The deist/materialist position is that God, if He acts at all, must be just another cause working in the universe, in the same manner as gravity, heat, charge,

The deist/materialist position is that God, if He acts at all, must be just another cause working in the universe, in the same manner as gravity, heat, charge, or whatever. Once this assumption is established (though rarely voiced), the "god of the gaps" attack is made. The idea is that God's action is a bad hypothesis, while [insert-theory-here] is a better one. But of course, this is question-begging. It assumes what it is trying to prove, namely that the totality of reality can be explained by scientific hypotheses of one kind or another. >But is not the existence and continued functioning of second causes miraculous? I mean, I wouldn't call it miraculous, since a miracle implies some sort of interference with the usual course of things. And calling it miraculous would also imply that second causes have no kind of explanatory power whatsoever, which is clearly false. This also gets us dangerously close to occasionalism, which is the idea that God causes everything independently of their visible causes, a kind of equal-and-opposite error to deism/materialism.