@chiral: i would keep some air between ‘dogmatism’ and ‘the search for God’. As in apples and oranges –both fruit, but apples don’t grow on orange trees, and so forth –organized religion being but an eddy in the stream of human consciousness.

@ken anthony: “many scientists…have ended up believers” –i guess looking back on it my long-ago mind-opening moment was realizing that the structure of the 15 billion light-year Universe is repeated in a ‘next-smaller’ molecular ‘universe’ and then again on down into atomic and sub-atomic ‘universes’.

Meaning to me that there’s little reason to accept any dogma about the ‘big’ universe being an end, and not a part of a ‘next larger’.

After all, observable creation is in motion between the two end points, ‘the beginning’ and ‘the end’. If this universe is an end, why the ‘becoming’ nature of everything in it?