Arguments from ignorance [which is what a GOTG is] occurs when evidence against one proposition is offered as the sole grounds for accepting an alternative. Thus, they have the following form:
Premise: Cause A cannot produce or explain evidence C.
Conclusion: Therefore, cause B produced or explains C.
It's easy it is to identify this type of fallacy, and how unreasonable it would be to use such thinking to try to prove any conclusion. Atheists and other skeptics often claim that the argument for God’s existence based on intelligent design is guilty of this type of illogical thought. How can the theist who is using the design argument show that it is not a God-of-the-gaps argument from ignorance?
To depict proponents of the theory of intelligent design as committing the GOTG fallacy, critics must misrepresent the case for it. This misrepresentation of the design argument looks like this:
Premise: Material causes cannot produce or explain specified information.
Conclusion: Therefore, an intelligent cause produced the specified information in life.”
If this were how the design argument actually worked, there would be serious problems with it, and the skeptic would be right to challenge it as false. However, that this misrepresentation of the design argument leaves out a very important premise. The design argument includes the positive evidence that it implies:
Premise One: Despite a thorough search, no materialistic causes have been discovered with the power to produce large amounts of specified information necessary to produce the first cell.
Premise Two: Intelligent causes have demonstrated the power to produce large amounts of specified information.
Premise Three: Intelligent design constitutes the best, most causally adequate explanation for the origin of the specified information in the cell.”
Notice that there is no gap in the properly stated form of the design argument.
1) We have been doing scientific research for hundreds of years.
2) We have discovered that intelligence is the only entity capable of producing large amounts of specified information.
3) We see large amounts of specified information in cells.
4) Therefore, we are forced by what we know about intelligence from centuries of scientific research to conclude that the specified information in cells is the product of an intelligent Creator.
On the other hand, we also know enough about how matter behaves to conclude that it is impossible to get the specified information from materialistic causes. Origin-of-life experiments have been done for decades that have shown how matter does and does not behave. In every single experiment done to date, we have seen that natural processes not only do not produce life, but they cannot produce life. This is not a gap in our knowledge. The argument for design is based on what we know to be scientifically valid in every instance.
Why, then, are so many skeptics convinced that the design argument is a God-of-the-gaps logical fallacy?
The reason for this is a prior commitment to naturalism - the idea that only the physical exists. If a person begins by assuming that there has to be a naturalistic process that brought about life, then that person is forced to see a gap in our current knowledge, since no naturalistic processes have ever (in any experiment under any circumstances) even come close to producing a living cell.
What chemical [or other natural] process first produced life? Since no such chemical process has been discovered, we are told this is simply a gap in our current knowledge that will be filled in the future.
Nevertheless, our present lack of knowledge of any such chemical process entails a “gap” in our knowledge of the actual process by which life arose, only if some materialistic chemical evolutionary process actually did produce the first life. Yet if life did not evolve via a strictly materialistic process but was, for example, intelligently designed, then our absence of knowledge of a materialistic process does not represent “a gap” in knowledge of an actual process. Stephen C. Meyer (2021), Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries that Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe pp 424
An illustration that a “gap” only exists if a person begins by assuming that all scientific explanations must be materialistic:
Imagine someone mistakenly enters an art gallery expecting to find croissants for sale. That is, he thinks the gallery is actually a fancy bakery. Observing the absence of pastries and rolls, such a person may think that he has encountered a gap in the services provided by the gallery. He may even think that he has encountered a gap in the staff’s knowledge of what must definitely be present somewhere in the gallery. Based on his assumptions, the visitor may stubbornly cling to his perception of a gap, badgering the gallery staff to “bring out the croissants already,” until with exasperation they show him the exit. Ibid., p. 424.
The moral of the story? The gallery visitor’s perception of a gap in service or in knowledge of the location of the croissants derives from a false assumption about the nature of this establishment or about art galleries in general and what they typically offer to visitors.
There is only a gap if a person will not accept what we know scientifically to be true. We “do have extensive experience of intelligent agents producing finely tuned systems such as Swiss watches, fine recipes, integrated circuits, written texts, and computer programs.” Furthermore, “intelligence or mind or what philosophers call ‘agent causation’ now stands as the only known cause capable of generating large amounts of specified information.” And “it takes a mind to generate specified or functional information, whether in ordinary experience, computer simulations, origin-of-life simulation experiments, the production of new forms of life, or, as we now see, in modeling the design of the universe.” Ibid., pp 338, 187, 385
Conclusion
The design argument for the existence of God is not an argument from what we do not know, or we do not understand about the Universe and life in it, but instead is an argument based on the aspects of nature that we have reasons to conclude to be true. As John Lennox has stated, “I see God not in the bits of the Universe that I don’t understand, but in the bits that I do.”
