God in The Gaps

A recent story in Scientific American illustrates my objections to the current approach to redefining science (see the 2005 Kansas evolution debate for an example). The story concerns recent evidence that some values we think of as constant have changed over time, and mentions in passing how unconnected these constants seem to be to each other(here is a link to a summary).

This is the point when the Intelligent Design movement steps in with the comment, "See, isn't it obvious? God made the universe, and here is proof- even scientists agree that things are just too complex to have happened by chance, and the initial conditions too delicate to be an accident."

OK, I believe in God. I think God is the Creator. So here is proof that He exists, and so... I quit my job and go to church? Well wait, maybe what these discoveries mean (as implied in the article) is that there are yet-undiscovered-laws that bridge these constants. That things really aren't just arbitrary-we just haven't discovered the key yet. Understanding these higher laws could unlock all sorts of un-dreamed of possibilities. Shouldn't we take a peek?

Is this the inherent anti-God-bias showing up? Why not just admit that God did it and leave it at that? Why go looking for an explanation that does not include God? The short response is that “God did it” is not enough of an answer. Of course God did it- but how? This is the real question from a scientific perspective. This is what gets left out of the discussions of Intelligent Design, by the way- there is no explanation of the mechanism for what we see. It is these mechanisms that science strives to explain, and these mechanisms that are either missing or only very provisional in Intelligent Design.

No doubt some scientists (just like people in every other kind of occupation) do have an anti-God bias- but does that mean that there isn't a Theory of Everything that will tie things together? Or maybe we are just not be smart enough to figure it out, or we may have come along too late in the universe to see what would have been obvious earlier on. And even if there is a theory, and we discover it, it will not disprove God- because what we see with our electron-tunneling microscopes and X-Ray observatories and super-colliders and mathematical theories is what God did. The physical earth, the universe, our biology - everything we see, hear and do is only possible because of what God did. So if there are 11 dimensions, if superstrings exist, if all life on earth traces its ancestry from a common single-celled organism to a chemical soup, to the bi-products of super-novas, back to the big bang and before that, to some unimaginable pre-history- well, that is what God did, and we will just have to deal with it.