Sunday, January 20, 2013

John Lennox, PhD on the God of the gaps argument and the arguments for God's existence

Some atheists, who even don't understand the basic principles of logic, argue that the arguments for God's existence are "God of the gaps" arguments, that is, arguments which are based on "gaps" in our knowledge of the world.

The "God of the gaps" argument has this logical form:

-There is a gap in our scientific knowledge regarding X, therefore God caused (or did) X.

No one of the best known theistic arguments have the above logical form. Some of these arguments are deductive arguments (e.g. the kalam argument), where the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises (and the premises themselves don't include any "gap" in our knowledge, but on the contrary, positive claims of knowledge).

In this short video, Oxford mathematician and philosopher John Lennox explains why the theistic arguments are NOT based on gaps in our knowledge (in fact, as stressed above, theistic arguments like the kalam are based on positive claims of knowledge, for example, in our scientific and common sense knowledge that whatever begins to exist has a cause and our scientific knowledge that the universe began to exist. No "gaps" exist in this argument at all, all of its premises are based on positive, actually existent, valid, rock-solid and extremely plausible scientific knowledge).


That some atheists keep saying that theistic arguments are based on "God of the gaps" arguments, is evidence of their ignorance and intellectual incompetence. If their misunderstanding is intentional, then it suggests that they misrepresent the argument in order to convey the impression (to other atheists) that the theistic arguments are so bad that they don't need to be taken seriously.

Pure self-deception in order to avoid the cognitive dissonance felt by not having good objections to the proper formulation of the theistic arguments.

This is one reason why sosphisticated theists continously kick the butts of atheists in public debates.

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