It seems clear to me that the natural world is formed and ordered by universals. The natural laws are universals. It just seems so unreasonable to me for atheists to stipulate that these very same laws are somehow the product of the natural world — which is composed of finite, contingent entities enveloped in a web or process of ceaseless change — which is structured by these laws in the first place, which do not themselves change. That is like saying the son is his own father....
Rabbi Daniel Lapin, appearing on Glenn Beck's show yesterday, had an incredibly astute observation about atheists. He said they were "parasites" — because they totally rely on the legacy they have received of great human achievements in the past, accumulated over many millennia of human thought and experience; and yet they add nothing to the magnificent corpus they inherit, do nothing to further inspirit it. Or words to that effect.
The problem is, in all of human history as far back as the records go, God has always been in the human picture; so much so that one can say man is "programmed" for God, that it is natural for man to see himself in relation to, not only the immanent processes in nature, but also in relation to their divine, transcendent ground. But atheists will have no truck with transcendence, with God.
But try to explain human history if you leave God out of it! For that matter, try to explain science if you leave God out of it. It simply cannot be done. Though atheists keep trying....
Thank you so much for writing, dearest sister!
ABSOLUTELY INDEED.
But those sciences have good cause for that approach since the historical record is spotty at best and little can be precisely reconstructed under laboratory conditions. So as long as the evidence can be fit into the blueprint, without kluging observations or ignoring contrary evidence, there is confidence in the blueprint itself.
Other sciences, in particular physics and chemistry, work from the evidence to form theories which are subjected to rigorous tests (or additional observations.) The most reliable theories have endured many attempts to falsify them.
In the latter approach to investigations, the vast body of scientific observations and theological, philosophical, cultural and historical information content is "all on the table" for the thinker/theorists' consideration in developing his hypothesis. But in the former approach, the information must be drastically filtered down to only those pieces which are relevant to the blueprint.
The atheist's reality, his filled-in blueprint, is an extreme reduction, a subset of the body of information because any material that mentions God is excluded a priori.
Conversely, in the latter approach, the greater the scope of the investigation the more likely God will be mentioned in the resulting manuscript, even if the investigator is a theoretical physicist.