For Theists (believers in God/Theos) of Every Creed and Color
An Introduction to The Wonder of the World: A Journey from Modern Science to the Mind of God

Roy Abraham Varghese

God exists. The soul is a non-physical reality separate from the brain. The human mind can know truth. These are not convictions that depend on any claim of divine revelation or a particular religious system. Rather, they are instinctive insights. Their denial is counter-intuitive, self-contradictory and irrational.

Now the questions of what God's inner being is like or why we were created by God or what happens to us after death are questions answered differently by each creed and claim of divine revelation. Thus theistic Hinduism, Mohism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity all offer radically distinctive and mutually exclusive answers to these questions. But the differences in these answers should not blind us to their underlying consensus on the existence of a transcendent Reality who brought all other things into being -- God!

The Wonder of the World addresses precisely this dimension of human thought and experience that lies outside the bounds of revelational and institutional religion. The work seeks to show that (1) the scientific enterprise and nature as a whole inescapably testify to an infinite Intelligence that created and conserves all things and (2) this awareness of God's existence is not to be restricted to any one religion and, technically, can even be accepted by someone who professes no religion. This latter point is highlighted by the differing religious heritages of the two dialoguers, Judaism and theistic Hinduism. The book has, in fact, received commendations from eminent Jewish, Hindu, Islamic and Christian (Protestant and Catholic) scholars -- and even from agnostic and atheist thinkers.

Now the adherent of a particular religion might be concerned that the book is ambiguous about the truth of one or the other religion. In point of fact, the book does not seek to enter into the discussion of religious truth-claims at all. This is not to say that such a discussion is not important or proper. Rather it is a matter of putting first things first. Neither theistic Hinduism nor Christianity, Judaism nor Islam, make the claim that God's existence can only be known through divine revelation. Quite the opposite. These religions hold that the reality of God and the soul can be recognized by any normally functioning intellect. Like Wonder, the greatest thinkers of these religions, in fact, sought to show that God's existence can be known to human reason independent of divine revelation.