The Science of God and the God of Science

Light is light, whether physical or metaphysical:

All who seek light are fellow travelers, pilgrims across the narrow bridge of time, staring above the abyss of eternity, seeking to discern the inscape of the heavens (White).

Concur: man is man and truth is truth, and the former has access to the latter or to hell with it. 

In the book we're discussing (On the Rational Credibility of Christianity), White reviews the Famous Five Ways to God, but I don't think we need to re-review them. Based on pure reason, the existence of something like "God" is actually more certain than anything else that reason can prove, especially considering their combined force.

After all, how many ways do you need? For the stubborn atheoholic, one is too many and a thousand is not enough. 

Have we achieved scientific enlightenment only to discover that we are a mere cosmic accident that exists in vain?

That's a binary question, but saying Yes is the only intellectual option, while saying No is the height of ant-intellectualism, for the intellect seeks reasons, while the atheist says there is no ultimate reason for anything, whether existence, intelligence, intelligibility, truth, beauty, unity, order, self-awareness, free will, etc. 

The human being is inevitably distinct from all the other animals because it is the truth-seeking animal.

He is also the truth-finding animal -- even the atheist who has found the One Truth that there is no truth. 

True, "the materialistic hypothesis does exhibit a certain degree of metaphysical parsimony," but truly truly, nothing is that simple, let alone everything. 

Remember, one of the characteristics of a good explanation is that it doesn't unexplain more than it explains, and atheism can't even explain the unexplainer. 

Chance? No chance: it doesn't work as an ultimate principle, because it is always parasitic on the order it necessarily presupposes:

Paradoxically, the more atheistic visionaries appeal to chance to explain the current state of our existing universe, the more they rely implicitly on an appeal to natural order.

How does life emerge from the inanimate, and mind from the mindless? Surely you must be a bit curious? No?

So the godless universe is potentially capable of becoming aware of itself for no particular reason at all. 

This is a surpassingly curious state of affairs, and it makes me curious:

where does this residual potency in the physical world come from in the first place, such that it can give rise eventually to living beings and agents of knowledge and volitional love?

Inquiring primates want to know. Uninquiring primates put the sap in homo sapiens.  

White reviews the answers given by other traditions, for example, Buddhism and Vedanta, which are pretty, pretty good. They take reason as far as it can reasonably go, which is to say, to Nirvana or Brahman, a radical but impersonal emptiness or fullness which amount to the same thing. To paraphrase Walter Neff, 

I never knock the other fellow's religion, Mrs. Dietrichson, but I can do just as well for you. I have a very attractive metaphysic here. It wouldn't take me two minutes to put it in front of your husband.

Or anybody else. We call it transcendent personalism, and let me explain how it works. "This book will argue that this vision of things is reasonable and true," more reasonable and more true than any other vision on offer. 

I have to take the wife to the airport, so we're just about out of time. We'll leave off with a preview of the next episode:

To the extent that the modern sciences are presumed to yield realistic knowledge of the world (which of course they do), they presuppose metaphysical knowledge of the world of just the sort that inevitably also facilitates and invites demonstrative knowledge of the existence of God.

Moreover, "To the extent that the modern sciences flourish" they

always inevitably presuppose and implicitly promote the necessary conditions for the kind of metaphysical realism that leads to the acknowledgement of the existence of God.