The Magic 8-Ball, or God of the Gaps

?Two things just came up in my mind: one is the secular idea of God as the Magic 8 Ball who we just go to for the hard questions so we don't have to deal with them (like God as the Prayer Vendor Machine or the less mechanic, more paternal, but euphemistic "Sky Daddy"?

Thinking of God as a ?magic 8 Ball? is a danger. What exactly is the problem with it? For starters, it is claiming to know more than is justified.

Whenever someone says, ?God told me that you are supposed to _____________,? I think we should be suspicious that this person thinks she knows more than she actually knows. I had a college acquaintance who used to say things like this. Then one time she told a friend of mine, ?God told me he is going to get me a red truck.? Within a few days, she got a yellow Toyota Corolla, and praised God for following through on his promise. Actually, she made God out to be a liar to save her false claim to knowledge. She should have said, ?God promised to provide for me; praise God, he provided.?

Add to this inappropriate claim to knowledge the use of such knowledge to explain the things around us, and we have the 8-Ball problem. We are officially using God as a way to fill the gaps in our understanding. For example: ?There are gaps in the fossil record, therefore God made the world.? The two claims may both be true, but the logic is bad (it is magic 8-ball logic). There are a lot of examples of this kind of logic used by Christians, and you are right to point out that they are bad arguments.

Why do people do this? Is it because we don?t like the uncertainty of not knowing exactly how God is going to provide for our needs, so we try to force him to be specific? Or in the case of the arguments against evolution, maybe it is the drive to claim explanatory territory?here is something science has not explained yet, so let?s claim it for God? My personal feeling is that the real reason is that we are intimidated by the idea that we would ever have to say something like, ?I have no idea, but I know God is trustworthy.? It seems weak, and we fear non-Christians will seize on it as evidence that we are wrong more generally. We so zealously want to defend God that we fill in details when we should really rest in the comfort of knowing God?s goodness and trustworthiness. So 8-ball reasoning is really a problem.

On the other hand, we are right to trust something that is trustworthy. In fact, we find that we can?t really operate in this world unless we do so. Do you doubt that what you read ten seconds ago is really what you read ten seconds ago? Of course not?you trust your memory, because, so far as you remember, it has been trustworthy in the past.

Our trust in something should be in harmony with the nature of the thing, and should be expressed in the way appropriate to that thing. I trust a chair to hold me because it held someone roughly my weight a few minutes ago. I don?t trust a chair to be a helpful weapon against an intruder. Likewise, I trust a chair to hold me because it held someone roughly my weight, but I shouldn?t claim to know that it will hold up to 373.5 pounds at sea level at 39% humidity (but no more).

Our trust in ?technology? is a lot like our trust in God.

We can blindly trust in ?science? or ?technology? to get us out of our economic, environmental, and social problems, or we can appreciate technology for what it is (a way of harnessing the universe for our own benefit). But technology always brings secret side-effects, i.e., unintended consequences no one told us about ahead of time (because no one knew), for which we need?more technology.

Blindly thinking we know that technology will help us out of our problems is a magic 8-ball way of thinking, it seems to me. Now go to your average mall or Wal-Mart and start surveying the people, and what percentage do you think will ?believe? in it? Probably about 100. Survey yourself, and then survey me, and the percentage probably has not changed. Note that there is not a shred of evidence in favor of the hypothesis that ?technology will get us out of our economic, environmental, and social problems.? Has it done this in the past? Do we have more or less of these problems since, say, the advent of nuclear technology? Or the television? Or the automobile? (Etc.) Not that we would ever go back if we had the choice, but that only shows how much we love and appreciate the true blessings of technology, not that it is able to answer these problems.

Technology is a good example because we all have faith in its ability to help us. But it is also a good example because of how easily it leads us astray. How? The obvious answer seems to be that its enormous success in one area (nature actually works according to regularities that can be predicted and harnessed) has led us to put our faith in it in other areas. As a logical strategy this is not a bad method, so long as there are compelling reasons to draw the analogy. But if there are not then it becomes an exercise in the fallacy of false authority, and can easily beguile us when used in an 8-ball argument.

But now let?s get back to using God as a magic 8-ball. We had a justifiable faith in the advancement of technology, but when we apply it to the areas of ethics or social advancement it is not nearly so obviously justified. What about our faith in God? Are we reasonable to see his work in one area, and then to infer that he is also working in another area? If so, it is not example of 8-ball thinking, but a justified application of the goodness of God. When I claim to know more about the details of God?s goodness than I am justified in knowing, I do a disservice to the witness of God?I am claiming that God is going to give me a red truck.