The “God of the gaps” label is a favorite with critics of intelligent design. It’s a fallacy, of course, since ID theory appeals not to what we don’t know but to what we do know about how creative and intelligent agents operate. But it’s not the case that debates about ID are free of appeals to a “Gaps” deity. Philosopher and scientist Kirk Durston identifies “Science’s ‘god’ of the gaps”:
By “science” he means a rigid, question-begging notion of scientific thinking. As biologist Eugene Koonin put it, “By showing that highly complex systems, actually, can emerge by chance and, moreover are inevitable, if extremely rare, in the universe, the present model sidesteps the issues of irreducibility and leaves no room whatsoever for intelligent design.” This brand of scientific ideology requires a “God of the gaps” — Koonin’s “present model” — to explain away mysteries like the origin of life. And it finds its God, as Durston explains, in the form of the multiverse.