I also think you read like a religious mystic, with all your talk of wonder and mystery. and I wonder, if you have considered that given that you are thus conceding limits to even your knowledge , being such a hardline atheist is inconsistent , since despite the mystery you discount a creator.

In the Beginning... there was, and is, and always will be, HUMAN SPIRITUALITY - which is common to each and everyone of us & defines our very Humanity. It's there in our sense of Beauty, Awe, Mystery, Awe, Joy, Love, Sorrow, Numinosity, Empathy, Togetherness, Ethics, Wonder and Ecstasy. All these things precede and transcend religion; they exist without any need of either God or the Supernatural. Indeed, religion exists solely to exploit them, much as pornography exists to exploit our sexuality. Ergo - Religion is spiritual porn.

We began, however so many thousands of years ago, with poetic metaphors for a cosmos we weren't at all equipped to understand, a cosmos of which we a part and yet, of a sudden, by dint of language, art, cognition, culture & aforementioned spirituality, apart. Thus we started making things up. We told stories and personified Nature in terms of what was benevolent or malevolent to our interests. We made metaphors and created allegories. The roots of the GOD CONCEPT is in POETIC ALLEGORY MADE UP BY HUMAN BEINGS IN TIMES WHEN WE KNEW NO BETTER. All great fun, but RELIGION came along, gathered up all these things and took them LITERALLY.

So, as well as being spiritual porn, religion is a spiritual void. Believing in a creator is to discount all cosmic mystery. The more science reveals, the more mysterious and wondrous and awesome it gets. Simple and elegant and perfectly GODLESS.

Enough said.