In earlier years, when man was significantly more ignorant and uneducated, the world was a place of wonder and awe – and very, very frightening. Primitive humans encountered floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, lightening, droughts and countless other unexplained phenomena.

Natural curiosity also raised many questions – ‘where did I come from?’, ‘where did the world come from?’
Before we had the capability of answering these concerns scientifically the answer was simple – God did it! God created us, God created the world and if he is angered he will bring floods, tornadoes, earthquakes and droughts as punishment. He’ll even throw in a lightning bolt to press home the point. Everything that exists, every unanswerable question raised – God did it all.
This concept in which any gap in scientific knowledge is filled by god, is called the ‘God of the Gaps’.

As example:
‘Where do babies come from?’
Although Aristotle is believed to be the first person to conceive of conception as naturally occurring when ‘male and female fluids combine’. It was in the late 19th century that Oscar Hertwig became the first person to observe the natural way sexual reproduction happens - the merging of the sperm and the egg.
Before this concept was accurately understood we would have had to turn to the Bible for clarity in Psalm 139:13 where it explains that God knits babies together in the mother’s womb.

Now, we know this verse is demonstrably false; God doesn’t knit babies together in a mother’s womb – not even in a metaphoric sense. Prior to scientific assistance, how else would you be able to explain it? There was no logical explanation, it had to be God. God was the only explanation.

God has less wiggle room
The problem with ‘God of the Gaps’ thinking is that as science answers ever more unexplained questions, the ‘Goddunit’ explanation has less and less room to manoeuvre and inevitably has to be discarded in favour of the demonstrable scientific explanations.

Retardation of thinking
A very real danger of God of the Gaps thinking is it claims to have an answer.
If you have the answer to a problem you stop looking into the issue. Luckily for mankind there were, and are, people not content to simply accept the 'Goddunnit' explanation and continued to search for more natural explanations.
Unsurprisingly, everytime God has been proposed as an explanation for anything and the real reason has been discovoered, the answer was never God. There has always been a purely natural explanation in which God was entirely irrelevant.

Many questions remain unanswered:

• What happened before the origin of the universe?
  
• What is consciousness?
  
• What happens when you die?
  
• What are the forces we call ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’?
  
• Are there other dimensions or multiple universes?
  

As I said at the beginning: thankfully, god’s influence is diminishing.