Consider something that looks magical like thunder. In the past we would have said it was magic and had a magic of the Gaps. Such gaps vanish as science comes along. There are still some gaps. Now we tend for cultural reasons to say it is God and those unexplained events are down to him being bigger than the universe. He is able to do what nature cannot. But underneath that, the magic notion is still there. It is what we really mean.
The God of the Gaps attitude is about the principle. If you stop using God to explain somebody getting better fast after getting antibiotics or to explain thunder you are still using him to answer this gap, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" The person with loads of gaps filled with God is troublesome yes but is no different from the person with one gap, that one. Both have an equally bad principle. It is luck that one person goes very far with it and the other does not. It does nothing to inspire trust.
If a high percentage of cripples started to walk and your cemetery had two resurrections a week then the magic wouldn't be magic to you any more. It would be routine. You would stop caring if people upon seeing a miracle didn't believe. Religion sets itself up to be amazed which is why it needs miracles to be rare. It is good for weaponising against critics. Why be that immature? They don't want a God to start doing loads of miracles as if it is up to them! Devotion based around a God of miracles is superstition, rank superstition.
Under the Miracle of the Gaps there is in fact a gap that nobody talks about. People get fed up with the ordinary and the humdrum and want a dramatic miracle to excite them. They fill a gap in them with a miracle tale.
Religion does not like being accused or suspected of having a God of the Gaps. But it grudgingly likes the expression for it puts its God to the fore. It likes the advertising. It gives God a higher profile than it deserves when magic or miracle is the real topic for discussing. Imagine how magic would look more serious if we talked of a Magic of the Gaps?
The temptation to think there is a God of the Gaps does not happen when you see an apple fall off a tree unless it hits somebody you do not like. It is really a Magic of the Gaps, rather than a God of the Gaps. It is magic for you are not consistent. Magic does not want rules to be rules and wants them broken so that the supernatural does what you want. And also there is a doctrine that evil supernatural happenings are magic. If you define magic like that you may decide God did it or he did not. Religion has no business suggesting that the resurrection of Jesus was definitely from God. It should be a bit less cocksure.
In the sub-atomic world you would see particles seeming to come from nowhere. That can amaze one person and not the other so it is very subjective. The temptation to affirm magic might or might not surface. And yet what is the universe but a pile of particles? We are more amazed by the wood than the trees. The trees are in fact the amazing thing. It is insane to focus more on Jesus rising than on this. Believers want wonders to fit their narrative not the truth.
If a miracle is like divine magic, then John who never walked suddenly walks like he always walked. That will stun us. We will be told it is an example of something positive. The wonderful love of God. If my headache vanishes when I take alcohol that is not an example of the positive power of alcohol. Alcohol is poison. So John’s miracle likewise is actually negative for Mary with ten kids needs to be raised from her deathbed and nothing happens. The distribution is the real amazing thing. And especially if John is a selfish person, the total opposite of Mary. The miracle itself is nothing.
There is a Compassion of the Gaps here. Just because John was cured we assume that it was compassionate in some way we cannot explain.
Religion may use evidence but it has no real regard for it with all the gaps it uses for cheating.
Evidence should tell us what to believe but we have to be careful to match it up to the claim. It is abusing evidence to use too little or to use stupid evidence. For example, proving John was at the scene of the murder is not enough. Also, to argue that John committed the murder for you thought he looked guilty when you asked him is stupid evidence. There can be evidence for something that is not true. But as long as we process it carefully we get the best chance of finding the truth. While you may suspect lies and errors when a miracle seems valid and true, you know the evidence even if excellent could still mislead.
David Hume never said there is no evidence for the supernatural but that it falls short. It is that simple. There are those who accuse him of being narrow and saying no evidence will do for a miracle. But that is slander for it is not his fault that lies and errors are rife and evidence can mislead or be distorted.
We are told that if you use Hume's logic that if you have not seen ice then you are validated for not believing in it. A critic writes, “Hume tried to avoid the problem by noting that ice was not outside [human] experience.” Believers say that if you can work out by analogy that the claim that ice exists because it seems reasonable to think water can change form you can also say that the dead person can rise. It is not the same thing at all. The fridge just breaks down when it is old. You don't argue, "It could have been vandalised by an alien or a demon".
The God of the Gaps type of thinker needs a gentle reminder. It is that he needs to end the worrying about gaps and decide what is true based on what we do know. Leave the gaps to sort themselves out. That means throwing out any notion that any gap may show God’s work
God is no bigger than what he supposedly does. How else are we to know him? For that reason God slowly is redefined the more gaps are sorted out. The God who acted at Lourdes becomes the God who did not. The God who is about the living not the dead becomes a mere energy when it is found the dead cannot come back.
Is this splitting hairs? The John who eats his breakfast today is the same John if he does not. No God is different. God is defined as spirit, as act. He has no bits and pieces. So his working at Lourdes is him meaning that he is a different God if he does not. He is white paint and if he alters the colour at all he is something else. If you declare the colour altered you have a God of your own. His colour is his identity. His act is his identity. God is doer. Versions of him that don't agree on the doing mean they are different Gods.
In prayer, God is thanked when things go your way. When they do not, when they end in catastrophe especially for others more than you, you will thank him that the whole thing is not worse. That is a Spirituality of the Gaps. You go as far as to shove God into every gap. This Spirituality of the Gaps is the most basic one of all. Yet it is overlooked in the God of the Gaps discussion. It is a placebo and rooted in fear of the truth and thus guarantees an intolerable level of bias.
The God of the Gaps is a cover for Compassion of the Gaps, Spirituality of the Gaps and Magic of the Gaps. It is only foolish.