Shannon was an atheist, and seems to have come by it naturally, without any crisis of faith; puzzling over the origins of human intelligence with the same interviewer, he said matter-of-factly, “I don’t happen to be a religious man and I don’t think it would help if I were!” And yet, in his instinct that the world we see merely stands for something else, there is an inkling that his distant Puritan ancestors might have recognized as kin.
