God of the System, Not the Gaps
Why Christian Designism is a research programme, not a retreat
There’s a common accusation thrown at Christians who take Scripture seriously on origins: “That’s just God of the gaps!”
The charge goes like this: You don’t understand how something works, so you invoke a miracle. Lightning was once “God’s wrath.” Disease was “divine punishment.” As science advances, God gets squeezed out. You’re just buying time until naturalism explains the rest.
It’s a powerful rhetorical move. And against some forms of naive creationism, it lands.
But it fundamentally misunderstands the actual position.
The Distinction That Changes Everything
There’s a critical difference between:
God of the gaps: “We don’t know how X happened, therefore it was a miracle.” This is reactive—knowledge-driven, retreating as science advances.
God of the system: God is the architect of the entire lawful, intelligible order. The laws themselves express divine design. The regularities science discovers are the fingerprints of rational design. And yes, occasional interventions fit within a unified, intentional structure—not as patches, but as scheduled operations in a coherent programme.
The latter view doesn’t deny natural regularities or their investigability. It grounds them.
Historical Amnesia
Here’s what most people don’t realize: metaphysical naturalism as the default worldview is historically the outlier.
From Aquinas through the medieval scholastics, from Kepler and Newton through the Enlightenment, the working assumption of intellectuals was that a rational, ordering Mind stood behind nature. Natural philosophy—what we now call science—was pursued within a theistic framework, not against it.
Kepler said he was “thinking God’s thoughts after him.” Newton saw his laws as descriptions of how God governs the cosmos. Boyle established chemistry while writing theological treatises.
The consolidation of metaphysical naturalism as near-axiomatic came only in the late 19th and 20th centuries—driven more by philosophical fashion than by direct empirical refutation of theism.
The Baseline Problem
Here’s the methodological trap: when evaluating competing frameworks, you can’t use one framework as the neutral baseline and call it “objective.”
If naturalism is assumed as the starting point:
Evidence fitting naturalistic expectations = “confirmation”
Evidence that doesn’t fit = “anomaly requiring explanation”
Theistic explanations of anomalies = “ad hoc nonsense”
This is circular. It evaluates Christian Designism from within the contested assumptions of naturalism and calls that “neutral assessment.”
A genuinely fair evaluation must ask: which framework’s core commitments more naturally predict the observed patterns?
Literal Programmatic Intervention
Central to what I call Christian Designism is the principle of Literal Programmatic Intervention (LPI): the view that God acts through designed, law-governed processes rather than arbitrary miraculous disruptions.
Think of it like this: the universe is an information-theoretic system—God’s “code,” if you will. It operates under stable divine law. Major events (Creation, the Flood, special revelation) aren’t bugs or hacks—they’re scheduled operations within the designed system.
The laws of nature are expressions of divine will, not independent constraints on God. Science studies how the programme normally runs. Scripture tells us about the Programmer and His interventions.
The Logos Connection
This isn’t just theological speculation—it connects to the deepest question in philosophy of science: Why is the universe intelligible at all?
John 1:1-3 says the Logos—the rational principle, the divine Word—was with God in the beginning and through Him all things were made.
The same reason you can do logic, the same reason mathematics describes physical reality, the same reason science works at all: there’s a rational Mind behind it.
Naturalism has no explanation for why the universe is lawful, intelligible, and mathematically structured. It just assumes it and moves on. Christian Designism explains it.
A Research Programme, Not a Retreat
When analysed through Lakatos’s philosophy of science framework, Christian Designism functions as a legitimate research programme:
It has a hard core: The Triune God as Creator, the Logos as ground of rational order, biblical reliability on historical claims
It has a protective belt: Specific models for how creation and the Flood operated physically
It makes predictions: Cosmic beginning (confirmed), information in “junk” DNA (confirmed), water in Earth’s mantle (confirmed), limits on abiogenesis (holding firm)
It’s not retreating as science advances. It’s generatingexpectations that keep getting confirmed.
The Real Question
The question isn’t whether you have “gaps” in your framework—every framework has unsolved problems. The question is whether your framework is progressing(generating confirmed predictions) or degenerating (only explaining surprises after they occur).
By that measure, Christian Designism deserves a seat at the table.
This is an introduction to a larger argument. For the full Lakatosian analysis with citations and detailed predictions, see the complete paper in the oddxian-apologetics repository.
What do you think? Does this framing change how you see the relationship between faith and science? Leave a comment—I’d love to hear your pushback.