>It's the set of things religions claim the only explanation/evidence for repeatedly shrinking
I haven't read The God Delusion or wherever the "god of the gaps" critique originated - what is this actually referring to? Are we just talking about like, pagan polytheistic explanations of natural phenomena? What serious Christian or Buddhist thinkers using religion to explain things like weather or medicine are being referred to here?
>A shift in the position of the faithful from "this an accurate account of how the world was created direct from the creator" to "well actually that stuff was all metaphorical but the Big Bang must have been God's moment because you can't explain anything that happened before then" is not a trend in favour of the explanatory power of religion.
As early as St. Augustine, writing around ~400, and one of the most influential Christian thinkers, we have discussion of the account of creation in Genesis being metaphorical. Long, long before the theory of the Big Bang.
> I haven't read The God Delusion or wherever the "god of the gaps" critique originated - what is this actually referring to?
A rare point of agreement between Nietzsche and the evangelist Henry Drummond was that the Christian apologetic approach of "ah, but that hasn't been explained yet, so it must be God's will" to all the discoveries of the Enlightenment wasn't a very impressive one. Not least because of the tendency of gaps to cease to be gaps.
Ultimately "the more we learn, they more we learn we don't know", to quote the OP is a route to agnosticism not a belief in a particular deity, and it's particularly hard to see an omipotent, benevolent God who created man in his own image in the incomprehensibility of quantum indeterminacy to the average layman (although I'll give credit to the creativity of those suggesting that three quarks must be proof of the Trinity)
> What serious Christian or Buddhist thinkers using religion to explain things like weather or medicine are being referred to here?
It'd be easier to ask what serious theologian said "nope, this stuff about the weather being controlled by divine fiat and pestilence being a punishment for the Fall is just stories and actually you might be able to alter them - perhaps even in your favour - as soon as you stop praying and start doing." well in advance of the accompanying science? Augustine, since you're apparently a fan, was pretty confident that the problem of pestilence was the product of a literally occurring Fall involving two actual First People, which doesn't square very well with evolutionary biology.
Monotheism hasn't quite had the problem of people landing on the moon god, but it's fair to say that what many mainstream monotheists believe today has changed considerably in scope from what mainstream monotheism purported to explain for most of its existence.
> As early as St. Augustine, writing around ~400, and one of the most influential Christian thinkers, we have discussion of the account of creation in Genesis being metaphorical
Sure, Augustine made four different attempts to explain Genesis because even in his time the six day account - still an article of faith for many other Christians even today - didn't make much sense. None of them involved evolution from apes, and he still ended up with Adam and Eve being literal people who caused suffering for everyone [and everything] else via Original Sin.
Central to Christian theology is the idea of the non-competitive transcendence of God. Augustine also says (along with basically every Christian) that all things are caused by God and exist/occur only through God's will. But in statements like this, he isn't ruling out or making these claims in opposition to natural explanations for phenomena in the world, because God's actions don't "compete" with physical phenomena at the same metaphysical level.
> Augustine, since you're apparently a fan, was pretty confident that the problem of pestilence was the product of a literally occurring Fall involving two actual First People, which doesn't square very well with evolutionary biology.
My understanding is that the current hypothesis says we are, in fact, all descended from one couple. I could be wrong about that though.
In any case, there's no contradiction between Original Sin, and germs and immunity and the like, as explanations for disease. See my previous comment.
I'm not sure about this current hypothesis about the first man and the woman who evolved from his rib before their apple consumption caused pain receptors to evolve, pathogens to acquire pathogenicity and reproduction to require sinful lust. Were they Homo Erectus, Homo Sapiens or Tyrannosaurus Rex? :-)
This is a specific example of the general point we are discussing in the other thread, so it would be better to focus on that, unless you think strongly otherwise.
I know evolutionary psychology has been getting a lot of heat, but is evolutionary biology in general in crisis? As far as I know people like Gould weren't rejecting evolution wholesale so much as they were rejecting adaptationism.
I haven't read The God Delusion or wherever the "god of the gaps" critique originated - what is this actually referring to? Are we just talking about like, pagan polytheistic explanations of natural phenomena? What serious Christian or Buddhist thinkers using religion to explain things like weather or medicine are being referred to here?
>A shift in the position of the faithful from "this an accurate account of how the world was created direct from the creator" to "well actually that stuff was all metaphorical but the Big Bang must have been God's moment because you can't explain anything that happened before then" is not a trend in favour of the explanatory power of religion.
As early as St. Augustine, writing around ~400, and one of the most influential Christian thinkers, we have discussion of the account of creation in Genesis being metaphorical. Long, long before the theory of the Big Bang.