Even working within the laws of physics, researchers with an anti-God bias often make blind leaps of faith to escape any evidence of God's involvement in the universe. For centuries Christians were criticized for their God-of-the-gaps arguments. Sometimes that criticism was deserved. Christians tended to use gaps in understanding or data to build a case for God's miraculous intervention. Then, when scientific discoveries uncovered a natural explanation for the "divine phenomenon," ridicule was heaped not only on those proposing the divine explanation but also on belief in God's existence. In the twenty-first century we see the reverse of the God-of-the-gaps arguments. Nontheists, confronted with problems when ample research leads to no natural explanations and instead points to the supernatural, utterly reject the possibility of the supernatural and insist on a natural explanation even if it means resorting to absurdity. For example, steady state models were supported by an imagined force of physics for which there was not one shred of observational or experimental evidence. The oscillating universe model depended on an imagined bounce mechanism for which there was likewise not one shred of observational or experimental evidence. Similar appeals to imagined forces and phenomena have been the basis for all the cosmological models proposed to avoid the big bang implications about God {see chs. 8 and 9}. The disproof of these models and the ongoing appeal by nontheists to more and more bizarre unknowns and unknowables seem to reflect the growing strength of the case for theism {see chs. 8, 9, 13, and 16}."
( Hugh Ross )
[ The Creator and the Cosmos: ]
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