Bruce Keener’s Lifestream

I wonder if his parents were religious, and whether he is: I cannot but imagine that routinely contemplating 11 dimensions and a constantly expanding universe (only 20% of the matter in which is currently understood, the rest being dark matter. And that's not to mention dark energy, or the multiverse) might induce a kind of existential vertigo, and thus nihilism, or belief, or total rejection. Some properly thought-through accommodation with the idea of divinity, at least. Dimensions, particularly, seem to me to require a certain leap of faith. He admits to regularly feeling awe, but the dimensions don't seem to trouble him much – mostly because, rather than trying to imagine them in space, they generally exist, for him, as letters and numbers in equations.

He doesn't believe in God. "My parents were very unreligious. Extremely. I presume they influenced me. I'm sort of jealous of people who do have faith. I suppose it depends on the sort of god you have faith in, but it gives you security, I guess.

"I get angry with people who are wildly atheist, because they sort of deny any humanity whatsoever. They deny the poetry – and they talk as if we understand everything, including love, and actually there are beautiful things which can move you in ways that presumably can be understood entirely in terms of complex pathways in the brain, but that's still not a useful way of thinking of them. So I get annoyed by ultra-atheists who aren't willing to tolerate anything – I suppose I'm less atheist than that."

Green's thoughts on religion are probably much more representative of the scientific community than are the thoughts of Dawkins or Stenger, et al.