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Comment by throwaway123x2 | Hacker News Reader

The discovery isn't attributed to God, but the existence of the phenomenon. So in your example, God made radium. God made the raw materials to make computers and gave man the intellect to make them.

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This sounds like the God Of The Gaps line of fallacious reasoning. Once we figure out where radium came from then God will be inserted just before that new discovery, ad infinitum, turtles all the way down

Sure but it's a way to integrate science and religion and ultimately science doesn't really have an way to answer 'why' for any of this. Even if there's not an actual answer it just happens to be that way and we're a happy little accident of the universe for a lot of people that's kind of unsatisfying. Even if they're wrong to people want to ascribe meaning to their lives, it's why philosophy and religion will probably never leave us.

Sure, that's the Prime Mover theory, which would be extraordinarily hard to prove or disprove. I don't think it's fallacious reasoning.

It's fallacious to put God one step before everything we don't know (radium, etc), while forgetting the numerous times this was done in the past (rainbows, etc) only to be demonstrated false once science advances. That's quite different to the Prime Mover hypothesis.

The God of the Gaps reasoning always seemed dangerous to me. It creates a system where each scientific discovery diminishes God, pitting religious people against the advancement of science. As the gaps grow smaller so does God. In the long run you're in danger of reducing God to some mathematical constants.

Like system administration: if a task occurs frequently, write a script to automate it.

> The discovery isn't attributed to God, but the existence of the phenomenon.

So basically they are frozen in a "Galileo Galilei" period?

This could explain part of the claimed scientific decline

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