I much appreciate your thoughts on this. You said:

Our faith is in God’s desire to be known, in our own capacity to understand ourselves, our lives, and the world we live in.

In that statement I see the answer to the question of rational minds. There is no justification for blind evolutionary processes to produce minds capable of the kind of rational thinking that allows us to comprehend (to some degree at least) the world we live in and ask the question: what is truth. However, if as you suggest, that the "Ultimate" had something to do with it out of the desire to be known and possibly to be loved as well as love, then rational minds become perfectly rational. The Ultimate would want those minds to comprehend what there is.