Many believers in God see God as an ineffable mystery

• It is the nature of God to reside in mystery–ineluctable, inexhaustible mystery. And we do not need to understand the cabala of mathematical physics to apprehend the mysterium tremendum. We need only look out the window.  Chet Raymo
• The language of God is Mystery. Kedar Joshi
• The mind of God is a mystery and none can understand it. Rae Carson
• We worship a mysterious not an anthropomorphic God. Frances M. Young
• I believe in God, but I’m not too clear on the other details. Bill Veeck
• A good parson once said that where mystery begins religion ends. Edmund Burke
• God shrouds himself in mystery so He can be found by true seekers. Karen Wheaton
• A genuine faith resolves the mystery of life by the mystery of God. Reinhold Niebuhr
• God is the mysterious veil under which we hide our ignorance of the cause. Leo Errera
• God writes spiritual Mysteries on our heart, where they wait silently for discovery. Rumi
• You believe God is not there, but He is, Hidden in the secret of the divine mystery. Rumi

.

Some believers in God assert that God is a God of the Gaps who resides in the unknown

• The idea that God resides in the unknown is what philosophers call the God of the gaps. And we have this thing called science, which marches on and makes discoveries in those gaps, ultimately closing gaps. Neil deGrasse Tyson
• The ‘god of the gaps’ is a god whose acts are hypothesized as the cause of that which we cannot explain. The usual use of the term refers not to the ‘deity’ under consideration so much as the invocation of that deity to explain the currently unexplained. Lael Weinberger
• Definition of “God of the Gaps: The invocation of God as an explanation of last resort to deal with questions of current (often scientific) ignorance. (“Only God can bring life out of inanimate matter,” etc.)’ John Polkinghorne

.

God of the Gaps is used to explain away mystery

• God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Richard P. Feynman
• Today secular philosophers call that kind of divine invocation God of the gaps-which comes in handy, because there has never been a shortage of gaps in people’s knowledge. Neil deGrasse Tyson
• Our ignorance is God; what we know is science. Robert G. Ingersoll
• To some people, knowledge and science are everything. To me, God is everything I don’t know. Kevin Sessums
• The Divine is simply that which science has not yet explained. In effect, God = Infinity – Human Knowledge. Ashwin Sanghi
• The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps. Jorge Luis Borges
• No one infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, from the unknown, and incomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science. Robert G. Ingersoll
• After all, is our idea of God anything more than personified incomprehensibility? Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
• Men have thought to find God at the special creation of their own species, or active when mind or life first appeared on earth. They have made him God of the gaps in human knowledge. To me the God of the trigger is as little satisfying as the God of the gaps. It is because throughout the physical Universe I find thought and plan and power that behind it I see God as the creator. Ernest Barnes
• Scientific atheism is not an undertaking that has cherished rhetorical inventiveness. It has one brilliant insult to its credit, and that is the description of intelligent design as “creationism in a cheap tuxedo.” I do not know who coined the phrase, but whoever it was, chapeau. By the same token, it has only one stock character in repertoire, and that is the God of the Gaps. Unlike the God of Old, who ruled irritably over everything, the God of the Gaps rules over gaps in argument or evidence. He is a presiding God, to be sure, but one with limited administrative functions. With gaps in view, He undertakes his very specialized activity of incarnating Himself as a stopgap. If He is resentful at the limitations in scope afforded by His narrow specialization, He is, scientific atheists assume, grateful to have any work at all. David Berlinski

.

…particularly by creationists

• Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it. Richard Dawkins
• Intelligent Design has been hijacked by a narrow group of creationist fundamentalists in America to mean something it didn’t originally mean at all. It’s another form of the God of the gaps. It’s bad theology in that it turns God once again into the pagan god of thunder and lightning. Guy Consolmagno

.

The problem with God of the Gaps is that this version of God recedes as our scientific knowledge expands…

• God is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance. Neil deGrasse Tyson
• If God to you is where science has yet to tread, then God is an ever-receding pocket. Neil deGrasse Tyson
• There are many aspects of the universe that still cannot be explained satisfactorily by science; but ignorance implies only ignorance that may someday be conquered. To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today. Isaac Asimov
• The God of the gaps who filled in the holes in our knowledge, who provided explanations for what could not be explained and who took up the slack in our responsibility for the world, was destined to become obsolete, especially as human knowledge expanded and science provided more of the answers for what had once been perceived as God’s will.” Flora A. Keshgegian
• If the ignorance of nature gave birth to such a variety of gods, the knowledge of this nature is calculated to destroy them. Paul Henri Thiry d’Holbach
• God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance. Neil deGrasse Tyson
• They [scientists of centuries past] call on God only from the lonely and precarious edge of incomprehension. Where they feel certain about their explanations, however, God gets hardly a mention. Neil deGrasse Tyson
• Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler, but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire Cat. Julian Huxley
• Increasing knowledge lessens the sphere of the supernatural. Edward Westermarck
• The God of the gaps argument for God fails when a plausible scientific account for a gap in current knowledge can be given. I do not dispute that the exact nature of the origin of the universe remains a gap in scientific knowledge. But I deny that we are bereft of any conceivable way to account for that origin scientifically. Victor J. Stenger
• How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know. Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• There is no ‘God of the gaps’ to take over at those strategic places where science fails; and the reason is that gaps of this sort have the unpreventable habit of shrinking. Charles Alfred Coulson
• Our superstitious ancestors thought that nearly all natural phenomena—the rising of the sun, the growth of the crops, etc. were attributable to numerous supernatural beings. Science has discredited nearly all of these ideas, but of course Science is not yet complete. The modern day defenders of religious traditions, therefore, although their original motivation for belief is gone, cling to these holes in our understanding as keeping a place for the divine activity. If only evolution or Big Bang cosmology or something leaves a place for God’s activity, these religious types argue, then we have some role for Religion. But as Science continues to discover more and more, the gaps get smaller and smaller, and eventually these claims will disappear as well. To cling to this sort of Religion is worthless. Sean Carroll
• God of the Gaps arguments are a discredited and outmoded approach to apologetics, in which a gap in scientific knowledge is used as evidence for the existence of God … From a philosophical point of view, the inherent problem with a God of the Gaps apologetic is that it relegates God to only a portion of creation— the portion that we do not understand yet … From a pragmatic point of view, the main problem with a God of the Gaps apologetic is that the gaps are getting smaller with every passing year … Ronald G. Larson
• Some arguments for design in biology, such as William Paley’s famous “watchmaker” thesis, are now often viewed as defunct due to scientific advances. Ronald G. Larson

.

…for nothing rolls back mystery like science…

• Science has penetrated the constitution of nature, and unrolled the mysterious pages of its history, and started again many, as yet, unanswered questions in respect to the mutual relations of matter and spirit, of nature and of God. Noah Porter
• Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. Charles Darwin
• The difference between science and religion is that the former wishes to get rid of mysteries whereas the latter worships them. Sidney Hook
• While science continually uncovers new mysteries, it has removed much of what was once regarded as deeply mysterious. Although we certainly do not know the exact nature of every component of the universe, the basic principles of physics seem to apply out to the farthest horizon visible to us today. Victor J. Stenger
• When it comes to science, ours is a paradoxical era. On the one hand, prominent physicists proclaim that they are solving the riddle of reality and hence finally displacing religious myths of creation. A corollary of this triumphal view is that science will inevitably solve all other mysteries as well.   John Horgan
• One might say science is the sum total of our knowledge of the universe, the great library of the known, but the practice of science happens at the border between the known and the unknown. Standing on the shoulders of giants, we peer into the darkness with eyes opened not in fear but in wonder. Brian Cox
• Physicists construct a sequence of partial and approximate theories, each of them being more accurate than the the previous one, but none of them representing a complete and Tao of final account of natural phenomena. Like these theories, all Physics the ‘laws of nature’ they describe are mutable, destined to be replaced by more accurate laws when the theories are improved. Fritjof Capra

.

…in its ceaseless attempt to understand and explain

• I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day. Douglas Adams
• Oh, no. Absolutely not… The biggest advantage to believing in God is you don’t have to understand anything, no physics, no biology. I wanted to understand. James D. Watson
• The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exist as an independent cause of natural events. To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with the natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot. But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress. Albert Einstein
• That’s the beautiful thing about science – that it’s all about things we don’t understand, not just the things we do understand. Freeman Dyson
• I’m interested in the hope we invest in science, and the disappointment we can feel when science flattens, or ‘explains,’ the larger mysteries of religion. Ben Marcus
• The history of scientific discovery has been a constant process of discovering that things are not the way we thought they were. Science has taught us, again and again, that what seems certain today will change tomorrow. The story that science tells about reality is continually evolving and this often means revolutionary changes in our understanding. Tim Freke

.

Many argue that an appeal to God of the Gaps to explain away mystery is not conducive to scientific progress

• The god-of-the-gaps argument assumes something about the theists it is wielded against. It assumes that God is invoked as a kind of ‘large scale hypothesis to explain what cannot be explained otherwise, i.e., naturalistically.’ If science cannot explain it right now, then God is postulated as the cause. If science can explain it now, God was not the cause. If science cannot explain it now and God is invoked, but later science discovers an explanation, the theist apparently has two choices: (a) acknowledge the scientific version and chalk another item off of God’s ‘to-do’ list, thereby making God’s activity contingent upon science’s inability to explain something naturalistically; or (b) refuse to acknowledge the new science, thereby defending divine action to the detriment of science. Both alternatives present the theist as unscientific in differing degrees. Neither is conducive to scientific progress. Lael Weinberger

.

There are those that argue that God, if God is to be relevant, has to mean more than simply what science has been unable to answer

• If God is the mystery of the universe, these mysteries, we’re tackling these mysteries one by one. If you’re going to stay religious at the end of the conversation, God has to mean more to you than just where science has yet to tread. Neil deGrasse Tyson
• In considering God’s power, we must not look for a God of the Gaps, a god who is called in for those phenomena for which there is yet no scientific explanation. Nevill Francis Mott
• The God excuse, the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument. George Carlin
• To base the unexplainabilty and the immense wonder of nature onto an other miracle (God) is unnecessary and not acceptable for any serious thinker. Fritz Zwicky
• The perception of god in the view of scientists and philosophers who do not believe in God is ‘god of the gaps’ which has to be invoked as an ad hoc presumption to bypass material explanations in certain instances where physical answers and explanations are absent for the time being. Their argument is that if a physical explanation can take us back to relying on some finite number of constant values related to forces and energy, then why to invoke god to fill the gap. Salman Ahmed Shaikh
• Either God is in the whole of Nature, with no gaps, or He’s not there at all. Charles Alfred Coulson
• “Well,” the answer comes back, “science has given us such marvelous explanations of the universe and demonstrates that God is just not necessary. Belief in God is old fashioned. It belongs to the days when people didn’t really understand the universe, and just took the lazy way out and said that ‘God did it.’ That sort of ‘God of the gaps thinking’ simply won’t do any more. Indeed, the sooner we get rid of God and religion, the better. John Lennox
• How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know; God wants us to realize his presence, not in unsolved problems but in those that are solved. Dietrich Bonhoeffer

.

God of the Gaps ignores God’s role in the entire natural order

• GOG theology limits God’s activity to the gaps in the natural order, ignoring or slighting his active creating and sustaining of the entire natural order. Ronald G. Larson
• A view that seems to limit God’s role to the filling in of a few gaps in the evolutionary record is more problematic for a theist than the gaps themselves are for an atheist. Ronald G. Larson
• Once God’s power over any part of his creation is recognized, his sovereign control over all of it can be more readily acknowledged. This is the essence of apologetics, which should not be confused with the development of a mature theological understanding of God and his interaction with creation. Ronald G. Larson
• Design arguments should not be allowed to degrade into a God of the Gaps theology that ignores God’s sovereignty as Creator and Sustainer of everything, including what he rules through physical laws. Ronald G. Larson

.

We need to also look for evidence of God in problems that are solved

• What should we make of Bonhoeffer’s admonition that we are to look for God in “problems that are solved,” not those that are unsolved? Attempting to follow this advice, one might argue that evidence for God is not to be found in any failing of the laws of nature alone to explain all that is, but is rather to be found in the very success of these laws, which points to a God who created such elegant laws and imposes them so uniformly. Ronald G. Larson
• People think of science as rolling back the mystery of God. I look at science as slowly creeping towards the mystery of God. Allan Hamilton

.

There are those who defend the notion of a God of the Gaps…

• Anyway, if the God of the Gaps is a fallacy, it’s a very strange one. It is not any one of the standard textbook logical fallacies, and it is only ever brought up in theological contexts.   On the surface, it sounds awfully like claiming that inference to the best explanation is a fallacy.  Let me pull out some home truths here, and make the following bold statement: Any time we ever believe in anything rationally, we do so because there is some kind of “gap” in our understanding of how the universe works, which is filled by postulating the existence of that thing. In other words, all valid arguments that something exists are based on Of-the-Gaps type reasoning.  This is just how reasoning (scientific or otherwise) works. This is not to say, of course, that all gaps are best filled by postulating specific divine intervention.  Of course not.  Admittedly, Monotheists do believe the following: All phenomena which occur in Nature do so because God sustains the world in being, thus (at least indirectly) causing everything.  But this hardly implies that all phenomena make equally good evidence for God’s existence. Aran Wall
• The God of the Gaps? I am prepared with the best of them to revile and denounce him. It is easy enough to do just that, one reason that so many scientists are doing it. But why not say with equal authority that for all we know, it is the God of Old who continues to preside over the bent world with His accustomed fearful majesty, and that He has chosen to reveal Himself by drawing the curtain on His own magnificence at precisely the place in which general relativity and quantum mechanics should have met but do not touch? David Berlinski
• If arguments for the theory of evolution can be adapted to new findings, why should not arguments for theism be adapted as well? After all, the validity of an idea is determined by the best current arguments for it, not the worst outmoded.  Ronald G. Larson
• By pre-emptively abandoning arguments out of the fear that they might one day be weakened by scientific advance, we risk inadvertently helping to sustain the myth of a continual retreat of theistic arguments in the face of an everexpanding naturalistic science. Ronald G. Larson
• The challenge for apologetics is to show the limitations of undirected natural forces, without putting arbitrary limitations on the ways God might direct or supersede those forces to produce what we observe. I believe that the inadequacy of natural forces alone is indicated by evidence from cosmology, biology (origin of life), humans’ consciousness, and morality. Ronald G. Larson
• As a rhetorical contrivance, the God of the Gaps makes his effect contingent on a specific assumption: that whatever the gaps, they will in the course of scientific research be filled. It is an assumption both intellectually primitive and morally abhorrent—primitive because it reflects a phlegmatic absence of curiosity, and abhorrent because it assigns to our intellectual future a degree of authority alien to human experience. David Berlinski

.

…pointing out there are some explanatory gaps science may never fill…

• Besides the possible difference between “gaps” and “limits,” it might be of some use to distinguish between explanatory gaps and continuity gaps. For example, it is one thing to claim that a lack of transitional fossils indicates a discontinuity in the evolutionary record and another to claim that such transitions cannot be wholly explained by natural processes. A similar distinction can be made for the origin of life. In general, claims of continuity gaps are more vulnerable to disproof through scientific discovery than are claims of explanatory gaps. Ronald G. Larson
• Still another distinction has been made between a “gap on account of nature” and a “gap on account of ignorance. In the former, the properties of the components and their environment are thought to be understood well enough to conclude that structures made from these components are unlikely to have come about without an external designer. In the latter case, the cause of the structure is unknown, but only because of our ignorance, rather than an inadequate potential in the materials or environment to produce that structure naturally. Obviously, the decision to place a given gap in one or the other of these categories can be controversial. Ronald G. Larson
• The notion that science does not concern itself with first causes – that it leaves the field to theology or metaphysics, and confines itself to mere effects – this notion has no support in the plain facts. If it could, science would explain the origin of life on earth at once – and there is every reason to believe that it will do so on some not too remote tomorrow. To argue that gaps in knowledge which will confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity. L. Mencken

.

…such as the origin of life…

• I feel that the origin of life is a pivotal area for apologetics. While other aspects of biology might, at least in principle, be explained by natural selection, it is clear that the origin of life from simple chemicals cannot be. This is because natural selection acts on heritable genetic material, which is not present in the simple chemicals from which life is supposed to have sprung. And yet, many biologists simply annex the origin of life to the origin of species as though it were part of the same overarching theory. Ronald G. Larson

.

…and the existence of consciousness

• Neither physical science nor psychology can ever ‘explain’ human consciousness. To me then, human consciousness lies outside science, and it is here that I seek the relationship between God and man. Nevill Francis Mott
• This most certain and familiar of phenomena obeys none of the usual rules of science. It doesn’t seem to be physical. It can’t be observed, except from within, by the conscious person. It can’t even really be described. Oliver Burkeman
• Colin McGinn has raised an intriguing if ultimately defeatist possibility: what if we’re just constitutionally incapable of ever solving the Hard Problem? After all, our brains evolved to help us solve down-to-earth problems of survival and reproduction; there is no particular reason to assume they should be capable of cracking every big philosophical puzzle we happen to throw at them. Oliver Burkeman
• I am sympathetic with those who, like the philosopher Colin McGinn and the psychologist Steven Pinker, have suggested that perhaps the emergence of consciousness is simply incomprehensible in human terms. Sam Harris
• Some prominent philosophers believe that there is an “explanatory gap” in the power of materialism to explain human consciousness, and thus infer the existence of a nonmaterial reality underlying it. Materialistic scientists assert that consciousness only seems to be nonmaterial because science has not yet shown how material interactions alone can explain it. This argument parallels that of creationists who hold that apparent vestigial structures only seem to be unexplained, but that, in time, science may find the functions of these structures. Thus, an assertion that “gaps can be filled” is not a satisfactory response when there are good reasons for doubting its possibility. Ronald G. Larson

.

Some point out there will always be explanatory gaps in science…

• The expression, “God of the Gaps,” contains a real truth. It is erroneous if it is taken to mean that God is not immanent in natural law but is only to be observed in mysteries unexplained by law. No significant Christian group has believed this view. It is true, however, if it be taken to emphasize that God is not only immanent in natural law but also is active in the numerous phenomena associated with the supernatural and the spiritual. There are gaps in a physical-chemical explanation of this world, and there always will be. Because science has learned many marvelous secrets of nature, it cannot be concluded that it can explain all phenomena. Meaning, soul, spirits, and life are subjects incapable of physical-chemical explanation or formation. Laird Harris
• Western science has proceeded by filling gaps, but in filling them, it has created gaps all over again. The process is inexhaustible. Einstein created the special theory of relativity to accommodate certain anomalies in the interpretation of Clerk Maxwell’s theory of the electromagnetic field. Special relativity led directly to general relativity. But general relativity is inconsistent with quantum mechanics, the largest visions of the physical world alien to one another. Understanding has improved, but within the physical sciences, anomalies have grown great, and what is more, anomalies have grown great because understanding has improved. David Berlinski
• Somewhere there is mystery. It impels one to theosophy: to the worship of a space-God, or a God of light. Theory dissolves the mystery, though it lays bare a cryptic new stratum. Quite likely there is an endless set of these layers, mystery below mystery. Jack Vance
• The notion that scientific history is a tale of continual and irreversible closing of gaps in a fully naturalistic account of nature, is, ironically, yet another argument by theists that has been undermined by scientific progress. Ronald G. Larson
• The laws of nature also put strict limits on what we can learn about the universe. We can’t peer inside black holes, for example, or view anything that lies beyond the distance that light has traveled since the start of the big bang. Mark Alpert
• The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite. Werner Heisenberg
• The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove. Freeman Dyson
• The greatest achievements in the science of this [twentieth] century are themselves the sources of more puzzlement than human beings have ever experienced. Indeed, it is likely that the twentieth century will be looked back at as the time when science provided the first close glimpse of the profundity of human ignorance. We have not reached solutions; we have only begun to discover how to ask questions. Lewis Thomas

.

…for as science progresses, our realisation of our ignorance only increases

• The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance. Lewis Thomas
• We see in all modern scientific advances that the solution of one problem only unveils the mystery of another. Each hilltop that we reach discloses to us another hilltop beyond. We must accept this as a hard-and-fast irrefutable fact… The aim of science… is an incessant struggle towards a goal which can never be reached. Because the goal is of its very nature unattainable. It is something that is essentially metaphysical and as such is always again and again beyond each achievement. Max Planck
• The Relativity theory, the copernican upheaval, or any great scientific convulsion, leaves a new landscape. There is a period of stunned dreariness; then people begin, antlike, the building of a new human world. They soon forget the last disturbance. But from these shocks they derive a slightly augmented vocabulary, a new blind spot in their vision, a few new blepharospasms or tics, and perhaps a revised method of computing time. Wyndham Lewis
• Knowledge advances, yes? But it’s surrounded by this ocean of the unknown. The paradox of knowledge is that as it expands and the boundary between the known and the unknown changes, you inevitably start to ask questions that you couldn’t even ask before. Marcelo Gleiser
• We have learnt that nothing is simple and rational except what we ourselves have invented; that God thinks in terms neither of Euclid nor of Riemann; that science has “explained” nothing; that the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness. Aldous Huxley
• Every branch of human knowledge, if traced up to its source and final principles, vanishes into mystery. Arthur Machen
• The measure of greatness in a scientific idea is the extent to which it stimulates thought and opens up new lines of research. Paul A.M. Dirac
• Although gaps in naturalistic explanation are sometimes filled by science,
• other gaps emerge or become wider. Discoveries in science are unpredictable, both in their content and in their implications for philosophy and theology. Believers in a God who created the universe have reason to believe that evidence for his design will always be evident, even if we sometimes mistake how it is evidenced. Ronald G. Larson
• The only solid piece of scientific truth about which I feel totally confident is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature… It is this sudden confrontation with the depth and scope of ignorance that represents the most significant contribution of twentieth-century science to the human intellect. Lewis Thomas

.

Some point out that, far from explaining away mystery (and God), some new scientific discoveries point to God…

• The discovery that our observable universe had a beginning shocked scientists who had expected an eternal universe, since it seems more compatible with naturalism. Ronald G. Larson
• The most compelling fine-tuning arguments are rather recent. Ronald G. Larson
• The exploration of cellular life in the last fifty years has similarly revealed the “simple” cell to be a wonderland of complexity, challenging the notion that it arose spontaneously. Ronald G. Larson

.

…such as the more recent finding that our universe appears to have been fine-tuned for life

• The real mystery raised by modern cosmology concerns a silent “elephant in the room,” an elephant, I might add, that has been a huge embarrassment to physicists: why is it that the universe has all of the appearances of having been specially designed just so that life forms like us can exist? This has puzzled scientists and at the same time encouraged those who prefer the false comfort of a creationist myth … In the past most physicists (including me) have chosen to ignore the elephant—even to deny its existence. They preferred to believe that nature’s laws follow from some elegant mathematical principle and that the apparent design of the universe is merely a lucky accident. But recent discoveries in astronomy, cosmology, and above all, String Theory have left theoretical physicists little choice but to think about these things …  Leonard Susskind
• Theists believe that human existence reflects the intent of a Creator to produce humans, which he accomplished, in part, through his design of the laws of physics. The recent discovery of indications that the laws of physics are fine-tuned for human life thus support the theistic view, rather than mere deism. Ronald G. Larson
• Might one argue that fine-tuning is not a GOG argument since it deals with the laws of physics themselves, not with the outworking of those laws in nature? But the laws of physics, expressed, say, as differential equations, require initial conditions. Should apparent fine-tuning of an initial condition be regarded as a GOG argument, but not the finetuning of the laws themselves? It is hard to see why God might tune the laws of physics, and not the initial conditions. Ronald G. Larson

.

Some point out our modern bias to naturalistic explanations over theistic ones

• The position that naturalistic explanations, even ones lacking in evidence, are preferable to theological ones is a position that has been defended philosophically. Ronald G. Larson
• The universal disapprobation of the so-called ‘God of the gaps’ and the impulse towards methodological naturalism in science and history spring from the sense of illegitimacy attending such appeals to God. A consistent adherence to this position leads, at best, to a remote, deistic (rather than theistic) view of God or to no God at all. If one is insistent that even glaringly obvious gaps in naturalistic scenarios (such as evidence of fine-tuning or problems in origin-of-life theories) are not reasonable places to see God’s design, then why is it reasonable to assert that God’s activity can be seen anywhere else? William Lane Craig
• One could argue that the human mind is not sufficiently imaginative to hit upon the most likely naturalistic scenarios. Thus one should always prefer an unknown natural cause to any possible supernatural cause. Ronald G. Larson

.

Some point out that science uses chance, like religion uses God, as a stop-gap for ignorance

• Scientists rightly resist invoking the supernatural in scientific explanations for fear of committing a god-of-the-gaps fallacy (the fallacy of using God as a stop-gap for ignorance). Yet without some restriction on the use of chance, scientists are in danger of committing a logically equivalent fallacy-one we may call the “chance-of-the-gaps fallacy.” Chance, like God, can become a stop-gap for ignorance. William A. Dembski