God of the Gaps

Atheists often allege that some of the arguments for theism are fallacious cases of God-of-the-Gaps (GoG) reasoning.  A GoG is case of reasoning in which one appeals to God as an easy way to explain some complex empirical phenomena of which we presently know little.  It's an informal fallacy and is quite difficult to put one's finger on exactly what's wrong with GoG reasoning, but there clearly are cases in which it's a bad method of thought: For example, explaining lightning by appealing to Zeus or something of that kin. 

Are the theistic arguments like this?  As noted by WLC, the Teleological Argument (TA) doesn’t try to prove that God exists, but rather that a cosmic designer exists.  So no appeal to God is being made.  So, strictly speaking, the TA cannot be committing a GoG fallacy.

Perhaps the GoG proponent could modify the principle:  We should not hold (hastily?) that some given complex empirical phenomena is explained by an intelligent designer.  But that won't work either.  To see why, consider this case:  If we found a car on Mars, it’d be odd for someone to rule out the hypothesis of intelligent design on the basis that this is an “aliens-of-the-gap” and we should just wait for a naturalistic explanation that makes no reference to intelligent design.  That's clearly not a good principle and should be rejected.

As for the Kalam Argument, the empirical evidence isn’t being used to support that God exists, but that the universe began. So no God-of-the-gaps is happening there either.  Instead, we reach the conclusion that God exists through analysis of what it would mean to be a cause of the universe.

And of course the Ontological Argument clearly isn't a case of GoG reasoning.

I'm thinking that to really diagnose what's involved in GoG reasoning it'd be helpful to break purported cases into a probabilistic argument form--to see whether an intelligent designer is the most intrinsically likely explanation, whether the explanation could be adequately expected on alternative hypothesis, and so on.  If a purported case of God explaining some phenomena really does adequately raise that thing's probability, if there are no alternative explanations on offer that do as well of a job, and given that God is not priorly unlikely, then a case of GoG may very well be justified!