New Covenant has a thoughtful, well-written essay on “Can Religion Tell Us Anything Important?”
To which I would add the comment that the reason all this works is because God is a Personal God. Existance is not simply an impersonal machine process. Your tools have meaning because you give them meaning… this universe has meaning, and the way it works has meaning, because a Personal Creator gave them meaning.
Being made in the image of this Creator is why we have the ability to discern this, even though our attempts to explain it are incomplete.
We accept this with science: we accept that our answers are incomplete. With spiritual matters, however, many expect that they will not use its truths until all is satisfactorily complete in the explanation and the understanding.
Is that reason at work? C’mon now, is that reason?
The contention is, often, that science provides something one can tangibly work with, but is that true? That is true of so small a part of science that it is negligible. We use our information on space, on atomic theory, and other things ( in medicine, for example), without knowing all of it, and without being able to perform tests of scientific methodology. We use it because it works. Then explanations for it are explored.
But taking the scientific analogy as reason for religion will quickly break down, what will not quickly disintegrate is man’s need for meaning. This has been a stubborn and unexplainable fly in the ointment of of modern materialist based philosophies.
We cannot bear to dispense with our meaning…. and all the implications that would bring to bear on our morality and ethics. Or the need for any morality or ethics.
We simply can’t live that way…not that this paves the way to God. It simply reveals the cracks in the fools contention within his heart that there is no God.
Because only a fool ignores the meaning of all that surrounds him.