Creationists only point to a divine Creator when the laws of science themselves point us unequivocally in that direction. And while there will always be an important faith element to belief in God, the creationist argument for God’s existence arises directly from a proper understanding of the laws of science, not because of ignorance of those laws.

Atheists regularly accuse Christians of inventing a ‘god of the gaps’ in their argument for a divine creator. A ‘god of the gaps’ argument arises when superstitious, unscientific people invent an imaginary god to explain things that they have no scientific understanding of. For example, a primitive people group may see a rainbow in the sky and, because they don’t understand about light refraction, come to believe in rainbow fairies. Or they may believe that thunder is the angry bellowing of a thunder god who is displeased with them.

Atheists claim that the Christian belief in a divine creator is similarly naïve and superstitious, plugging the gap of our missing scientific knowledge with a convenient imaginary god to explain what we do not yet understand. They claim that just because scientists don’t currently understand how the universe came into existence from nothing or how the 3.2 billion pieces of genetic information in our genome evolved by chance processes, it doesn’t necessarily mean that there isn’t a scientific explanation that we will one day discover. They claim that when Christians point to these and MANY other scientific conundrums and use them as evidence for the existence of a creator God, we are inventing a god of the gaps. In a recent online discussion that I had with an atheist, he accused me of this very thing, also calling me some rather disgusting names in the process. Lovely!

Christian creationists do not believe in a god of the gaps, but a God of absolute necessity. Creationists only point to a divine Creator when the laws of science themselves point us unequivocally in that direction. And while there will always be an important faith element to belief in God, the creationist argument for God’s existence arises directly from a proper understanding of the laws of science, not because of ignorance of those laws.

The origin of the universe is a case in point.

Cosmologists are now almost universal in their agreement that the physical universe came into existence from nothing, at the very beginning. Dr Stephen Hawking (1942–2018), in a lecture published on his website, stated: “All the evidence seems to indicate, that the universe has not existed forever, but that it had a beginning. This is probably the most remarkable discovery of modern cosmology.”

Similarly, Dr Quentin Smith, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Western Michigan University, in a debate with William Lane Craig a few years ago, stated: “The universe came from nothing, by nothing for nothing.”

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