It is a philosophical approach which guides scientific investigation. The thought comes before the investigation, and it is also an attempt to include an idea of God, which I assumed was a priority of yours. So, yes, it is not demonstrable, but it shows the direction in which his investigation led him.
Which is exactly what I and others are saying, but we are saying it inclusively, not excluding other ideas, traditions, experiences, and philosophies. Science cannot explain everything and should not dictate our philosophical debate, which is necessary for the discovery of areas of investigation.
Your use of the terminology “God of the Gaps” is so foreign to what we are saying as to be deceptive. This has been an ongoing experience with conservative Christians whose use of strawman arguments derails any real investigation. Just as the scientist who rules out theism is not scientific because he is barring any evidence that may come, theists who rule out interpretations of millennia-old scriptures that do not suit them are also not scientific.
But this is wrong. You may assume this. Some scientists have even assumed this. But it demonstrates no such thing. It is also quite possible that we cannot detect them because they don’t exist. They were imagined/invented to rescue theories which were not agreeing with observation. But it is also quite possible that the theories are wrong in some small part and it is this which produces these discrepancies. By claiming it points to things which cannot be measured is a “God of the Gaps” type argument. Don’t get me wrong. I believe in things which cannot be measured. I simply don’t claim that some unsolved problem in science demonstrates that these things exist. They do not.
This strikes me as somewhat like my current view which is that what we call consciousness is a process where two ‘realms’ interface and is thus a cooperative effort between the physical/material and the spiritual – which is what I would expect from applying the description of Adam becoming a “living soul”, a thing of spirit and physical body at the same time.
I vaguely recall a sci-fi story where minds were being viewed from two realms (which roughly correspond to “material” and “spiritual”); mind couldn’t be fully explained from either view though both could come close. So I expect that there will never be a fully ‘material’ explanation for consciousness.
Dark matter and dark energy were indeed “invented” or, better, hypothesised, to reconcile theory with observation, but this is a standard, evidence-driven process in science, not merely an ad hoc rescue of failing theories, but a method to guide further investigation and refinement of our understanding of the universe. You make it sound “off the cuff”!
The basic fact is there was no actual evidence such things existed and there remains no evidence they exist. It is why they are called “dark.” The are basically fudge factors, and some physicists come up with theories for eliminating any need for them.
Observations don’t agree with the theory. But if we invent this theoretical dark thing we cannot see or measure in any way, then it makes the theory agree with the observation after all. That methodology is not the scientific method but faith. Your evidence is essentially faith in the theory. I am not saying that is a bad thing. But it is not the methodology of science.
So what about all the previous evidence supporting the theory? Is that that evidence for the dark invention? That would only be the case if you can show that the theory is the only way of explaining the original evidence. This is not something usually demanded of scientific theories… so no such thing has been demonstrated. The best we can say is that the theory isn’t completely wrong any more than Newtonian physics was completely wrong. So it is a typical approach of physics to come up with a new theory which matches the old theory under the conditions where the old theory works but is different for the conditions where the old theory fails – just like Einstein gravity compared to Newtonian gravity.
Could dark matter and dark energy exist? Sure… But these are frankly just words at this point. My favorite proposed solution is that of Neil Turok, where a massive right handed neutrinos provides the dark matter and a mirror universe boundary condition replaces inflation and the need for dark energy. This solution has the advantage that it is actually testable.
An anecdote from somewhere that I can’t remember at the moment:
A Jewish Biblical scholar and professor gets a lot of flack from his students one day from students who protest: “But what does the text say?” So the next he comes into class, he takes the Hebrew Bible and puts it on the podium or table in front of him, and opens it to the page which the class had been studying. Then the professor stepped back and waited. The class grew restless while waiting, then someone spoke up and asked: “What are you doing?” And the professor said: “I’m waiting for the text to speak to me.”
With dark matter, the issue is that we do measure it, i.e. we see gravitational effects, and since mass is what produces gravitational effects we conclude that there is mass, and since it doesn’t appear to move around rapidly that mass must be some form of matter – but we can’t see it, so it’s “dark”. So in the case of dark matter it’s a label for an observed phenomenon.
It’s not so firm when it comes to dark energy; there we see a phenomenon that could be caused by things other than energy, but since the expansion of the universe is a matter of energy that’s kind of the default – but where we see a mass-related phenomenon with dark matter, it’s only a guess that dark energy is a form of energy (though treating it as energy closes a hole in the calculations of the total mass of the universe as well).
I heard that from a professor who made distinction concerning reading the text: First, “What does it say?”, i.e. what is the result of analyzing the vocabulary and grammar. Second, “What did the author intend?”, which he said is where the text stops “speaking”; followed by “What did the original audience understand?” as a necessary companion. Third was “How did later voices understand it?” These applied to all texts; in the case of scripture, he add a fourth: “What does it mean in Christ?”
His point more broadly was that until we have wrestled with each of those then we have little business saying what it means for us today.