In my opinion, he is a most accurate and careful historian/historiographer.
"Ol' Man River" in this context is the totality of God-ordained Being.
Darn. I can't slip a thing past you. {8^)
"we are dealing with questions of ultimate truth, and how truth can be accessed and understood by human minds"
With us, is this not always so?
[Man, the] "reflection of the divine, a creature of reason and free will, was set up in the beginning to understand such things"
Yes. And my point being that Man is his own worst problem. To be sure, there are other features of 'the observer problem', but IMHO Man himself (his will) is the greatest of these.
"Which understanding [man, as the reflection of the divine] probably is the reason why systematic science arose only in the Western cultural tradition"
Or so was the thought in Judeo-Christian Western Civilization until recently when it has become fashionable to believe that Western Civilization can do better absent the Judeo-Christian part.
It seems we live in an age that celebrates radical egoism: the doctrine that holds individual self-interest is the actual motive of all conscious action, and legitimately so. But of course this gives short shrift to the social dimensions of man's life: The "Good" is defined as "what's 'Good' for me," not any wider or more comprehensive Good beyond the self. Lost, or nearly so, is any idea of connection to other human beings, of a sense of duty or responsibility to others. Above all it seems the human person is losing all sense of being a participant in a "great hierarchy of being," which extends beyond the selfish self to society, history, nature -- and above all to God, who is the Author of the hierarchy.
In falling away from the life of the Spirit (greatly enabled by the prestige of positivism and reductive materialism which arguably includes at least the popularized form of neo-Darwinism), man is plunged into disorder, and from there disorders all that he comes into contact with.
But he is "free to do as he likes." And this is how human liberty is defined these days. Truth has no bearing on one's choices; utility is king, and what passes for "success" is the standard of "correctness." All truth is just opinion anyway....
These are suicidal tendencies, IMHO. And so yes, I do agree with you, YHAOS: Man is his own worst problem.