GOD AS A PLACEHOLDER FOR IGNORANCE

God as a Placeholder for Ignorance

As long as humans have sought to explain their world, they have reached for gods. Thunder, lightning, disease, death, when ancient people lacked explanations, they filled the void with divine causation. Each mystery had its deity. Zeus threw storms, crops grew with Demeter’s blessing, and the sun rose under Ra’s command. Gods were the original stopgaps for ignorance.

As knowledge grew, the pantheon shrank. Polytheism gave way to monotheism. Yet even now, the pattern endures. Whenever we don’t understand something, where the universe came from, how life began, the default answer remains: God, not as a revelation, but as a placeholder. Neil deGrasse Tyson captures it clearly: God lives in the ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance. The more science explains, the less room there is for God.

The God of the Gaps

Richard Dawkins has called this the “God of the gaps”, a deity invoked only to paper over what science cannot yet explain. The problem is obvious: as discovery advances, the gaps close. Where once disease was divine punishment, we now understand viruses. Where lightning was the wrath of the heavens, we now understand electricity. Each new fact pushes God further back.

But beyond science lies an even sharper critique: logic itself.

The Infinite Regression Trap

David Hume warned that humans are inclined to project their own minds onto the universe, imagining a designer because we ourselves design. But Bertrand Russell cut to the core with a simple question: Who made God? If everything must have a cause, then so must God. To assert God as the “first cause” is not logic but special pleading, a convenience that dissolves under scrutiny.

To demand a cause of a cause is to admit there is no cause at all. It is an infinite regression disguised as an explanation. The more honest conclusion is that existence itself requires no origin. The universe exists because it exists. Life exists because it exists.

Existence as Its Own Foundation

This is not nihilism, nor denial of wonder. It is the recognition that being is self-sufficient. As philosophers from Spinoza to Russell understood, to demand a supernatural creator is to invent a bigger mystery than the one you hoped to solve. The universe is not a clock requiring a clockmaker. It is reality itself, complete, whole, and without external cause.

The Final Word

God has always been humanity’s answer to ignorance. But as our knowledge grows, his relevance diminishes. Science does not reveal him; it replaces him. After stripping away the placeholders, what remains is a simple, logical truth: existence needs no explanation beyond itself.

The universe exists because it exists. Life exists because it exists. To argue otherwise is to chase the endless mirage of a “cause of a cause,” which is no cause.

William James Spriggs