But at least you can go on explaining. With God there is nothing to explain. We're stopped in our tracks. Nowhere to go except to look for even more inwardness with a spicy bit of revelation thrown in. Talk of consciousness pricking a mindless universe hasn't got much to do with flesh and blood, whether on this planet or a million others. It's just rather high-flown cod philosophy. Why not just have some nice conjecture on the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere. If it's there, my bet is that it will be different to ours but just as ordinary (tangentially, I also think that it will have developed by some form of evolution by natural selection, but hey). I absolutely love that the wonderfulness of life is so ordinary. That's what I mean by keeping me feet on the ground. A bunch of hairy-arses here on earth thinking about other bunches of hairy-arses and revelling in the imagination. No need to go off half-cock talking as though the universe is some kind of super-organism that could do with a bit of spiritual awakening. It's wonderful enough without all that. You're putting fairies at the bottom of the cosmological garden. I'll set Douglas Adams on you one of these days.