There used to be a god who ran the world. He caused the lightning. He turned the seasons. He killed the firstborn of Egypt over a labor dispute. He worked full-time, weekends included, and his job description was the entire physical universe.

He has since been laid off from most of it.

Meteorology took the weather. Astronomy took the calendar. Germ theory took the plague, which was awkward because the plague had been marketed for centuries as divine wrath and turned out to be a flea on a rat. Evolutionary biology took the origin of species. Neuroscience is currently negotiating for consciousness. The technical name for what remains is god of the gaps — the god who lives in whatever we haven’t figured out yet. Every year the cartographers finish another region and he is asked to move house.

The shrinking portfolio

Isaac Newton, the smartest person alive in 1687, believed the orbits of the planets were unstable and required periodic divine intervention to keep them in line. This was not a metaphor. He wrote it into the Principia. God, in Newton’s view, was essentially the universe’s IT department, restarting the solar system when it froze.

A hundred years later Pierre-Simon Laplace showed the orbits corrected themselves. Napoleon asked where God fit into the model. Laplace, so the story goes, replied that he had no need of that hypothesis. The story is probably apocryphal. The mathematics is not. Newton’s God had, in a hundred years, gone from Chief Mechanical Officer of the Cosmos to redundant middle management.

He did not die. He was simply no longer required. This is the shape of the last four hundred years. Not a war. A layoff.

The current portfolio

Two positions remain.

The first is the origin of consciousness — why there is something it is like to be you, why three pounds of electrified fat produces the sensation of reading this sentence. A genuinely hard problem. Also a problem neuroscience has been actively dismantling for thirty years, neurotransmitter by neurotransmitter, brain region by brain region, one anesthetized volunteer at a time. We do not have a complete answer. We have most of an answer, and the answer keeps looking less and less like a soul.

The second is why the physical constants of the universe appear tuned to permit stars, planets, and eventually us. The theological reading: this looks designed. The scientific alternatives: a multiverse, an anthropic selection effect (of course the constants look tuned to permit us — if they didn’t, no one would be around to notice), or deeper physics we don’t yet possess. All three are being actively investigated. None of them is God. God, notably, is not being actively investigated, because there is nothing to investigate.

These are the last two gigs. Both are under review.

The one-way border

The god of the gaps has a structural defect. He shrinks. He shrinks in one direction, permanently, and the direction is toward zero.

No seminary has ever announced the arrival of new territory. No theologian has ever stood at a pulpit and said we used to understand this and no longer do. The border moves one way. Every year a question that was God’s yesterday belongs to a laboratory today. Every year the response from the pulpit is that the mystery has deepened.

The mystery has not deepened. The mystery has moved. It has moved to a smaller room in a smaller wing of a smaller house, and someone is putting up drywall.

Carl Sagan wrote that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. True. It is also not evidence of presence. A gap is a gap. It is not a signature. It is not a fingerprint. It is a place where the paint has not dried, and drying is a solved problem.

What most people actually believe

Most religious people no longer worship the god of the harvest or the god of the plague. They worship the god of what remains unexplained. This is presented as sophistication. It is not sophistication. It is a lease.

It is what you get when you inherit a set of claims, learn that most of them are false, and decide to keep the ones that haven’t been checked yet. That god has no scripture. He has a Google alert.

What comes next

The gaps will continue to close. This is what science does. It does not care whether you are religious. It does not care whether the closure is comforting. It closes gaps because that is the only function it has and it has been performing that function, with acceleration, for four hundred years, with a track record embarrassingly better than every priesthood combined.

The consciousness problem will be solved or dissolved. Both are outcomes. Both remove the tenant. Fine-tuning will yield to multiverse cosmology, or to a deeper theory of the constants, or to an argument that renders the whole question ill-posed. All three remove the tenant.

The tenant will then move to whatever question remains. And then to whatever question remains after that. Eventually the last question closes and the tenant looks around and there is no room left. No smaller wing. No back office. Just the front door and a cardboard box of personal effects.

He was never a god. He was a bookmark. He held the place until the reader was ready.

The reader is ready.

Play loud.