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This Weekend in California, Paul Nelson Will Speak on the "God of the Gaps" Challenge and the Explanatory Superiority of Design

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You’ve heard the objection: ID is nothing but a "God of the Gaps" argument, employed to insert an empty teleological cause into some hole in our current scientific understanding — a hole that will inevitably be filled by physical or material knowledge. When that physical knowledge comes, the "designer" will be found unneeded and unwanted yet again, to be handed his pink slip and the address of the Cosmic Unemployment office.

So familiar and potent has this "God of the Gaps" (GOTG) objection become that it causes a well-known phobia among many theists who work in the sciences. Fearful of committing a GOTG blunder, these scientists and philosophers simply avoid saying anything that may implicate a designer in the physical history of the universe. A designer who does nothing detectable, of course, is not a designer who could possibly lose his job. Thus protected, however, the designer becomes superfluous in another way. He makes no discernable difference in the affairs of the universe. The GOTG phobia thus strips theism of any content.

Discovery Institute fellow Paul Nelson will analyze and respond to the GOTG critique in a lecture this Friday evening, February 27, at Biola University (Bardwell 112, 7 pm).

The talk is open to the public, but seating is limited.

Closely related to the GOTG objection is the claim that physicalism turns out to be inevitably superior to designed-based reasoning in the sciences. On this view — call it the inherent superiority of physicalism — intelligent design can only be a placeholder for a physical causal account, from which all agent causation has been eliminated. Agents disappear and the fundamental particles take over.

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But is this true? In his second talk, on Saturday, February 28 (Bardwell 112, 10 am), Dr. Nelson will disentangle the various philosophical threads that make up the superiority-of-physicalism claim. In fact, design offers the better toolkit for explanation.

This talk is also open to the public, but again, seating is limited. We’ll hope to see you there.

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