Sometimes I envy those with religious faith, or is perhaps 'faith' too strong a word, and 'religious' too imprecise?

I've never had it. Until I was about 12 I suppose I was vaguely deist, I was willing to concede there was probably some supernatural agent responsible for creating the world, although I could see no evidence it had any further interest in it, or its inhabitants. The best that could be said was that it had created the Universe so perfectly that it no longer needed any attention from him. By my teens I had even given that up. My later studies in science did not necessarily corroborate these opinions, but neither did they contradict them.

My universe is a lonely place--magnificent, complex, certainly grand, but lonely. Everything that really matters to us, beauty, truth, virtue, love, all seem psychological in origin. They exist only inside our minds, they seem to carry no intrinsic meaning of their own. The fabled laws of physics seem real enough, but they are just accounting principles to keep track of matter and energy, space and time. They don't really speak to us the same way that art, or goodness, or happiness, do. It's not that these things don't matter, they do, but they don't matter to the laws of physics. As always, the accountants are in charge.

I see no trace of intelligence or consciousness in the cosmos, I see pattern but no order, consistency but no truth; everything has a reason, but there is a purpose to nothing. Everything that matters, everything important, everything of value is in my mind. Perhaps consciousness is the Universe's way of contemplating itself, perhaps just, as the philosphers tell us, an epiphenomenon with no reality of its own, a result not a cause, a symptom not a condition. But it does matter to me, and recognizing it in others is my proof that I am not alone in an otherwise monotonous and irrelevant creation.

Throughout the endless void are scattered minute sparks of light and warmth, surrounded by a handful of insignificant motes of dust. In the haze of moisture on just a few of these specks...perhaps on only one of them...are the tiny microbes we call conscious beings. And inside each and every one unfolds, if only for a brief moment, an entire universe.

The most remarkable thing about the world is that there are other minds in it sharing it with us, fellow travelers. The Universe is lonely, but we are not alone. This is an astonishing realization for a materialist, for it makes every human soul so precious, so valuable and so necessary. Without them we are truly desolate. There is nothing else out there except the cold yawning gulfs between the stars that so terrified Pascal.