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Thanks for the ping, BB.

Just as I am not a biblical scholar, I am just as ‘Not a scientist.” As I was reading through your wonderful post and noting my agreement with it, I was sure it had to be you and I rushed to the bottom to verify it. You and Matchett-PI have done an outstanding job. I intend to bookmark this thread and send the URL to many people as a excellent discussion of Science/Evolution vs. Religion/Intelligent Design.

As for my own uneducated point of view, if you accept God as the Ultimate Being and the Creator of All, as I do, then science fits naturally under that tent. If not, then one falls back on science to prove things that are unprovable. That is where the God of Gaps concept comes from. Scientists accuse believers in using God to fill the gaps that science can’t. It seems more logical to me that the gaps are in the science rather than in the continuity of God. God is there for the whole ride, not just to bridge the gaps.

An example is the inability of evolution to scientifically prove the beginning of life or the universe. They postulate a Big Bang and a primordial soup struck by lightening. How is that more scientific than the story told in Genesis? Like Marxism, it attempts to describe things while avoiding God. Neither Marxism nor evolution correspond with reality.

The evolutionists are also undeterred by the evolutionary gaps in the fossil trail and the sudden appearance of a new species without a fossil trail. They look at what exists and proceed backward for their explanation making huge leaps of faith as they go. We believers start at the beginning and proceed forward with our own spiritual evolution while noting the correspondence of the physical world with scripture.

Scientists are also incapable of explaining abstracts other than that they just happened as an unexplained progression of evolution. Has science ever explained love, beauty, music, poetry, the feeling we get from a beautiful sunrise/sunset, a full moon or a cool breeze on a clear summer night? We clearly see it explained in the Garden of Eden and Original Sin which separated the purely spiritual into the physical/spiritual while giving man free will.

I agree with the idea that God set the parameters in the beginning and those parameters included all science from biology, to physics, to mathematics, etc. He also gave us an instruction book, the Bible, as He inspired it through His believers, some who became Prophets.

That makes Newtonian Mechanics and Physics an excellent description of the physical world, and Darwin’s theory based upon them, and Einstein’s quantum physics an excellent predictor of the unseen. As you, or someone, said, Darwin’s assumptions are strictly extensions of Newton and as a result incapable of describing the abstract.

I also think mutations leading to improved survivability is a leap. In most observable cases, mutations lead to increased deformity and death. Also, because of the time involved, it is impossible to prove evolution using the scientific method. When speeding up the process in petri dish research, the scientists introduce a mutation and watch to see what happens. Despite what any of these may seem to prove, they all fall back on the original assumption that such a mutation would have occurred naturally over time if not introduced artificially. Would they have? No one can know.

I see a uniformity in all we know and that uniformity is the forces of subatomic physics. They are operative in the micro and the macro, at low temperatures and high temperatures, etc. They are various forms of electromagnetism. Most set gravity apart as a separate, yet undefined, force but I think at the nub of it it is still a form of electromagnetism. That is the essence of the physical world.

Yet, that energy is also possibly the gateway into the spiritual world. That is God’s energy, created by Him and used by Him to keep all we know together. It is also the secret of the Nirvana. It is that place where the Buddhists, Hindus, Yogis, and others attempt to reach, a oneness with God’s energy. It is also what we feel when we are in direct contact with God, when we truly feel God’s Love, Truth, and Life. It is the essence of the Word. It is the avenue through which we reach God. It allows, through prayer, an intervention into the fixed world in order to shape things our way in seeking and following God’s will.

If there is evolution, it is through that rather than through random mutations and survival of the fittest.

Scientists accuse believers in using God to fill the gaps that science can’t. It seems more logical to me that the gaps are in the science rather than in the continuity of God. God is there for the whole ride, not just to bridge the gaps.

Seems that way to me, too, dear brother in Christ!

So it seems it might be helpful to straighten out this language of "the God of the Gaps." That is, what are the people who use this term actually saying?

It seems pretty clear to me that there are no "gaps" in the world; the only "gaps" that exist are gaps in human knowledge about the world and its processes.

But "science" reassures us that, if only the rest of us are patient enough, they will deliver the goods; i.e., they will fill in all the gaps via the scientific method given enough time — a method which excludes any "metaphysical," i.e. "immaterial", let alone "theological" data in principle.

They keep alive in their hearts (it seems) Baron Laplace's hopeless abstraction and reduction of a living universe down to a mechanistic, "clockwork" one.

The problem is, if this expectation is unwarranted to begin with, then any scientific method built on it would also be "wrong" — not to mention that any scientific findings based on this premise would likely be "wrong," too — or at the very least, incomplete.

To which I would say: There's nothing wrong with science's "method" — as long as its application is restricted to its own proper sphere of competence.

Which has obviously proved impressive, at the "material" level.

Or more "materially" to the present discussion, at the observational level.

Everything in the scientific method "supervenes" not so much on the "physical," as on the "observable."

This means that everything within the purview of the scientific method extends to "objects" that are amenable to sense perception — and only to such objects. (I hear Francis Bacon — the driver of this new Novum Organum — had precisely this result in mind.)

Now the problem with that, as Kant pointed out, is that human observers have no assurance that what is presented to human sense perception and understood by such means is an exhaustive description of the object of intention's actual reality as a "thing in itself." We never directly see the thing in itself, only its phenomenal projection to the human mind via sense perception alone. This is what Kant means, when he speaks of the phenomenon (what can be registered by sense perception, as technologically aided if/as possible) and the noumenon — the fundamental state of being of the object that is perfectly unvisualizable and therefore unanalyzable, thus unknown to the human mind — precisely because its manifest being in its totality is irreducible to direct sense perception.

In short, the scientific method is not the magic key that turns all (epistemological) locks....

I'll stop for now. Though good grief, I could go on....

Thank you ever so much for your excellent essay/post, and your kind words, dear brother MNR!