You don't swallow the arcane concept of a mindless universe, Steve? Perhaps you might elaborate on that? Of course there might be numrous other cases of species in other parts of the universe who've evolved to a state where they have minds, but do I take it you mean that even prior to that having happened it wasn't a mindless universe.

I accept that you like to keep your feet on the ground, and that's an excellent thing to do - but the ground on which we keep our feet is of course a very local phenomenon, floating in a much bigger universe. Can't escape those turtles.

Scientific inquiry is great, and it's fascinating. Mathematics is fascinating too. But there will never be a largest prime number, or an ultimate value of Pi. My instinct is that the same goes for explaining reality. The more it gets explained, the bigger it gets