Ep. 05 | God of the gaps | Hamza Karamali | Basira Education

This video is part of “The Thinking Muslim’s Guide to Atheist Arguments.”
LEARN MORE HERE: http://www.thinkingmuslimguide.com

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New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins frequently point out that religious believers base their belief in God on natural phenomena that cannot yet be scientifically explained. He remarks to Lawrence Krauss that such reasoning, “a pathetically bad piece of argument”.

Hamza Karamali shows that Richard is right: the intelligent design arguments that Christians make are God-of-the-gaps arguments and they are bad arguments for the existence of God.

He then shows that the traditional Muslim argument for the existence of God (the argument from contingency) is not a God-of-the-gaps argument at all.

In fact, it’s the opposite. One of the features of the argument from contingency is that as our scientific understanding of the universe grows, the argument for God’s existence grows stronger. The reason for this is very simple: a thousand contingent things is a thousand times more of a reason to believe in God than just one contingent thing. And all science does is reveal more and more contingencies in the universe.

Hamza then anticipates the atheist objection that looking at science in this way does away with laws of nature. He explains that the laws of nature don’t go away. They just look different. Instead of being necessary relations between natural causes and effects, they become contingent associations between contingent things that are all upheld by God.

Although this seems counterintuitive, it is, in fact, the rational conclusion of a rational argument. Scientists who imagine that the laws of nature describe necessary and unchangeable relations between natural causes and their effects aren’t employing any argument. They are just following their animal instincts, in the same way that Ivan Pavlov’s dogs followed their animal instincts when they began salivating at the sound of a bell. Watch Hamza describe Pavlov’s famous psychological experiment, classical conditioning, and how it shows that we don’t need to create any gaps at all in our scientific inquiry to prove the existence of God.