Some have denigrated belief in God by calling it a God of the gaps. They argue that in ancient history people needed God to explain natural phenomenon like earthquakes, rain, snow, and thunderstorms, because they didn’t understand how the natural world functioned. Now–the argument goes–we understand the scientific forces behind these natural phenomena and so we no longer need God to explain the gaps in our knowledge of the world.
So, do we still need God to explain the world around us? Can we say that God causes the sun to rise when in fact astronomy has revealed that it’s simply the orbit of the earth around the sun? Can we say God causes earthquakes when geologically it is the shifting of tectonic plates? I believe we can, and the reason is found in Colossians 1.
Colossians 1:15-20 is a glorious passage on the supremacy of Christ. In verses 16-17, Paul writes, “For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities all things were created by him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
Creator
First, this passage makes clear that Christ created all things.
We could say that a scientific explanation of a natural phenomenon is the secondary cause, but God is the primary cause. God is the one who put every law of nature in place and who sustains them every second. God is a God of order and so he doesn’t delight in a universe where things are happening randomly or inconsistently. Because of that and because it simply pleased him, he made the universe to function under certain laws. Natural events happen predictably according to these laws such as gravity, pressure systems, and the earth’s orbit. Yet, behind it all is a God who brilliantly and thoughtfully put it all in place.
If I want to send someone a gift I might take it to them myself or I might have it delivered by someone else. But in both cases I could still say I gave them the gift. It’s the same with God and his creation. He is the ultimate cause of all natural phenomena because he put every law of nature in place.
Some of these laws of nature are extremely fine-tuned. For example, physicists claim that if gravity was off by one part in 1040 then life would be impossible on earth. To illustrate this, imagine a radio dial with ten thousand billion, billion, billion, billion stations. If the force of gravity was off by one single station then life would be unsustainable. And this is just one example of the remarkable fine-tuning of our universe.[1]
The best explanation of such fine-tuning is that an all-powerful God created it exactly that way. But what keeps the world functioning so perfectly? God did not simply create the world and then disappear as deism teaches. According to Colossians, Christ continues to sustain all things and hold all things together.
Sustainer
The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy (disorder) of the world is always increasing. That is, things in the world will always tend to go from order to disorder without outside intervention. Robin Collins illustrates this by pointing to how a child’s room after being cleaned tends to get more and more messy unless cleaned again by the child or parent.[2] Not only was the universe miraculously fine-tuned initially, it has continued that way, and this is quite remarkable given the second law of thermodynamics. The most obvious solution is that Christ has not only created all things but continues to hold them all together.
Gravity continues at the perfect force because of Christ’s sustaining power, the orbit of all planets continue in perfect synchronization because Christ is upholding the universe.
This is not only the case with the fine-tuned orderliness of the universe, but also with apparent chaos in the universe.
In 1917 Albert Einstein published a paper on what would become quantum mechanics. One of the things in this theory that troubled Einstein his entire life was the randomness with which atoms and photons behave. According to his experiments, when a photon was emitted from an atom there was no way to determine when it would happen exactly or which direction it would go. It seemed to Einstein like chance. This was horrifying to Einstein because he thought it destroyed the principle of causality, the idea that we know with certainty that A will cause B, in the natural world. This led him to say famously, “God doesn’t play dice.”
Werner Heisenberg was a Nobel prize winning German physicist and he was also a devout Christian. He wrote this to Einstein about the troubling nature of seemingly random atomic leaps, “We can console ourselves that the good Lord God would know the position of the particles, and thus He could let the causality principle continue to have validity.”
In other words, nothing is actually random, but perfectly guided and controlled by God who through Christ sustains and upholds all things, making our universe dependable. The consistency of the natural world doesn’t depend solely on laws of nature, but on something much greater: the power of Christ.
Christ holds all things together even at the subatomic level. Things may seem random to us but they are all held together by him and point to him.
So is God a God of the gaps? No, he is God of the universe, and the more we discover about the universe the more we should be amazed at his creative and sustaining power. As Heisenberg said, “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences [might] turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”
[1] Michael J. Murray, ed., Reason for the Hope Within (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999). 67.
[2] Murray. 63.
Mike McGregor
Mike McGregor (MDiv, Reformed Theological Seminary) is Director of College Ministry at First Baptist Church in Durham, N.C. You can follow him on Twitter at @m5mcgregor.
