Some people conceive of God as an explanatory alternative to
science: “There’s so much about the world that science can’t explain; we need
God to explain those things.”
While such a conception of God may sometimes serve to
highlight the limitations of science, it unnecessarily restricts his
jurisdiction to the scientifically unexplainable. And if future advances in
science explain the currently unexplainable, then the arena for God’s
jurisdiction gets reduced, leading to what is know as the God-of-the-gaps
fallacy.
Krishna is not the God-of-the-gaps; he is the God due to
whom the gaps are fillable
Gita wisdom doesn’t entertain such a fallacious conception
of God. The Bhagavad-gita (09.10) indicates that Krishna is the overseer of
nature, implying thereby that he is the reason for the order present in nature.
He is the God-of-everything, not the God-of-the-gaps. He is the reason that the
gaps in our knowledge are fillable. If the universe were not guided by a
supreme intelligence, why should it have any order at all? Why should its
behavior have any explanation? Why should we have rational minds capable of
deciphering those explanations?
Thus, God is not an explanatory alternative to science; he
is the explanatory foundation, the raison d’être for all explanations.
Sometimes wisdom-traditions use the immense and inconceivable
complexity of the universe as a pointer to God. But such pointers underscore
primarily his intelligence, not his existence. If the order underlying the
universe is so complex that it even the best brains in the universe require
years, decades and even centuries to grasp that order, then it underscores how
super-intelligent the brain of the order-maker must be. Such an acknowledgement
of God’s glory doesn’t deny the possibility of future scientific research
explaining what is currently unexplainable. If and when such explanations do
come up, they won’t demonstrate his non- existence; rather, they would
demonstrate his intelligence.
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