Old website, with heavily filtered comments
http://answersforhope.com/refuting-god-gaps-cliche/
New website. No comment section. Problem solved!
http://answersforhope.org/portfolio_item/refuting-the-god-of-the-gaps-cliche/
Here is the reply I gave. I saved it here on blogger because I knew there was a good chance of my comment disappearing. Note: I have updated the post somewhat, as I was going off topic slightly.
1. God of the Gaps is an unreasonable accusation because most arguments for Christianity are deductive in nature."
FALSE: Let's use the Kalam cosmological argument as examples:
"P1: Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
P2: The universe began to exist.
Neither P1 or P2 have been proven. You can make deductive arguments until you are blue in the face, but it won't make the premises true. You need to prove the premises before you can lay down the argument. Asserting that the universe began to exist is pretty silly, because we don't know if it did.
2. The atheists commit their own mistake, which I call “Ignorance of the Gaps.” This amounts to when the atheist says “I don’t know, therefore, not God.”
Maybe true, but intellectually mature atheists don't draw any conclusions from not knowing. Both claiming that god exists because we don't know or claiming that god does not exist because we don't know are the same fallacy, namely an argument from ignorance. You described the "God of the gaps" fallacy as an argument from ignorance in a flipped around form, then denied it in your next point. Interestingly self contradictory.
3. An atheist will often attempt to say that we should withhold belief in God until it is shown that a naturalistic explanation is completely impossible. This is a fallacy known as an argument from ignorance.There is a difference between withholding belief and believing that something is false. There is no claim made, except that we should only believe things once those things have been sufficiently been proven. There is no wait to a natural explanation, just the idea that for us to be able to figure out the difference between what is true and false, we need objectively verifiable evidence. Such evidence does not need to be naturalistic. It just can't be "because the bible says so" or "because it was revealed to me by god". Otherwise anyone can come out and make claims of their holy books and revelations and we would have no way of telling which is true or which is not.
4. An atheist will often claim they are justified in not believing in God because they don’t see any evidence for God, even after we have presented the evidence. This is another variation of the fallacy that is called an argument from ignorance.
A responsible atheist will make the nature of the required evidence clear. The bible is evidence, just very bad evidence. Hearsay is bad evidence. Since some theists will admit that there is no empirical evidence for god, and we can't investigate the question scientifically, we seem to be at a horrible impasse. The theist executes a dual epistemology, accepting the rules of rational scientific enquiry with everything except their dearest beliefs, comfortably ignoring the contradiction they know to exist. The inversion of the statement "An atheist will often claim they are justified in not believing in God" is also telling, because it is trying to convert the more plain statement, that there is no justification to believe in god into a statement that resembles a claim. Although you seem at least honest enough not to outright lie about the atheist's position here. bravo. As previously mentioned, if a particular piece of evidence cannot tell between what is true and what is not, then that evidence is bad.
5. An atheist often says that we will find a naturalistic explanation of the universe one day, therefore, we should assume that the universe has a naturalistic explanation for its existence. This is a fallacy known as an appeal to the future.
Comments