Thank you for waxing philosophical and theological, freedumb2003! Only a minor quibble: Is it God's intention that man "harness that Universe and bend it to Man’s will," or did He just intend for us to cultivate it for human needs, and then to take good care of it; i.e., to be good stewards? And that's the reason there is a natural correspondence between the natural world and the world of the self, or mind? (To what extent this is a matter of evolutionary process still seems to be an open question.) Personally, I don't think we can much "bend the Universe" to our will. Sounds kinda exploitative to me. JMHO FWIW.
There's an excellent article in Divine Action and Natural Selection by the Jesuit philosopher and theologian Edward T. Oakes, in which Dr. Oakes comes at this problem under the influence of natural law theory. Which the mathematician/physicist Robert Rosen, in Life Itself, describes like this:
In his article, Dr. Oakes cites the secular atheist philosopher Thomas Nagle on matters regarding our present concern:
“If we can reason, it is because our thoughts can obey the order of the logical relations among propositions — so here again we depend on a Platonic harmony. The reason I call this view alarming is that it is hard to know what world picture to associate it with, and difficult to avoid the suspicion that the picture will be religious or quasi-religious. Rationalism has always had a more religious flavor than empiricism. Even without God, the idea of a natural sympathy between the deepest truths of nature and the deepest layers of the human mind, which can be exploited to allow gradual development of a truer and truer conception of reality, makes us more at home in the universe than is secularly comfortable. The thought that the relation between mind and the world is something fundamental makes many people in this day and age nervous. I believe this is one manifestation of a fear of religion which has large and often pernicious consequences for modern intellectual life.” — The Last Word, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 129–130.I had to laugh at the "secularly uncomfortable" business. But that's the atheist's problem.
I thought what Professor Nagel wrote was pretty "spot-on" in all other respects.
Anyhoot, freedumb2003, I thought his views support (and resemble) your own, and that you might enjoy seeing this, assuming you hadn't already.
Forgive me Lorraine if this is a massive digression from the main topic of this thread. And thank you so much for writing, freedumb2003!