Editor’s note: To mark the 20th anniversary of the publication of Richard Dawkins’s bestseller The God Delusion, Stephen Meyer took to the pages of The Telegraph. His essay prompted 2,100+ reader responses. A recurrent challenge was the “God of the gaps” objection. Below, Dr. Meyer replies. Find the original article here. For more replies to readers, see here and here.
First Reply
Some readers pose the familiar God-of-the-gaps objection. It claims that if an explanation cites intelligent design to explain something materialistic processes have not, the explanation invoking intelligence constitutes a fallacious “argument from ignorance” and leaves a “gap” in our knowledge.
Arguments from ignorance occur when evidence against one causal explanation is offered as the sole grounds for accepting an alternative explanation — without offering affirmative evidence for that alternative. Critics of intelligent design (ID) claim that ID proponents make such fallacious arguments as follows:
- Materialistic causes cannot produce specified information.
- Thus, an intelligent cause produced the specified information in DNA.
True, our ID argument does depend in part upon critical assessments of the causal adequacy of materialistic explanations for the origin of the information in DNA. Yet the specified information in DNA implicates a prior intelligent cause, not only because materialistic origin-of-life scenarios fail to explain the origin of such information, but also because we know that intelligent agents produce information of this kind. We have positive experience-based knowledge of an alternative cause (intelligence) sufficient to produce the key effect (specified information). Thus, the argument constitutes an inference to the best explanation, not an argument from ignorance, and has the following form:
- Despite a thorough search, no materialistic causes have been discovered that produce large amounts of specified information.
- Intelligent causes have demonstrated the power to produce large amounts of specified information.
- Thus, intelligent design is the best, most causally adequate, explanation for the origin of the specified information in DNA.
Second Reply
There is another, more subtle problem with the God-of-the-gaps objection. It claims that if an explanation cites the activity of a creative intelligence to explain something that materialistic processes do not, that explanation does not qualify as an explanation because it leaves a gap in our understanding of why something happened. This objection, thus, presupposes that only explanations citing materialistic processes count as explanations. But this begs the key question in the origins debate, namely, whether the universe and life owe their origins to strictly materialistic processes or whether a mind played a causal role.
A more philosophically neutral, non-question-begging way to assess the issue is not to insist that good explanations must cite only materialistic causes, but instead to compare what philosophers of science call the “causal adequacy” of competing explanations.
Adequate causal explanations cite entities with the demonstrated or theoretically plausible power to produce the effect in question. Explanations that cite entities with such causal power are better than explanations that do not.
Using this more neutral criterion of evaluation clearly justifies an inference to a creative intelligence as the best explanation for the origin of key features of life and the universe. We know from experience that finely-tuned and information-rich systems — whether engines, French recipes, or digital code — always arise from the activity of intelligent agents, rather than materialistic processes. Thus, based on what we know — not what we don’t know or a “gap” in knowledge — about the cause-effect structure of the world, the activity of a mind represents a better more causally adequate explanation of (1) cosmic fine-tuning and (2) the digital information in DNA.