It’s not necessary to believe that all scientific questions and problems will be resolved by further research to see the pitfall in using divine intervention as an all-purpose patch that keeps having to be moved as old gaps close and new ones appear.
A further problem is that a god-of-the-gaps critique can be leveled at almost any argument for the Christian God and gospel. A call to bald fideism (“Just believe, you self-justifying sinner!”) from one angle is the only appeal immune to such criticism. However, Scripture in too many places validates evidence and argument in defense of the faith to allow for such a retreat.
Some gaps, as the Biologos piece claims, are more resistant to scientific attack than others, although I am not enthusiastic about the examples they give, namely, fine-tuning and highly altruistic behavior.
There are open questions that can conceivably answered through the collection of more scientific data and adjustments to theory. There are other, conceptual problems which no accumulation of information can be imagined to resolve. In the latter category is what philosopher David Chalmers memorably called the “hard problem of consciousness”: that subjective experience is, strictly speaking, superfluous to biological-mechanistic explanations of behavior, particularly in the context of evolution. Aspects of this “problem” or phenomenon crop up in unexpected ways.
For example, the Biologos essay says that while evolutionary pressure can produce altruistic behavior at a certain level, it could not do so for that of, say, Mother Theresa. I find this argument weak. If evolution can produce a spectrum of behavior in other respects, why not with altruism as well, whether or not we have all the details worked out?
What is less scientifically tractable is our conscious experience of the tug of conscience and moral responsibility. Social insects offer us examples of extreme self-sacrifice, but no one believes that an ant reflects on duty and morality before yielding its life for the good of the colony. Any behavior can be programmed, and programming does not require conscious experience of anything, much less of moral law. Or to put it differently, no scientific model of altruistic behavior requires subjective experience as an ingredient. So why do we have that experience? I should add that this point is not foreign to Scripture (1 Cor 2:11).
Typical historical arguments for the resurrection of Jesus are also susceptible to a god-of-the-gaps assault. History confirms that the range of human behavior where religious devotion is concerned is wide. Furthermore, it is far from rigidly rational. Finally, the experience or impression of contact with the dead is surprisingly frequent and has taken many forms. This is not to say that an evidential argument for the resurrection of Christ is useless, but that the argument must be couched in a larger context of transcendent moral truth and the story of Israel’s fraught encounter with the invisible God to escape a god-of-the-gaps critique.