What a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe and what a yearning to understand, were it but a feeble reflection of the mind revealed in this world, Kepler and Newton must have had to enable them to spend years of solitary labor in disentangling the principles of celestial mechanics!

Comic religion is another way of talking about profound wonder and imagination.  Einstein speaks about his awe of the unknowable. It is unnameable and therefore a perpetual source of wonder and inspiration.

  Personally, I find the hypothesis that the simultaneous complexity and order of the natural universe is entirely the product of random chance to be very dubious (not impossible but dubious).

  Ignoring the possibility that something purposefully caused it would seem about as anti-intellectual and anti-scientific as believing Dinosaurs and man co-existed.

  The uses of the word "intelligence" is perhaps not a good idea, because we cannot even agree about what that word means in human and other animal life and we can't really understand it except in reference to human characteristics. (i.e. animals are more intelligent in the context as to whether their cognition is closer to ours).

 Tthe reason I think so many people get so frightened by applying reason to the issue is because it might require challenging prejudicial assumptions they don't want challenged. That trait seems equally pronounced in the fundamentalist religions and the fundamentalist rejectionists.