In order to show his quality I will endeavour to summarise his arguments for the Existence of God, with as many quotations from his writings as my space will permit.
"It is not enough to prove," he says, "that some sort of Being exists. In the end, the only thing that matters is the character of that Being." But how are we to set out on this quest since "Science will not allow us a starting point at all"?
He answers that question by carrying the war into the scientific camp, as he has a perfect right to do. "Science makes one colossal assumption always; science assumes that the world is rational in this sense, that when you have thought out thoroughly the implications of your experience, the result is fact. . . . That is the basis of all science; it is a colossal assumption, but science cannot move one step without it."
Science begins with its demand that the world should be seen as coherent; it insists on looking at it, on investigating it, till it is so seen. As long as there is any phenomenon left out of the systematic coherence that you have discovered, science is discontented and insists that either the system is wrongly or imperfectly conceived or else the facts have not been correctly stated.
This demand for "a coherent and comprehensive statement of the whole field of fact" comes solely from reason. How do we get it? We have no ground in experience for insisting that the world shall be regarded as intelligent, as "all hanging together and making up one system." But reason insists upon it. This gives us "a kinship between the mind of man and the universe he lives in."
Now, when man puts his great question to the universe, and to every phenomenon in that universe, Why?—Why is this what it is, what my reason recognises it to be? is he not in truth asking, What is this thing's purpose? What is it doing in the universe? What is its part in the coherent system of all-things-together?
Now there is in our experience already one principle which does answer the question "Why?" in such a way as to raise no further questions; that is, the principle of Purpose. Let us take a very simple illustration. Across many of the hills in Cumberland the way from one village to another is marked by white stones placed at short intervals. We may easily imagine a simple-minded person asking how they came there, or what natural law could account for their lying in that position; and the physical antecedents of the fact—the geological history of the stones and the physiological structure of the men who moved them—give no answer. As soon, however, as we hear that men placed them so, to guide wayfarers in the mist or in the night, our minds are satisfied.
Dr. Temple holds fast to that great word that infallible clue, Purpose. He is not arguing from design. He keeps his feet firmly on scientific ground, and asks, as a man of science asks, What is this? and Why is this? Then he finds that this question can proceed only from faith in coherence, and discovers that the quest of science is quest of Purpose.
To investigate Purpose is obviously to acknowledge Will.
Science requires, therefore, that there should be a real Purpose in the world. . . . It appears from the investigation of science, from investigation of the method of scientific procedure itself, that there must be a Will in which the whole world is rooted and grounded; and that we and all other things proceed therefrom; because only so is there even a hope of attaining the intellectual satisfaction for which science is a quest.