History cannot prove or disprove God's existence, even as science and philosophy cannot do so. Nature and history both provide man with experience, which is highly complex and gives contradictory messages or clues, as it were, which completely baffle all human efforts to penetrate into the mystery of being. Like a gigantic Rorsach Stimulus card, both nature and history could be interpreted in diverse ways. Some objective justification or reason could always be traced in (he mosaic of the 'empirical manifold' or what is objectively given to us in experience. Thus, many known parts of nature are, in fact, structured with a remarkable mathematical proportion and functional coordination (the epitome of which is the human body). Such structures strongly incline us to the interpretation, that nature is linked with a benevolent purpose or telos, while some other features of nature (enormous waste, nature's circuitousness or trial and error, dead ends, struggle and suffering) incline us towards the interpretation that the cosmic process is blind and absurd. In the final analysis, neither of the two interpretations could be deemed to be a verifiable hypothesis. Both are essentially 'adventures of faith', that could claim existential but not logical scientific certainty.

Doubts and Difficulties of History

It seems to me that existential doubts and difficulties, as presented by nature, in relation to God's existence, are rather less than the doubts and difficulties presented by history. Nature presents the difficulty that it is 'red in tooth and claw' (suggesting that life is a relentless struggle for survival in which the strong devours the weak, rather than a garden in which a hundred flowers bloom to glorify their Creator). The difficulty presented by history is that it is 'blue' in pain and suffering of innocent millions down the ages. Does not the sorry tale of the periodic destruction of cultures and the regression of human societies to barbarism, the untold sufferings of oppressed minorities, the inhuman exploitation of the despised untouchable for millennia mock at our attempts to find the hand of God in history? Does not the tragic story of the sufferings of countless millions of maltreated children, persecuted wives, detested widows, unwanted female children, luckless orphans, mutilated prisoners and slaves, bonded laborers, underfed and emaciated workers, the unattended sick, and last, but not the least, the tortured mute domestic animals, fill our eyes with tears which rather dim the picture of an all loving and all powerful God in heaven? Does not the anguished unrequited prayers of countless millions of innocent sufferers raise a serious question mark against the assumption of the hand of God in history? Is it so easy to dismiss the doubts of an honest skeptic or agnostic in the Divine regulation or intervention in history as nothing more than a perverted or wicked response of a proud atheist or materialist, rather than the anguish of a compassionate and noble soul caught in the antinomies of history. While the brighter side of the tangled and tortuous web of history inclines one towards theistic optimism, the darker side pushes one towards atheistic or agnostic pessimism.

God as Master of History

A person may take the stand that the proper evidence of cosmic purpose should be sought, not in the realm of history, but in the realm of nature, since God has given a long rope to man until the day of final reckoning and chosen, in his Divine wisdom, to withhold His intervention. This does not imply any external or forced limitation of His sovereign power or loving concern as Supreme Creator of nature and Master of the course of history. He may intervene in nature or history whenever He may choose, suspending, as it were, the laws of nature or history, through exercising His sovereign power in His inscrutable wisdom. According to this view, the course of history is a tiny fragment of the cosmic process, with man enjoying almost total freedom of action as part of a Divine plan, which is necessarily opaque to us in historical time but which will become manifest in the eschatological future. According to this view, history  is a game in which players win or loose, not because of any Divine help or wrath, but as a result of their hard work, patience, grit, skill, fraud or other human or natural factors. When temporal history ends eschatological history begins, and it is at this stage of the cosmic process that God's omnipotence and justice will make good the deficiencies and contradictions of temporal history. A person who lakes this stand may say that the concept of metaphysical time, as distinct from historical time, though an act of faith is, nevertheless, not an arbitrary response, but a response rooted in man's awareness of the immense and wonderful architectonic complexity and beauty of nature. It seems to me, this approach is quite valid, though it becomes invalid or unwarranted, the moment it is converted into a sort of an ideological argument, for the existence of God or for the presence of a super-purpose in either nature or history. Faith in a Divine purpose of nature and history may evoke only existential, but never logical or objective certainty.