Regarding your risible points on awe, firstly there is little swearing here. Calling us effing and blinding humanists betrays your own obsession with the swearing of others. Also, an atheist is not necessarily a humanist.
Your attempts to claim that because we are not afraid to use the full range of vocabulary offered us by the english language, rather than pruriently self-censoring means we lack the ability to feel awe (or even a clear-eyed innocent astonishment) are baseless.
To claim that not being afraid to swear means we are blind to the beauty in the world is just the kind of sanctimonious twaddle I’ve come to expect from you and your fellow deluded smug gullibles.

You’re totally inappropriately drawing conclusions from one facet of someone’s life over into another.

I think the ‘awe’ point is an important and central one. Awe (even, one might say, a kind of clear-eyed innocent astonishment) is the common denominator of most of the best people I have met. When I come across a group of effing and blinding humanists, then I wonder: Isnt it clear that the effing and blinding associates them with either (a) adolescents, or (b) disillusioned people whose horizons have been narrowed & who have lost their vision of beauty, the ability to be humble before the beauty they see in the world (and indeed in the English language).
Of course, there are other explanations. Sometimes ppl swear as (c) a sort of code to let everyone else know they are one of the lads!! Well, good for them – but why do they need to let ppl know that?
There’s probably a (d) which I have forgotten.
On the topic of 6000 years (surely such a small period decreases rather than increases one’s awe?) the magnificent tome of Archbishop Ussher has just been republished after hundreds of years, & my copy arrived yesterday.

The universe maybe be finitely big, but it’s so enormously huge as to be effectively infinite, since putting a number on its size is essentially meaningless ‘cos we can’t comprehend the awesome enormity of it. Claiming that because I seek to discover why things are, rather than just assuming that they must be the work of God, means that I lack a sense of awe is absolutely ridiculous. It’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen anyone write about anything ever. What goes on in that little head of yours? eh? Does having an imaginary friend mean that you’re the only person who can be overwhelmed by the beauty and mystery of the unvierse?
Just because I’m interested in finding out why the universe is so incredible, rather than just saying that “it must be the work of god, ‘cos I’m too stupid to comprehend anything else” doesn’t mean that I lack a sense of the magnificent. It’s what inspires people to understand it.

Just because you have an imaginary friend who is a giant sky-pixie that according to your special book of demented ramblings, made the universe 6,000 years ago, I don’t go around saying you inherently lack intelligence or a healthy degree of scepticism.

I wonder whether I should allow you to get away with your remark on fine-tuning. (Of course, lack of awe is always the first thing I am suspicious of, since of all the things one might lack, awe is the strangest and most unaccountable when one lives in a universe like ours.) The stats I have seen in anthropic principle publications (and when discussing the feasibility of intelligent design in general) tend to involve odds of many millions/billions to one, tho’ of course Im not the best person to assess them.

The drop in spelling standards I would reckon is the greatest change since my schooldays (not that long ago, after all!). One feels the pinch when 75% of the time one spends correcting essays is spent correcting spelling and grammar.
Of course, spelling is not rigid anyway (cf. introvert/intravert: one is correct etymologically, the other lexicographically. Your ‘inquire/enquire’ is a simnilar example, since etymologically they are virtually identical, but not so, apparently, lexicographically. But there is flexibility here, surely.).
Maybe ‘wholistic’ came into being in circles where ‘wholeness’ was a buzzword – or else to avoid any confusion of ‘holistic’ with ideas of ‘holy’ or even ‘holes’.

Is the universe really infinitely big? I always thought it was finite but unbounded – with a finite number of stars and so forth.

Some people may see the universe as improbably fine tuned, others not. You wouldn’t happen to have a quote or source for that the astronomer royal assertion would you? I’m not accusing you of dissembling, it’s just that many creationist organisations use quotes out of context, and, if you saw this from them, then you may have been misled. I’d just like to check it out for myself.

According to the OED: The traditional distinction between enquire and inquire is that enquire is to be used for general senses of ‘ask’, while inquire is reserved for uses meaning ‘make a formal investigation’.
Also, the OED doesn’t have wholistic as a word, and under holistic it’s not listed as an alternative spelling. This is unsurprising since it derives from the Greek holos meaning whole (like hologram, which also lacks a leading silent w).
That’s the problem with the internet, one starts off spelling something correctly (because one reads properly proofed documents like books and newspapers), but the reading a load of poorly typed misspellings by random punters leads to all sorts of errors later on. My mum used to be a primary school teacher, and she found her spelling got worse the longer she taught, ‘cos of reading the stuff that the kids wrote.

Which of course is a truism, except that the levels of probability in some cases (even given the time available) are so very minute that they equate to more or less zero.

Our own universe strikes many top scientists as improbably fine-tuned – e.g. the Astronomer Royal.

Re: holistic/wholistic: I first encountered the first option, but have since encountered both repeatedly. Isnt it true that they are alternative spellings, like enquire/inquire, judgment/judgement?

God has been definitively removed from all areas of science following the big bang purely because of methodological naturalism. We’ve found out how things work, so there’s no room for the supernatural.

The universe is infinitely huge, and there’s an infinity of stars, it’s not at all surprising that some life eventually flourished on one planet or another. There may be plenty of other inhabited planets out there for all we know.

Nobody has ever said that it is not permissible to posit that the universe is designed. That was the prevailing view until the last century, and still is in some backwards places (like the southern states of the USA). It’s just that Intelligent Design is a bullshit theory full of more holes than a fisherman’s net.
In your hypothesis, it is quite possible that there would be large bodies of evidence pointing towards a designer, but there isn’t any evidence on earth or that we have found extraterrestrially that points towards a designer.

Oh, and it’s not Parsons, it’s far more in keeping with your hypothesis.

Also, the anthropic principle isn’t appropriately reduced to state that “our universe is improbably suited for intellignet life”.
Wikipedia provides definitions of the following 3 anthropic principles:
Weak anthropic principle (WAP): “The observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are not equally probable but they take on values restricted by the requirement that there exist sites where carbon-based life can evolve and by the requirements that the Universe be old enough for it to have already done so.”
Strong anthropic principle (SAP): “The Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history.”
Final anthropic principle (FAP): “Intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and, once it comes into existence, it will never die out.”

Ultimately, they’re all truisms (except the Final, which makes a prediction), and of little use to anyone really, unless you’re trying to design a universe that would produce life. and even then they’re not that useful, since they’re axiomatic.
Finally, the anthropic principle is not some major guiding force behind civilisation and science as we know it, it’s just one bloke (Brandon Carter)’s attempt to state the bleeding obvious in scientific jargon.