Mind the Gap
Of kettles and history
Ok, so it’s not been every month. Yes, yes, it’s been many months. I know. Life, it happens. Anyway, here’s a little something just to say I’m back. Anyway, subscribe just in case, for the thrill of it. Like a slot machine, you never know when I’m going to pay out…
So there’s this fellow, let’s call him Sebastian, and he has done some remarkable things in his professional life. Right now he’s the COO of the European division of Tata, the Indian manufacturing everything corporation, but he’s looking for new opportunities. And so he sends out his CV, and under Previous Experience he writes “Operations Team leader for Central Liverpool M&S”1. Very worthwhile, no doubt, but dear Sebastian does seem to be selling himself rather short. And yet this is exactly what HKBH does. In the very first of the Ten Commandments He introduces Himself as follows: “I am the L-rd your G-d who took you out from the land of Egypt.”
Remember, this is the same HKBH who created the universe and everything in it from Nothingness.
The Andromeda Galaxy? He did that.
Komodo dragons? Him again.
Muons? Yup, Him.
Olympus Mons? That was G-d as well.
Literally everything from the Higgs Boson to the Himalayas to the Horsehead Nebula. All of it.
Wouldn’t it have been far more of a statement of who He is if He would have said “I am the L-rd your G-d who made, y’now, all of this including yourselves”? Why pick what seems to be a relatively minor event involving a smallish nomadic tribe’s exit from Egypt?
The thing is that many atheists often accuse believers of simply believing in a “god of the gaps”. In other words “we can’t explain x, y or z so it must have been G-d”. There are two problems with this – firstly, why G-d? Why not magic or unicorns or aliens? And secondly, what happens when you can explain it? Incrementally, the boundaries of knowledge get pushed further and further and the gaps for G-d to fill become smaller and smaller and eventually we should, as Laplace put it, “have no need for that hypothesis”.
The response to this is to talk to them about kettles. There are, says the late Rabbi Sacks z’l, two possible responses to the question “why is the kettle boiling?” You could answer by talking about the flow of electrons from the mains down the wire into the element which produces a temperature change, thus exciting the water molecules and inducing them to vibrate faster. Or you could say “because Bob wants a cup of tea”. This is not a “Bob of the gaps“ argument. It’s simply stating that knowing mechanical procedures does not warrant claiming to have a complete understanding of a phenomenon.
And as it is with kettles, so it is with the universe. We could understand everything, from the formation of black holes to the collapsing of quantum waveforms and yet still not understand why the universe works. The only way to know that is to see how history unfolds, to watch, so to speak, HKBH make His cup of tea. Of course, only He knows His plan and specifics of the information is, as a nice Jewish boy from Newark once wrote, unavailable to the mortal man. But the fact that He involves Himself in history is what tells us that there is a plan, even if we don’t know what flavour tea, how long it will brew for, how many sugars are involved or if there will be cream or milk.2
Now if HKBH had started off The Revelation by saying “I am The L-rd your G-d who created the sun and stars and planets” then all the astrophysicists would have nodded sagely and said “weeeeell when dust clouds start swirling in space then gravity makes everything pull into donuts and then you get planets and if the dust is mostly hydrogen and helium it will start exploding and abracadabra stars.”
So instead He introduces Himself as The One who intervened to save a small, seemingly unimportant people from servitude, who turned the tide of history to bend it towards the where the Plan needed to go, who is not filling gaps but guiding everything.
The next time someone asks you why you believe in G-d, mind the gap and tell them instead that it’s hard not to when He’s left His fingerprints all across time.
Liverpool (noun) - a city in North-West England, famous for its music, football, shipping history, and the inability of its inhabitants to pronounce the letter “K”.
M&S - Marks and Spencer, “Sparks”, a national department store chain in the UK.
Or, heaven forfend, those stupid tapioca “bubbles” that look and taste like congealed glue.
Love it.