The “God of the Gaps” fallacy and the Koran
Conclusion
In this paper, we saw that, while the events, which are necessities, presented to the human mind as evidence/ lesson/ sign by Koran and on which the Koran invites us to think, they are somehow designated as necessity and the Koran left these types of phenomena as necessity.
Think about the times when the Koran was inspired. During those times, humans even did not know the true explanation of the daytime and nighttime and assumed they emerge from the sun’s rotation around the world. However, as we demonstrated above, although the Koran designates the movement of the sun as a necessity, it defines the alternation of night and day as a “sign”, i.e. presents it as an element of design. In other words, the Koran does not consider it as a necessity. If the author of the Koran thought that the sun turns around the world and thereby, called it necessity, He must have also called the alternation of night and day as necessity. This fact which is simple and obviously comprehensible for today is a clear contradiction when the knowledge of the times when the Koran was inspired is taken into consideration. This demonstrates that the author of the Koran is aware of this fact. Otherwise, it is impossible to explain the alternation of night and day without running into the foregoing contradiction. This inference is also supported by the following verses of the Koran.
Yasin/40 It is not
permitted to the Sun to catch up the Moon, nor can the Night outstrip the Day: each
(just) swims along in (its own) orbit (according to Law).
Enbiya/33 It is He Who created
the Night and the Day, and the sun and the moon: all swim along, each in its rounded
course.
The words “each” and “all” in these verses also cover night and day. This verse clearly expresses that the world signed by night and day rotates in an orbit. Additionally, it is also useful to state that the Arabic verb in these verses has a special form unique to Arabic language which is used for more than two objects.
As it is seen, the triplet of Necessity -Chance-Design is used appropriately in the Koran. This is true even about the things we can understand by the use of the state of the art scientific knowledge. This pattern in the Koran was created verse-by-verse, word-by-word.
These interesting details in the Koran are extremely suitable to the spirit of a holy book which defines itself as “justice”. Because, there have never been such attacks against faith in the history which are supported with robust arguments of today.
Yes, the Koran is justice for us, the people of modern times.