Science, Mormonism, and the “God of the Gaps”

In the nineteenth century, the publication of two books, Charles Lydell’s Principles of Geology and Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, rocked the religious foundations of western civilization. It marked the beginning of the profound — though sometimes manufactured — conflict between science and religion. However, as Terryl Givens points in People of Paradox, the young Mormon church, accused though it sometimes is of fundamentalism, was not threatened by these new scientific discoveries.

For centuries, it had been widely believed that God had created the Earth and all life on it out of nothing in a period of six days about six thousand years earlier — what the creation narrative in Genesis seems to imply. Both Principles of Geology and Origin of Species directly challenged, and even refuted, that belief. Lydell’s studies indicated that the earth was not a mere six thousand years old, but hundreds of millions of years old, and Darwin’s book presented the case that modern species descended from common ancestors and evolved into more complex organisms through natural selection.

Though few religious people still espouse the idea that the world is six thousand years young, evolution is still a topic of heated conflict. The irreligious decry a willful ignorance of scientific evidence in the religious, and the religious go about exposing whatever gaps they can find in that scientific evidence. They point to the Cambrian explosion, bacterial flagellum, and the origin of life itself as instances when natural selection is insufficient to explain the fossil record. Francis Collins, in his book The Language of God, calls this rhetorical maneuver the “God of the gaps” theory.

The “God of the gaps” is invoked to explain what science can’t — at least not yet. Some religious people point to these gaps and claim them for faith. “This is where God comes into the picture,” they cry. But it can be spiritually dangerous to hang our faith on current mysteries. Science has a knack for solving mysteries.

For example, before the publication of Principles of Geology, science had no way to determine the age of the earth. There was a gap in scientific knowledge. So there seemed to be no reason to question the literal interpretation of the first few chapters of Genesis. But then Lydell came along and filled in that gap. The gaps that modern religious people point to may be more sophisticated than the age of the earth, but they still run the risk of being filled in as science continues to make discoveries.

Collins, a Christian and the head of the Human Genome Project, puts it this way: “Faith that places God in the gaps of current understanding about the natural world may be headed for crisis if advances in science subsequently fill those gaps. Faced with incomplete understanding of the natural world, believers should be cautious about invoking the divine in areas of current mystery, lest they build an unnecessary theological argument that is doomed to later destruction.”

This “God of the gaps,” can end up doing significant harm to religion when the gaps in scientific knowledge are filled in and the faith based on those gaps crumbles. I find it especially distressing when members of my faith, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, try to defend the same faith that I espouse with this flawed rhetoric, especially since they don’t have to.

Even though the religious world at large was distressed at the scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century, the Mormon church, which was founded the same year that Lydell’s book was published, was theologically unaffected. The beliefs that came under scrutiny because of these developments — ex nihilo creation, a 144-hour creative period, and a young earth — were never a part of Mormon theology.

Joseph Smith taught that God created the world out of “chaotic matter,” not out of nothing. He translated the Book of Abraham, which calls the six creative periods “times” instead of days. And no church president, from Joseph Smith until now, has ever taken an official church stand against evolution. As Mormons, we are not condemned to believe in centuries-old interpretations of ancient documents. We have modern prophets and revelation, and if we would be diligent in finding out what that revelation says, we would see that just as the science versus religion debate did not affect Mormons in the nineteenth century, it doesn’t affect us in the twenty-first.

Science may pose a threat to false religion, but it does not pose a threat to the truth. Those of us who know the truth should not feel threatened by new discoveries. On the contrary, we should welcome them. After all, they help us better understand how God works in this creation of his