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The Shrink & The Sage: Is there a right way to grieve?

Until the 19th century, some communities in India believed that a widow ought to throw herself on her husband’s funeral pyre. The fact that sati, as this practice is called, was normal at the time did not make it right. Likewise, nothing follows about the rightness of any way to grieve simply because it is the norm. This is easily understood, but it is remarkable how difficult it can be to shake a conviction which is rooted in nothing more than the fact that this is how it is and has always been.

Latest column in this weekend's FT Magazine

On Rawls

If you were to ask an academic philosopher which of their colleagues from the past 50 years will still be read in a century’s time, the answer is likely to be John Rawls (1921-2002).

Short piece supplementing main interview on John Rawls in this weekend's FT(see bottom of page)

Afterlife - South Bank Centre, 28 January

For the record, I spoke on a panel today at an event called The Afterlife: ‘And then what happens?’ at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre. The chair was Bidisha and other panelists were Dr Desmond Biddulph, Canon Giles Goddard and Huma Qureshi.

On time

The idea that, if the laws of physics don't mention it, it isn't real is also totally unjustified. To a physicist, biological organisms are ultimately as much collections of atoms as chairs and tables. Some would go so far as to say that, in principle at least, biology is reducible to physics. But does that mean that zebras aren't real? Any physicist who insists on this can't see the wood for the carbon.

Short piece on time in the January edition of The Times's Eureka Science magazine, Only available online through the Murdoch pay wall.

Heathen's Progress 17: The modern believer is not suspicious enough

I'm afraid it's all too common for defenders of faith to start off by piling up a whole load of interesting scientific findings, only to follow up with a plethora of non sequiturs. The question rightly asked is how reliable are the various cognitive mechanisms we use for establishing different kinds of truth? And there seems to be no escaping the simple fact that subjective experience, in all its forms, is a very unreliable detector of objective reality. Despite the comfort Mark Vernon draws from recent research, there is no escaping the fact that the vast bulk of it points in exactly the opposite direction, undermining any confidence we might feel that our intuitive judgments are effective truth-trackers.

Latest in the Guardian Comment is Free Belief series.

Monarchists are from Mars, republicans are from Venus

If you want proof that there is not one universe but a multitude of parallel worlds, you don't need any quantum physics: just read the Letters pages of our national newspapers...

Article in today's Independent

Heathen's Progress 16: Struggling with the question of belief? Homer Simpson's got the answer

Homer's Wager concludes that you have no good reason to believe in God, even if it is more likely than not that he exists, let alone if you are among those of us who think the probability is closer to 6.7% than 67%. And what this shows is that the issue of God's existence or non-existence is not an important one after all.

Latest in the Guardian Comment is Free Belief series.

The Shrink & The Sage: Are we responsible for our actions?

Responsibility is one area in life where philosophy and psychology leave us with the message: do not trust your feelings. You carry responsibility for whatever is within your control, whether you feel its weight or not.

Latest FT Weekend Magazine column

Heathen's Progress 15: You don't have to be religious to pray … but it helps

Prayer, like many rituals, is something that the religious get some real benefits from that are just lost to us heathens. One reason is that many of these rituals are performed communally, as part of a regular meeting or worship. This means there is social reinforcement. But the main one is that the religious context transforms them from something optional and arbitrary into something necessary and grounded. Because the rituals are a duty to our absolute sovereign, there is strong reason to keep them up. You pray every day because you sense you really ought to, and it will be noticed if you don't. In contrast, the belief that daily meditation is beneficial motivates in much the same way as the thought that eating more vegetables or exercising is. Inclination comes and goes and needs to be constantly renewed.

Latest in the Guardian Comment is Free Belief series.

Review: A Short History of Western Thought

To condense the history of western thought to around 50,000 words is the literary equivalent of trying to reproduce the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel on the inside of a matchbox. So it is to writer and film-maker Stephen Trombley's tremendous credit that his intellectual miniaturisation, while inevitably losing almost all the detail, leaves very little out and renders most of the original characters and scenes distinctive and recognisable.

Review in today's Observer

The Shrink & The Sage: Is blood thicker than water?

Take simmering tensions about duties and obligations, add the same old disagreements about how family members should treat each other and you may get fraught, heated arguments. I am, of course, describing a typical row between moral philosophers who cannot agree on whether or not familial blood needs ethics to thin it...

Latest FT Weekend Magazine column

Heathen's Progress 14: Can it be rational for the religious to be non-rational?

In practice there is no neat distinction between the logical and the psychological. Those who attempt to use pure reason cannot expect to succeed, while those who willingly allow psychological factors to affect their reasoning may be being more self-aware about their rational capacities than those who do not.

The Guardian Comment is Free Belief series continues.

Shades of green

If Scruton makes a mistake it is, ironically, that he is not conservative enough. As he has written before, conservatism is not a philosophy but a disposition, and one of the things it is disposed to do is be mistrustful of comprehensive world views that attempt to provide all the answers. Conservatism has to apply that insight to itself and accept that the environment is a large, messy problem that requires a large mess of solutions, big and small, conservative and radical. Scruton is right to make the links between conservatism and conservation and to stress the role attachment to place can play in environmental protection. But this battle is too big, international and unprecedented for Burke’s “little platoons” to fight it alone.

Review of Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet by Roger Scruton in the FT Weekend (31 Dec/1 Jan)

Heathen's Progress 13: Has the God debate been moved on?

Some in the blogosphere have suggested that in this series I have moved closer to the new atheists. I'm not sure this is true. For a variety of reasons (including unfortunate headlines others gave to some of my pieces) the extent to which I have disagreed with the new atheists has probably been overstated because it is the disagreements that I have found more interesting to write about. I agree with them that literal belief is not a straw man, strongly expressed belief is not aggressive dogmatism, we should be as free to criticise religion as people have been to criticise atheism, and that science does pose difficult questions for many religious people. But I still maintain that much of the rhetoric has not been helpful and that in order to make progress we have to look more at the best that religion has to offer, not the worst, and find common ground with more liberal believers in order to counter the more pernicious forms of belief.

Half-time report in the Guardian Comment is Free Belief series.

Saying sorry has never meant less

The act of saying sorry when you're not has been elevated in recent years to something of an art form. There are so many ways of issuing a non-apology apology, all of which try to square the circle of meeting a public demand for repentance with the private refusal to admit that any is necessary...

Post at the Guardian's Comment is Free

Heathen's Progress 12: The parable of the allotments

Last week I challenged the idea that religiosity is more about practice than belief with evidence that most religious people appear to have a large number of traditional beliefs which they take to be important. However, I suggested that there might be a response to this, and I've found a possible one in book 42 of the apocryphal Gospel According to Monty.

Latest in the Guardian Comment is Free Belief series

World Briefing & World Have Your Say - BBC World Service

Yesterday I was on World Briefing talking about Science, meaning and values in the wake of the latest Higgs boson findings. The interview is at the end of the 13 December podcast, available here for a week.

I also took part in Word Have Your Say on the same channel later in the day. That programme is here.

Heathen's Progress 11: The myth of mythos

A few weeks ago, I argued that the debate about the true nature of religion is hampered both by a confusion between what we think it ought to be and what it actually is, and by a lack of knowledge about what religious people, rather than the elite commentariat, really think. To get a better sense of these facts on the ground, I've conducted a survey, and I think the results make for interesting reading.

Latest in the Guardian Comment is Free Belief series

Sunday - BBC Radio Four

I was on this morning's programme talking about "the luxury of being selfish" with Jamie Whyte and presenter Samira Ahmed. Listen again available here for a week.