Mind the God of the gaps

"I am not an idealist. And I'm not a naive realist. I'm not saying it just is "out there" as the materialist scientists say. And I'm not saying it's something that is "made up" by my mind. It is in the encounter, the betweenness, the coming together, that the thing comes into being." - Iain McGilchrist

Life happens in the space between things, between birth and death, between this moment and the next, between every exhalation of air from the lungs and the next inhalation. And in religion, we worship the "God of the gaps". Richard Bube attributed modern crises in religious faith in part to the inexorable shrinking of the God-of-the-gaps as increasingly comprehensive scientific explanations progressed. How has religion arrived at this sad state of affairs? It went through two unfortunate historical changes: from being relative, and open to skepticism and doubt to being absolute, and from being primarily figurative/metaphorical to being exclusively literal and antagonistic to inquiry, growth, and change. Had these transformations not occurred parallel to its adoption as a political tool, and as cultures have become increasingly ‘hyperindividualistic’ and prone to relegating the role of perspective to the footnotes of ‘objective science’, it would be far less damaging than it now is. But nothing is absolute, including this; there’s always curious exceptions, interpretations that remain relative and figurative, but these do not command the spotlight today. As religion became more fully incorporated within the Western materialistic perspective, where 'essences' are primary, it was no longer able to comfortably 'live in the gaps'. From such a perspective (though it claimed to transcend perspective altogether), science endeavored to fill the gaps with new 'things' that incrementally constituted evidence for either confirming or excluding a materialistic God, and fill the gaps in classification with new mechanistic substances. From that perspective, the God of the gaps is, of course, an insult. God was relegated to the leftovers of science. Scientific knowledge increased, and the dominion of God decreased. Which is why Charles Alfred Coulson (1910−1974) explained that many Christian groups reject the premise: "Either God is in the whole of Nature, with no gaps, or He's not there at all." Nonetheless, the derogatory sting remains so long as religion is framed through the lens of a culture that is dominated by McGilchrist's emissary, the left hemisphere's view of the world. The only way to remove it is to step outside the materialist worldview. For if we reverse the contemporary order defined by this worldview, and see that 'relations precede relata' instead of the other way around, then Nature is no longer fundamentally composed of things but relationships. And in such a process-relational perspective Nature is shot throughout with gaps and nothing but gaps! Here the 'God of the gaps' is quite literally true, and a 'God of the things' becomes the insult. 

Transience, ephemerality, and absence are incomprehensible, or at least anxiety provoking, to a materialist. So the Japanese cultural aesthetic of 間 (ma), meaning 'betweenness', a gap, space, pause, or the perception of an interval in time or space (without necessarily requiring a physical compositional element) is likewise confounding. The space between things rather than the things, ma signifies a peculiar ambivalence - both “distance” or “interstice” and “relatedness” or “polarity”. It's not like other concepts in Eastern philosophy like sunyata (emptiness) or apranihita (aimlessness). Integral to ma is the understanding that all intervals have a beginning and ending, they are intrinsically episodic or partial (not absolute), inherently transient, and eventually end. So we are enjoined to relax, appreciate these intervals while they last without rushing to the next big 'thing', or else life will pass us by. Nor is ma like Terrence Deacon's 'absentialism', the efficacy of absence. He wrote that “we simply need to pay attention to the holes, to what is missing”. But 'missingness' is not an aspect of ma. As part of his “teleodynamics”, absentialism is a concept used to explain the sense of goal-directedness in living processes, but in contrast to that, ma might be said to exist before any goal, sense of purpose, or concept of 'missingness' emerges. Perhaps it is more like a choice that hasn’t been made, a coincidentia oppositorum, but the choice itself has not been conceptualized as something that even has to be decided. In this space dissimilar things can freely co-exist and the law of  non-contradiction has no force. The idea of ma relates to physical as well as mental health. Everything we do has a beginning and an ending: eating, exercise, rest, etc. Some activities might be cyclical, like the breath, or the circadian rhythms of day and night, some may never repeat again, perhaps occuring only once in a lifetime or not at all. But like the author of Ecclesiastes wrote, "to every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up..."

Episodic behaviors were mentioned by John Pohl recently in connection with how the Firmicutes/Bacteroidetes ratio in the microbiome of the human gut is important. Firmicutes make short chain fatty acids, which help to prevent toxins and inflammation. Inflammation decreases serotonin and dopamine levels, which is what we see in anxiety and depression. The ratio is influenced by factors like diet composition and physical activity levels. Activity levels influence intestinal motility and the transit time of the chime through the different segments of the gastrointestinal tract. And all this, in turn, affects the composition of the microbiota. So you can see how these synergistic, "chicken and egg" sort of feedback processes, all go on within a single human holobiont, and can make it hard to distinguish which is a cause and which is an effect. Behavior influences microbiota which influences serotonin which influences behavior. The human gut microbiota is mostly composed by two dominant bacterial phyla, Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes that together represent more than 90% of the total community. The relative abundance of these phyla is highly variable between subjects from the same population, which is probably due to many lifestyle-associated factors, which include diet and physical activity, but also food additives, contaminants, and antibiotic consumption, among others that influence the composition of the microbiota in the gastrointestinal tract. 

The disappearance of beneficial commensals could be addressed by the administration of specific probiotics such as Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG, L. reuteri DSM 17938, L. plantarum DSM 9843, and Bifidobacterium lactis Bb-12. Lactobacillus rhamnosus and L. reuteri are often added to yogurts, cheeses, milk, and other dairy products. Lactobacillus plantarum and Bifidobacterium lactis Bb-12 are present in fermented saurkraut and dairy products. Most people can easily make cabbage saurkraut at home, and buy dairy foods with active cultures (yogurt, cheeses), in addition to eating a plant based diet. In the interview with Pohl, Matt Segall commented "we are these tubes ultimately", referring to an earlier remark made by Alan Watts. A lot happens in the gap between both ends of that tube. Our health depends on our ability to behaviorally regulate the various gaps in our bodies and our lives, because if these become dysregulated so does our physical health, and that in turn can produce mood and mental disorders. We cannot mistake a part for the whole, or forget that all gaps eventually end. When we realize that satisfaction is temporary it is easier to delay gratification. The opposite of gratification seeking is frustration tolerance. Like 'stopping cues' that signal it's time to move on to something new and different, gaps can provide functional resistance (enabling constraints). This "tribological" (frictional) quality of ma means that as our appreciation of ma grows, reward seeking tends to decrease while frustration tolerance increases. In a world full of 絶え間 (taema), discontinuous spaces, the time you spend reading this page is another gap. It was preceded by something and will be followed by something new. And when the gap ends, a change, a transformation occurs. Time unfolds between the poles of past and future, and we live in the gap between them. As Kiran Desai wrote "love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment". Always mind the gaps. 

Fabien Magne et al., The Firmicutes/Bacteroidetes Ratio (2020)
Graham Parkes, Japanese Aesthetics (2018)
Matt Segall, Gastroenterology and Process Theology: Dialoging with John Pohl, MD (2021)
Gunter Nitschke, MA: Place, Space, Void (2018)
Jerrold McGrath, The Japanese words for “space” could change your view of the world (2018)
Michel Random, Japon: La stratégie de l'invisible (1985) as quoted in Derrick de Kerchhove, Brainframes: Technology, Mind and Business (1991)
Kevin Nute, Time in the Traditional Japanese Room (2021)
Pattee, H.H. The Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiotics (2005) "Epistemology by its very meaning presupposes a separation of the world into the knower and the known. That is, if we can speak of knowledge about something, then the knowledge representation, the knowledge vehicle, cannot be in the same category as what it is about. This separation is often called the epistemic cut. ...A symbolic description, whatever form it may take, has a physical structure that is independent of its interpretation." In Rovelli’s RQM every view implies a split, a boundary, an epistemic cut between observer and observed, there is no observational point that is not itself a part of ‘the totality of all that is’. Consequently, the ‘God’s eye view’ is impossible.
Michael Gazzaniga. The Schnitt. (2017) "For all our scientific efforts, there remains a gap, the Schnitt. The gap between the quantum and the classical, between the living and the non-living, between the mind and the brain. How on earth is science going to close this gap, what the physicist Werner Heisenberg called the Schnitt, and what the theoretical biologist Howard Pattee calls the “epistemic cut”? Some maintain the gaps only reflect a current failure of knowledge. Others think the gaps will never be closed, that they are in fact un-closeable." This Heisenberg cut is a more technical treatment of the perhaps more well known "Cartesian cut".