The God of the Gaps

Smriti convention hall was heated. Not only by the hundred or so in the audience breathing out warm air, but also by the acrid exchanges between the two debaters on stage.

“Atheism and religion: Jagadguru debates Prof. Neel” read the banner on stage. The discussion went as one might expect these things to go. Jagadguru’s appeals to God giving life its meaning did not fail to rouse his followers in the audience. Neel’s derisive comments on scientifically disproven Texts gained satisfied nods from the other half of the audience.

“You all claim the universe was formed by the Big Bang, but you don’t tell us what caused the Big Bang. How can there be something from nothing? There was always something, and that is God,” concluded Jagadguru to an uproar of approvals.

“I knew you’d bring this up. You people always bring this up. We call this the ‘God of the Gaps’ fallacy,” retorted Neel. “When we didn’t know stars were balls of gas, we called them God. When we didn’t know lightning was caused by a large charge buildup, we blamed it on God’s wrath. Before Darwin we credited God with all creations. We use God to explain our gaps in scientific understanding. The God of today is only the ‘God of the Gaps’, you see. And we’re always working to reduce his domain.”

So on and so forth.

The debate ended, neither parties having changed their minds. The audience went home, thought about it all for a minute or two, went to sleep.

About fifty years later, the air was sombre in a ward in Leelavati hospital. Neel, now nearing 96, was on the bed. He was at peace. Why wouldn’t he be? His career has been nothing short of miraculous. His ideas on atheism, philosophy, scientific studies, history and what not had taken him to places. Many good places to be specific. He knew it was time go. His loving family, gathered around, noticing his chest oscillations, knowing they’ll stop any minute now. And they did. Neel closed his eyes for the last time.

Neel opened his eyes. Only foggy white. He looked down at himself, his hands were no longer wrinkly. In fact, they looked like they did at the prime of his youth—bony and stick like but no wrinkles whatsoever. He felt youthful too. Just as he was about to start throwing out questions, God announced, “Welcome to Heaven, Neel.”

It had been a week in Heaven now. Neel had spent time acquainting himself with its old occupants. He met Jagadguru too, and they laughed heartily about all the foolish debates they had while on earth. Neel, having spent his time on earth belittling God’s self-appointed agents, was naturally unwilling to accept this reality in the first hour. But then the truth hit him—Heaven is nice and it is only scientific for him now to start enjoying its amenities.

In his first week he had already made some good friends. Gandhi was his morning yoga accountability partner. He never questioned why they should do yoga when their bodies no longer metabolize. Rationalism had left him. He and Jagadguru would walk around the garden, looking at baby birds and their golden feathers. The birds couldn’t fly because gold is heavy and not the right material for feathers. They’d only flit around, bobbing heads, letting passers by ogle at them. Our duo was now on one of their walks.

“By the way, how long have you been here, Jagadguru?” asked Neel, realizing he didn’t know when Jagadguru had died on earth.

“I came here about twenty years before you did,” came the answer.

“You must have been pretty happy to know that much of what you preached on earth was true.”

“Oh, not at all. In fact, I was entirely wrong about so much of what I said on gods and their punishments and so on.”

“But at least you weren’t completely off the mark like me,” reminded Neel. “I spent all my time convinced that God doesn’t exist.”

“You weren’t wrong about everything, Neel. You remember our debate in Smriti Hall?” asked Jagadguru.

“Smriti convention center,” corrected Neel.

“Yes, that. Back then, your comment on the God of the Gaps threw me off my game a little bit and had me thinking for a while. Anyway, it turns out she’s real.”

“What do you mean she’s real?”

“The God of the Gaps, Neel. She’s real.”

“You probably think you’re explaining yourself, Jagadguru, but you’re just repeating your words,” complained Neel.

“I mean God of the Gaps is real, Neel,” repeated Jagadguru. “Her name is Jaaga, she’s the head of the Department of Gaps. You should pay them a visit. I’m sure you’ll love it.”

Neel stood there, scratching his head.

“Welcome to the Department of Gaps” read the signboard. Neel was now in a huge but unremarkable building. In a few minutes, he found himself smiling at the affable-looking clerk manning the front desk.

“Hello, I’m Sid, how can I help?” asked the clerk.

“I’m Neel and new to Heaven. I am just a curious visitor trying to find out more about what you do,” replied Neel.

“How long have you been here?”

“About a week now.”

“People generally checkout the eat-all-you-can cafe, no-side-effects heroin, golden butterfly park, and the likes in their first week. I’m glad you chose to come here instead, Mr. Neel.”

“Thank you.”

“I see from our records that you were a professor. Oh, and, that you also mentioned our head, Ms. Jaaga a few times in your speeches too. How flattering!”

“I’m sorry, but I merely mentioned God of the Gaps as a theoretical concept. Not Jaaga.”

“That’s alright, Mr. Neel. People hardly ever mention us, and we’re grateful to the ones that do. You know what, I can probably get you an appointment with Jaaga herself. She can tell you all about us. Let me see her calendar.”

“Hello Neel, please take a seat,” greeted Jaaga.

Jaaga’s office was large but minimalist with a desk and a few chairs. It had a few pictures on the wall, Neel noticed. One showed the heliocentric and geocentric model of the universe laid side-by-side. Another showing lightning. A different one with the archetypal human-from-apes evolution. Many were examples that Neel, at some point or another, would mention in his God of the Gaps argument.

“So, Sid tells me you’re a huge fan. I’m flattered!” said Jaaga after Neel took a seat as instructed.

“I must confess that’s a bit of an exaggeration. I merely used God of the Gaps as a theoretical construct to discredit religious arguments.”

“Oh I see, that’s alright then,” sighed Jaaga looking visibly disappointed. “What do you want from me?”

“I’m new here. I’ve only been here a week. I just want to know who you are and what you do.”

“Oh just a week, I see. You probably don’t know anything yet.”

“That would be an accurate assumption.”

“Okay then, let me walk you through the whole thing.

“So the earth was created by God. The Boss God, I mean. That’s my boss. All of us sub-gods report to the Boss God. All clear till now or what?

“Okay. Now, don’t get me wrong, but the Boss God isn’t exactly a perfectionist. He is, to put it mildly, a bit on the lazier side of things, you know,” said Jaaga lowering her voice to a whisper at the last comment. “Ask Gandhi how the Boss God loathes hard work. Gandhi’s been here a while, he knows the boss’s deep passion for shortcuts.

“Anyway, the boss was tasked with creating the Earth. None of us know by whom but we know he had a deadline. He did a good job, a good but a shoddy job.”

“What do you mean shoddy? Was the earth different from what it is today?” interrupted Neel.

“Oh, Neel, the Earth was very different when it was created. Take the night sky, for example. The sky was a black dome, with some sparkles randomly scattered on it for effect.”

“Wait there were no stars?”

“No, not at all, why should there be? The boss was tasked with creating Earth, you know, not the stars. He’d never do more than what was necessary.”

“But we see the stars with our telescopes! Our scientific observations show that they’re balls of gas generating immense amounts of energy!”

“Hold on, hold on, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Yes, there are stars today, but there were no stars when the earth was created. They were just dots. Sparkling dots.

“Dots were enough for your naked eyes. But then you all come along and invent the telescope and start looking at the sky. Now what should you see? It’s just weird to see bigger dots through the telescope, you know? If you didn’t have something interesting to see, you wouldn’t invent new things. You’d lose interest in the Design. Then we’d lose interest in our work because you’re no longer interesting and we’re just stuck maintaining a legacy system. The boss realized this. He knew there were gaps in his design.

“Of course he didn’t deal with these gaps himself. He’s a master delegator. He created the Department of Gaps. Its sole purpose was to deal with the gaps in his design. He appointed one of us as the God of the Gaps. It wasn’t me to begin with, it was Ms. Holey.

Holey did a marvelous job. She made the stars when you invented the telescope. She made the cells, virus and bacteria when you invented the microscope, she—”

“Now wait a minute!” interrupted Neel. “So you say the stars didn’t exist until we invented the telescope? That doesn’t make any sense. This means the Sun was just a bright looking object giving out light, with no inherent mechanism to generate its energy. So essentially life on Earth wasn’t getting any energy, so there’s no reason for life to exist.”

“You’re looking at it all wrong, Neel,” replied Jaaga. “There’s no need for there to be anything. We decide what is needed. Life exists because we want it to exist. When we update the Earth, by adding sources of energy like the stars, for example, we add the dependency between life and energy. Starting from that update, all of your `scientific’ observations will now show that life depends on energy. But again, that’s only because we wanted it to.”

“So we were essentially living in a simulation?” asked Neel.

“Not precisely, at least not the kind of simulation humanity can conceive of at the moment. We don’t control everything. In fact, we can’t control everything. That’s the way we’ve built Earth. We can’t change the past, for example. We can pause time though, so we can work on our updates. We didn’t make you invent the telescope. That’s all to your credit. We merely noticed that you had, decided it was interesting, and updated our models to add the stars.”

“But we possibly invented thousands of things every day. You are not updating the Earth those many times, are you?”

“You’re right, we’re not. Inventions fail all the time, remember? Also, some inventions actually observe the current universe the way it is.”

“So some of the inventions that were successful, like the telescope, were only successful because you found that intriguing and changed the model? Not because of the researcher’s hard work and their ingenuity?”

“Precisely.”

“Well that’s unfair. Many scientists have possibly died in obscurity because you decided something wasn’t blingy enough?”

“Exactly.”

“Who decides what’s worthy?”

“Our whims and fancies. We have been trying to instate a principled review process, for like more than a millennia now. We never succeeded. We have no idea how you make the peer review system work down there.”

“That’s depressing,” said Neel. For the first time since his arrival in Heaven, Neel felt a pang of sadness. He spent his life on scientific pursuits. Doggedly pursuing logical arguments, tearing down people who he thought were not logical. He is now learning that everyone could be right and everyone could be wrong. Just someone’s fancies from the Department of Gaps had to be tingled. He was now desperately raking his brain for some inconsistency, some flaw, in Jaaga’s explanation. This has to be some cruel prank on him, it has to be!

“Aha,” he cried loudly. “Humans have maintained consistent records of their scientific observations over generations. If you go around meddling with the way the universe works, all records from the past would be invalidated. You told me you can’t change the past, so you can’t change these records. Humanity would immediately know something’s amiss.”

“You underestimate humanity’s willingness to call its ancestors ignorant and discard their findings. Here, let me give you an example of my own project. In fact, it was the success of this project that promoted me from a project leader to the God of the Gaps. You’ve surely heard of geocentric and heliocentric theory?”

“Of course I have. For centuries, we thought the universe revolved around the Earth, or that it was ‘geocentric’. We eventually noticed that if we put the Sun at the center of the solar system, or adopt the ‘heliocentric’ model, we get simpler and more accurate models. But …”, Neel paused. He suddenly realized what Jaaga might say next. “You don’t mean …,” he said with a shaky voice. He always used the transition from geocentricism to heliocentricism to talk about ignorance in religion. Seeing his favorite example crumble was too much.

“Yes, Neel. The geocentric model was the right one. Some of us here in heaven marvelled at Ptolemy’s genius when he wrote the Almagest. Pure brilliance realizing that your planets revolved around two centers, not one. His theory explained all of your seasons, the shifting night sky, and everything. For centuries you all used it.

“And then came Copernicus and the likes. They presented an interesting theory. Gross approximations, but elegant nonetheless. I noticed it. We were thinking of changing the system anyway. You had all entered the dark ages and not much was happening in the way of discoveries. We were getting bored.

“I came up with a plan. We abandon geocentricism and move to a different model. Not really heliocentrism of course, but closer to something you all have almost figured out recently, Baryocentrisim. There’s no one center of the universe and bodies dance around each other because of gravity.

“You might know that predictions based on Ptolemy’s geocentric model were accurate. Much more than those based on Copernicus’ heliocentricism when it was proposed. Then we came along and updated the system so some new observations that you now make can only be explained better by a heliocentric model. And then, collectively, humanity decided to discard geocentricism. And I was promoted to the God of the Gaps.”

Neel listened with awe. Gradually, the gloomy airs around him were clearing. They were being replaced with curiosity.

Jaaga fielded Neel’s questions for about an hour. Neel had many. They discussed if Newton discovered the concept of gravity, or if he invented it, only for it be added later in an update. How many of Einstein’s theories were true when he wrote them and how many were made true by recent updates. String theory. Quantum mechanics. The questions and answers kept flowing. Neel’s time on Jaaga’s calender was now nearing a close.

“We’re almost out of time, Neel. But before we go, I’d like to know if you’d be intersted in working at the Department of Gaps. We’re always in the need for new perspectives.”

“Wait, what?”

Five minutes later Neel walked out of the building. He was now one of the few employed residents of Heaven.

Neel had now worked at the department for over 50 years. His satisfaction with his work was beyond anything he had experienced while on Earth. Strangely, he felt more alive after dying. He had worked with his team on introducing super dark energy to explain the Big Bang. Thanks to his work, String theorists were now observationally proving portions of their theory.

One of the perks of being in the department is you could observe anything and anyone on earth. Neel, although ashamed of it, sometimes indulged in his perverse habits of spying on his progeny. He was now looking at his great-grandson, who was now a fairly well-known Professor of Physics. He was now on stage at the Samhiti Convention Center, talking to Amrutguru, a religious figure.

“You say the Big Bang was caused by super dark energy. But who created this super dark energy? How did something come from nothing? There was always something and that is God,” said Amrutguru.

“I knew you’d bring this up. You people always bring this up. This is why we call your God the God of the Gaps,” retorted the great-grandson.

Neel, looking down, smiled triumphantly. He was proud of his great-grandson.