In 1977
Pergamon Press published a curious book called The
Encyclopedia of Ignorance, which tried to collect, in a collection
of articles written by specialists in different areas, most of the problems
(then) unresolved in fields such as cosmology, astronomy, particle physics,
mathematics, evolution, ecology, biological development, medicine and
sociology. Some of these problems have not yet been solved, almost 40 years
later; others, like the mystery of the missing neutrinos in the solar
radiation, which I mentioned in the
previous post, seem to be in the way of being resolved, although this has
led to the emergence new problems, as often occurs in science.
Since the
nineteenth century, one of the typical accusations of atheists against
believers has been that they resort to the god of the gaps,
i.e. to use God to explain those things we still don’t know about the structure
of the world. We are still far from knowing everything, because science is (and
probably always will be) incomplete: there will always be mysteries.
Well, believers are accused to rely precisely on the mysteries (the gaps of science) to justify the existence
of God. According to this view, God would be nothing more than the deus ex machina of the Greco-Roman drama,
who appeared to solve the unsolvable problems where the playwright had entangled
his characters. As science advances, the holes will be filled and the need to turn
to God will get lower.
