

But is lack of satisfactory explanation for a particular phenomenon suitable grounds for doubt? 

This writer has blogged significantly about how unsatisfactory explanations and unanswered questions are the very bedrock of science, and the parallel is this: We have a very weird, counter-intuitive religious phenomenon intended to atone for unsolved murders in the open country, and because this writer can't wrap her head around it, she denigrates and discounts it. It's very similar to Fundamentalists who denigrate and discount Darwinism because they can't wrap their heads around punctuated equilibrium or Gould's use of Scilla's coral as a metaphoric triune depiction of evolutionary theory.

I'll admit that making complete and total sense of the passage is probably near impossible, and although I'll take a stab at it in the next post, I don't need to explain the passage in order to make my point. The message I'm getting from this writer is that inexplicability and counter-intuitiveness are okay in science, but not religion. That ignorance justifies doubt but not faith. 

And this is just God of the Gaps thinking taking place in an atheist's brain.