1. Some epistemological clarifications

In general terms, it seems clear that the notion of God, as it is usually understood in the philosophical or theological sphere, cannot be the object of the natural sciences, since these examine the real insofar as it can be verified experimentally, above all in the quantitative dimension. The Philosophy proposes an approach to the notion of God, to the point of formulating possible conclusions about his existence, either from the existence of the cosmos (natural theology, metaphysics), or from the nature, existence and destiny of man (questions of existential subject : freedom, meaning of life, moral conscience, etc.). The image of God that philosophical rationality can attain possesses attributes that do not in themselves exhaust the image of God as understood by theological reflection on the basis of the biblical revelation transmitted by the Hebrew-Christian tradition. However, in order to be meaningful for human reason, the image of God of biblical revelation must also account for - even eventually surpass, but not contradict - the attributes required by the image of God grasped by philosophical reason. To ask how the notion of God can be arrived at by means of scientific-philosophical rationality does not mean to strive to give some demonstration of the existence of God in the context of the rationality of the sciences, for this would be contradictory, because of the proper object of a scientific analysis which cannot have God as its adequate object. It is equivalent, instead, to asking whether the notion of God is a meaningful notion for a subject who lives in an intellectual context such as that of scientific rationality. Answering this question does not entail showing the appropriateness of the reference letter to God in the areas of scientific discussion we have listed above, or in other analogous ones. On the contrary, it is a matter of pointing out whether the scientist is obliged to take into consideration the philosophical knowledge about God and to listen to the revelation and theology that speak to him about God because he recognises, also in the context of scientific rationality, that this notion is not a pure "nonsense". In the famous "five ways" formulated to demonstrate the existence of God1 , Thomas Aquinas (1224- 1274) divided each test into two parts: a) the presentation of a philosophical argumentation that arrives at the existence of a First Motor in act, of a First efficient Cause, of a Being necessary in itself, of the infinite Cause of finite participations and perfections, of a final Cause; b) the affirmation "and this is what everyone calls God" (intelligunt, nominant, dicunt Deum). The question now is whether the second part of the argument, which refers to a pre-understanding (heuristic, existential, intellectual, rational, etc.) of the term God, can also be accepted by those who approach reality in a limited way and modelled by the rationality of the sciences. In order for a philosophical or theological notion of God not to be judged as "meaningless" - i.e. to be judged sensible - by a scientific rationality, there must be a "semanticarea " available to formulate a speech (Logos) about the Absolute, a area that scientific rationality can recognise, or indicate, as meaningful. We point out the following four semantic areas as "candidates" for such recognition:

1. area to which the incompleteness of formal language points (openness to a transcendence beyond language).

2. area to which the ontological incompleteness of contingent physical reality points (openness towards a metaphysical-necessary foundation, beyond the empirical plane).

3. area of meaning that gives reason for the rationality, order and intelligibility of the cosmos (beyond the nature of the cosmos itself: perception of a Logos ut ratio).

4. area of meaning that accounts for the personalist-existential dimension of scientific activity (openness towards the ultimate meaning of the search for truth: perception of a Logos ut verbum).

In particular, these four areas are, to a certain extent, linked to the "philosophical foundations" of the scientific knowledge . They are, respectively, a) logical-epistemological; b) ontological; c) logical-rational; d) anthropological foundations. These are "openings" of language and scientific method towards other forms of knowledge and other sciences. We could speak of four "windows" that are present in the house of science. The windows belong to the house, that is, the scientific method can thematise them, point them out, but through them we see "beyond the scientific method" in the strict sense. Through them we can see the external world, we see the landscapes surrounding the house of science. In this approach we will follow and develop an intuition that Mariano Artigas made clear in his work The Mind of the Universe (2000), where he stated that science "transcends itself". In this work, the author examines the "presuppositions" of science, the complete analysis of which is, however, the task of Philosophy and theology: ontological presuppositions, epistemological presuppositions and ethical presuppositions. There are three types of presuppositions, he stated: "The first (ontological) concerns the intelligibility and rationality of nature and is linked to the natural order. The second (epistemological) concerns the human capacity to know the natural order and includes the different forms of scientific reasoning. The third (ethical) refers to the values that the activity of science implies: it includes the search for truth, rigour, objectivity, intellectual humility, cooperation "2.

2. The meaning of a reference letter to the Absolute beyond formal language

As we know, the programme of logical neopositivism (R. Carnap, B. Russell, O. Neurath), wished to arrive, in the logical aspect, at unambiguous and formally complete axiomatic languages. Once logic was recognised as a "founding" theory, this property was automatically recognised also for mathematics, so that a complete basis was provided for all mathematizable sciences, i.e. for the empirical knowledge typical of the natural sciences. Consequently, statements of a metaphysical (or meta-empirical) nature were to be openly acknowledged as meaningless, because they have no correspondence with the world of facts. But this programme proved to be unrealisable, because it collided with the impossibility of defining, axiomatically, a formally complete logical-mathematical system, i.e. one that would provide from within itself all the elements necessary to formulate any decision and carry out any calculation. This project, moreover, was also faced with the necessity of incorporating every system and every language, in order to make them comprehensible, within a goal-language or a goal-system of more general value, external to the initial one: the object language (a language "of which" one speaks) must necessarily be distinguished from the goal-language (language "in which" one speaks). If one does not make the appropriate generalisation in order to arrive at ever more open and richer levels of language, one necessarily falls into antinomies, which in turn express the fact that "semantics" cannot be reduced to "syntax". This means that: a) there is no complete syntactic system (rules to be followed) that can do without semantics (meaning to be given to the objects that follow the rules); b) if the system can be considered complete from the point of view of syntax, semantics must be sought in areas external to the system itself. One of the main objections raised by logical neopositivism to metaphysics and religious language is that any speech about what transcends the empirical level (such as precisely a speech about God) does not possess the characters of a universal, unambiguous and communicable language, because it may contain assertions whose truth or falsity cannot be verified, being detached from the "world of facts". To answer this criticism, it is useful to recall the philosophical pathway of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). Bent on founding a language that could eliminate any ambiguity and contradiction from the philosophical speech precisely by means of a rigid connection with the world of facts, Wittgenstein eventually showed implicitly that this programme was impracticable, thus distancing himself from the Vienna Circle and the neopositivist perspective. Contrary to what the neopositivists claimed, in Wittgenstein's reflection transcendence and the existence of an Absolute were not denied. They were received within the Philosophy as an opening, as a referral to the unspeakable, to a meaning and a foundation external to philosophical language, since without them language would in fact have been impossible (the "first" Wittgenstein of the Tractatus); and they were also received within real life, as a search for the reasons for living and as a criterion of truth of the meaning of the very terms of language (the "second" Wittgenstein). For Wittgenstein it is not possible to deny the problem of meaning, but the fact that it is inexpressible "within the world of facts" makes it, in scientific terms, a pseudo-problem; only if it were possible to look at the logical world of the facts of science with perspective would we realise this, and the realisation itself can be indicated as "something mystical". Thus in the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (1921):

"The meaning of the world must be outside it" (6.41). "We feel that even if all the possible questions of the sciences were answered, they would not even come close to touching our vital problems" (5.52). "The inexpressible really exists. It manifests itself, it is 'the mystical'" (6.522). "The mystical is not as the world is, but the world is [exists]" (6.44).

Wittgenstein's philosophical journey goes beyond both the Kantian and the neo-positivist positions. The question of meaning and the openness to the unspeakable arise within the analysis of the scientific knowledge , and not outside it, as Kant had argued. Although it cannot be adequately expressed, the goal-language arises as a demand of the limits of language recognised within language itself. The employment of the analysis of language to elaborate a critical speech on the notion of God simultaneously finds both the limits and the transcendence of our knowledge: man is more than his language and the analysis of language, by touching the limits of human rationality, also reveals its ineffability. Wittgenstein concludes the paradox of empiricism and logical neopositivism and, overcoming them, lays the foundation of a Philosophy capable of recovering the meaning of the problem of God. A God, however - it must not be forgotten - of whom language cannot speak, but only experience can show. Analogous results to those of Wittgenstein will be obtained, in adjacent disciplines, with the demonstration of the incompleteness theorems of axiomatic systems (Gödel, 1931), of the necessity of metalanguages and of the impossibility of a definition of all the true statements of a system (Tarski, 1935); of the limits of any automated logical operation and of the inability to "judge from outside" the process (Turing, 1937); of the existence of notions of infinity that do not belong to mathematics (Cantor, 1884). All these authors agree in affirming that the semantics of scientific language is not exhausted by the formalism of empirical sciences: there is a "significant" space for notions that belong to a goal-language, or transcend empirical analysis.

3. The ontological incompleteness of contingent physical reality and its openness to a metaphysical-necessity foundation

The impracticability of a self-referential science on the logical level also has a correlate on the ontological level. Since the analysis of science cannot completely define the scientific language and the criteria of truth that this language requires, closed to the goal-empirical dimensions, this analysis also requires ontological preconditions. This is equivalent to saying that, prior to the analysis of the sciences, it is necessary that the entities Materials "exist" and "exist according to a specific nature". The necessity of an implicit ontological foundation for the activity of the sciences can be made clear by developing the following perspectives:

1. At the basis of every natural science there is a Philosophy of nature, and at the basis of every Philosophy of nature there is an ontology: but every ontology must face the problem of the contingency of being.

2. For science to be able to study its objects, it is necessary that these objects exist (as entities): science cannot give a reason for their existence, nor for the ultimate why of being as such, dealing only with the transformations of one entity into another.

3. The analysis of the natural sciences is based on the formal specificity (essence, nature) of things, in addition to their existence.

Empirical analysis therefore requires two conditions: that the entities Materials exist, and that they exist according to a specific nature. The notions of "entity" and "essence/nature", proper to the Philosophy of nature, are non-deducible presuppositions within the method of the natural sciences that nevertheless make science possible. Acknowledging the existence of such ontological presuppositions is equivalent to acknowledging that there is a semantic area of intelligibility that transcends the physical-empirical real. The denial of the existence of a semantic area that "transcends" the empirical analysis of the sciences is typical of the attempt to found a self-referential science, which avoids the problem of being, ignoring it (materialism) or wanting to give it a justification from within empirical formalism. This fact generates some inevitable contradictions, especially in the field of physical cosmology, when it denies the existence of an ontological foundation that makes its analysis of physical reality possible. For example, if cosmology ends up attributing to subject the properties of a philosophical Absolute (eternity, necessity, uncaused first cause, etc.), in spite of the experience of physical reality.), despite the experience of its contingency; or if it attributes to a coherent mathematical formalism, of a descriptive character, the value of a sufficient reason to explain the existence of the cosmos that this formalism describes or represents; or also when it seeks to give a reason for the existence and nature of time from within time itself; or, finally, if it tries to give a reason "for everything", looking for a law or an all-embracing formulation, which turns out to be the foundation for everything real ("Theory of Everything"), finding the same incompleteness and the same antinomies that occur in the logical realm. In substance, the scientific research perceives the necessity of having to admit an external foundation to its method when it recognises that the analysis of the physical real always starts from some measurable magnitude, implicitly assumed (mass, topology, space-time, physical vacuum, virtual energy, etc.), from which it is possible to construct the successive probabilities of existence of entities that proceed from it.

"If the super-gravity theory achieves the goal it sets out to do, it will tell us not only why the particles exist as they do, and not others, but also why they have the mass, charge and other properties that characterise them. All of this could come from a mathematical theory that encompasses all of physics (in the reductionist sense) in a single super-law. However, a new question arises: Why that super-law, and not another one? This is the ultimate, terminal question: physics may be able to explain the content, origin and organisation of the physical universe, but not the laws (or super-law) of physics itself. Traditionally, God is credited with establishing the laws of nature and creating the things (space-time, atoms, men and everything else) upon which those laws apply. In the 'free lunch' scenario, the laws alone are sufficient; the universe can provide the rest by itself, including creation itself. But what about the laws? They must already exist, so that the universe could exist. It is necessary in a sense that quantum physics exists so that a quantum transition can generate the cosmos "3.