Sir Francis Bacon was the great exponent of experimentalism, and of induction as opposed to Aristotelian induction. He is often considered to be the father of the technological revolution.
He supposed that you could perform violent experiments upon nature (he emphasizes the importance of power and violence), move up from the details to ever more general truths, and thus climb a sort of scientific ladder of control over nature, which would bring mankind back into the Garden of Eden (a metaphor he uses several times).
Pico della Mirandola (oddly, an ancestor of mine) uses similar imagery in his Oration on the Dignity of Man. You can work your way up the ladder toward eternal truths--but it becomes quite confusing toward the end whether he prefers a Platonic ladder up to God or a demonic ladder down into the depths of magical control over nature.
Experience since those times, however, has confirmed that science seldom progresses by Baconian induction, but instead by conjecture and confirmation or conjecture and refutation.
Where do these hypotheses or conjectures come from? A scientist wakes up from sleep, remembers a dream, and discovers some important new scientific principle. For example, the benzene ring. Experiments simply confirm what he dreamed up in his sleep. It becomes evident that the way our minds work corresponds in some mysterious way to the way the universe works.
The only really plausible explanation for all that--other than sheer coincidence that is statistically unlikely on an astronomical order of magnitude--is the Logos, a general principle of order and rationality that pervades the universe. God made our minds to accord with these rational principles underlying His universe. Mathematics, which is purely theoretical, somehow accords with physics, describing the actual nature of things. I just can't conceive that human minds capable of these perceptions evolved by sheer chance. There's no way to explain it. It's all very well to say that given enough time monkeys on typewriters could produce the works of Shakespeare, but if we turn our common sense on this proposition we have to say, no, the monkeys could never do that, not in 20 billion years.
[1] The modern scientific position is that consciousness (or mind) is what the brain 'makes'. Through an amazingly complex network of electrochemical interactions (and possibly even quantum effects), the brain causes the mind to manifest as the subjective experience of a person. If there is more to the creation of mind/consciousness than that, what is it? In other words, is there a demonstrable phenomenon that yields consciousness other than the material working of the brain?
[2] The complexity and order of life is such that any rational and unbiased person contemplating it would conclude that it is impossible for it to come about by random processes. However, is that position mostly due to our inability to imagine or grasp the vast time frames involved, and the size of the material canvas? In addition, the process is random only in the sense that a Monte Carlo simulation is random. It is governed and constrained by physical laws which ultimately manifest themselves as biological laws.
[3] The naturalistic view of ethics is that it arose out of our fears - death, oblivion, injury, starvation, etc. This Kantian conception of ethics (viz. the Golden Rule) requires no God. Why isn't that satisfactory?
What a splendid essay/post, Cicero! Thank you ever so much!
The above italics explains why analogy is not just a literary device....