A Revealed Preference for God?

"The author" -- that would be me -- "sees the qualitative leaps in cosmic and biological evolution as particularly strong evidence for the need to invoke more than just material and efficient causes, hinting at a deeper, perhaps even transcendent, reality at play." 

Qualitative. Leaps. How are there even qualities? And how -- and why -- do they leap? We know that there are qualities, but most of them are supposedly secondary effects of primary ones such as solidity, extension, and size. Secondary qualities -- e.g., color, sound, and texture -- are just like, your opinion, man. They are in the subject but only projected onto the object.

But Whitehead, among others, argued that if secondary qualities are relegated to mere subjective experiences, then the very world we begin with, and are trying to understand, essentially vanishes. He famously cracked that in this view,

Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endless and meaningless.

Like anybody could even know that. Literally, because subjectivity itself becomes a secondary quality, so the world reduces to a lifeless, abstract, and ultimately unrecognizable universe bearing no resemblance to the world we actually live in and interact with. 

As I said in the book, scientists "are like branches of a tree trying to show the trunk is dead by growing more leaves." Denial of spirit by spirit does not thereby eliminate spirit, duh. It is like 

propounding the claim that there is no truth as if this were truth or in declaring it to be absolutely true that there is nothing but the relatively true; one might just as well say that there is no language or write that there is no writing....

The assertion nullifies itself if it is true and by nullifying itself logically proves thereby that it is false; its initial absurdity lies in the implicit claim to be unique in escaping, as if by enchantment, from a relativity that is declared to be the only possibility (Schuon).

Besides, even so-called primary qualities are still known by a mind. In this regard Bishop Berkeley was correct -- that they are just as mind-dependent as any other qualities. 

In the beginning is the intelligible word. If not, then we're done here. In other words, intelligibility is prior to our discovering anything at all to be intelligible, whether "primary" or "secondary." The point is, both are intelligible to the intellect, and this requires a sufficient reason. 

This next chapter of The One and the Many, The Final Unification of Being, is right in our wheelhouse:

The whole quest of metaphysics has been a search for the ultimate principles of intelligibility, the ultimate necessary conditions of possibility, of all the beings of our world of experience -- and, by the extension of the same principles, of all finite and changing beings, whether known to us or not.

The necessary Principle of Everything that makes everything else make sense, and without which nothing makes sense. I'm in!

We don't need to bring God into the discussion at this early juncture. Rather, just follow the evidence where it leads. If it leads to God, then we'll just have to deal with that eventuality, no matter how pleasant. The question is,

"What does the world of my experience demand as its adequate sufficient reason, to render it adequately intelligible?"  

To start with,

Any search for sufficient reason, especially the passage from finite to infinite being, requires a certain metaphysical insight into an exigency of of reason beyond the merely logical, and a fundamental openness and commitment to the call of the intelligibility of being.  

This very much reminds me of Gödel, since he proves the insufficiency of reason to account even for reason, let alone what lies beyond reason. Man is uniquely open to what transcends man, and this vertical openness is even what defines man. To close ourselves to this transcendence is to become less than human. Or all too human if you prefer, i.e., Genesis 3 All Over Again.

Sounds like God is the primary quality.

That's getting ahead of oursoph. But there are two paths to arrive there, the outer and the inner. The outer "begins with efficient causality to conclude that there must exist at least one self-sufficient being." You know, all those classic proofs of God. But I'm partial to the inner path, through which 

we rise directly to the discovery of the Infinite Fullness of being through the interior dynamism of the human person as knowing-willing subject oriented toward the Infinite by its very nature, as the only adequate goal that can fulfill its innate natural longing.

Well, just because you long for God, it doesn't mean God exists. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

This is different. It is "rooted in an unrestricted inner dynamism of my intellect toward the limitless horizon of all being as intelligible." This limitless intelligibility is not a dream, rather, an undeniable reality: "my very nature as a human person is to be an ineradicable implicit drive toward the Infinite."

Yes, but does the object of infinite intelligibility exist?

Only if life itself is not absurd. In other words, "either God exists, or I am absurd: that is the basic option that confronts me." 

How is it possible that options exist at all, let alone this one?

That's a good question. It seems that freedom cannot be eliminated in a truth-bearing cosmos. In other words, if God's priority is truth, then humans must be free to accept or reject it. 

But if the world were absurd, how could we know it? It is a "lived contradiction" to affirm theoretically

that the universe or myself is unintelligible and continuing to live and use my mind as though it were intelligible -- which we cannot help but do. 

People vote with their feet. What do they call it? Revealed preference? Watch what people do, not what they say. 

A revealed preference for God?

Yes, supposing everyone behaves as if this is an intelligible cosmos that endlessly discloses itself to the intellect.

That's good, but the real cosmic tree must have its roots aloft and branches down below. At least for those whose wood beleaf.