There's a new site, The Big Questions, including articles from the likes of Paul Davies, Michael Shermer, Simon Conway Morris and, er, yours truly. My first, The Evils of Evolution. A taster:

Evolution is indeed magnificently fruitful, but it squanders, at a truly fearful rate, the life that is so supposedly valuable to God. It is possible that swallows may sing for joy as they flit across the evening sky and flying fish may leap from the waves just because they can. But the ordinary workings of evolution show nature to be both a careless butcher and a vile torturer.

Image: Bob Ainsworth

I've a piece in the Guardian about the moral import of the Wikileaks' Afghan war logs. A taster:

Let's assume the war in Afghanistan is justified, and focus on the jus in bello. One of Aquinas's major contributions was the notion of proportionality: how to assess the bad consequences of otherwise well-intended military action. Michael Walzer, a leading modern just war theorist, notes that simply not to intend the death of civilians is not enough. That's "too easy". Instead, there must be a positive commitment to saving civilian lives, rather than just killing no more than is militarily necessary. "Civilians have a right to something more," he concludes. "And if saving civilian lives means risking soldiers' lives, the risk must be accepted."

Also, two more pieces - one at Religion Dispatches, the other in the Church Times - on the recent John Polkinghorne God and physics conference. A taster from the former:

Perhaps the most arresting paper of the conference was given by the philosopher of science, and non-believer, Nancy Cartwright. She is well known for her idea that science is not as unified a discipline as scientists tend to think it is. By carefully observing how science actually proceeds, she’s concluded that it deploys a diverse range of principles and theories to describe the phenomena it does, and that these cannot be boiled down to a few, simple laws that could be melded into a ‘theory of everything.’

What this might mean for believers, she suggested (tongue half in cheek) is that God is not a law-giver, but an engineer. A deity commensurate with modern science would be one who takes the rough stuff of nature and molds it into this, and then that. A seed would be an example of this divine engineering because, all else being equal, it produces a plant. In general, if the book of science appears to be written in multiple languages, that’s perhaps because the book of nature is too.

To Cartwright’s mind, this would actually make for a more attractive notion of divinity than the traditional one she was raised with, as it’s a God who loves the mess! ‘Glory be to God for dappled things,’ wrote Gerard Manly Hopkins. Quite, she agreed.

My turn to do the Evening Standard Life Class column today. Here's what I wrote.

In a plural world, such as ours – a place in which today you will bump into people who think exactly the opposite to you, on everything from the taste of Marmite to the veracity of God – it is easy to value constancy. Hence, the media pillories politicians who bend their policies, and to admit to compromise is to utter your own condemnation. ‘Here I stand, I can do no other,’ is the statement attributed to Martin Luther which has set the standard of personal integrity for the modern world. Be like a rock, or the northern star: unchanging.

And yet, isn’t changing your mind actually more virtuous? Is it not more honest and harder, though wiser, to be prepared to change as you assess and weigh the rich variety of opinion and experience that surrounds you, on the tube or the bus? There was an ancient philosopher who made change his leitmotif. Bion of Borysthenes seemed destined for a life of obscurity, not least when he was sold into slavery. But gradually, he educated himself. He made his way to Athens and, one by one, sat at the feet of the different thinkers of his day – the Platonists, the Stoics, the Cynics. He wanted to understand how they each think, in that deep sense of, ‘I see what you mean.’ Only then might he make up his own mind.

He is remembered now for inventing a practice called the diatribe. We’ve perverted his art, as today, a diatribe is a verbal attack against a foe. But Bion originally meant it to be a way of critiquing your own assumptions. For him, the best diatribes are directed against yourself. They put your own ideas to the test. You stand in your opponent’s shoes and test what of worth is found in their point of view. Why? Because it is expansive of your humanity, and you might change for the better as a result.

He was accused of being a flip-flopper, and shifty. People don’t like individuals who are informed and change, because they threaten their own beliefs. But think of individuals who refuse to change their mind. Don’t we have a shorthand for them: fundamentalists? They seem inhumane as a result. So fear not. Change your mind. ‘To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often,’ remarked John Henry Newman. And he’s about to be made a saint, when the Pope comes to visit in the autumn.

The Dalai Lama's message for Armed Forces Day may surprise those who assume him to be a pacifist. Might he be encouraging his western followers to engage with him, and his tradition, in more sophisticated ways? I've written a piece for the Guardian's Cif. A taster:

'Alternatively, there's the fact that Tibetan temples swarm with wrathful deities. These images of violence are interpreted as representing enlightenment's victory over delusion, though it's striking that the spiritual journey itself evokes images of violence. As another teacher, Abraham Joshua Heschel, put it: life is a war, "a war which cannot be won by the noble magic of merely remembering a golden rule".'

Kylie's wearing the red bracelet. But is Kabbalah an easy option for celebrities who don't want religion to change them too much? I've a piece up at the Guardian's Cif. A taster:

'The great humanist, Pico della Mirandola, tells us something else about Kabbalah's appeal. He popularised the phrase "the dignity of man", humankind's dignity being found in our capacity to discern divine secrets. "Thou shalt have the power, out of thy soul's judgment, to be reborn into higher forms, which are divine", he wrote in his treatise of 1496. It's an alluring idea. Shakespeare is thought to have reflected something of the same sentiment when he has Hamlet muse, "What a piece of work is a man". Humanism to this day, with its celebration of our capacity to contemplate the cosmos and unpick the code of DNA, follows in the same tradition. Kylie with her red string. Richard Dawkins with his red "A". They're almost metaphysical cousins.'

I've done a belief news roundup at Cif Belief, thinking about Muslim prisoners, the plight of RE, the archbishop's sermon to parliament, and football as virtue ethics. A taster:

'Come Friday, there will only be one religious story for a whole month: the football. In fact, whilst football is often compared to religion – for the devotion it inspires, for its power to draw people together – I'm not sure that's quite right. Football, and sport in general, has more to do with what philosophers call virtue ethics, the kind that focuses on nurturing skills, excellence and character. It's that kind of language you'll hear being used quite naturally as the competition proceeds. It's the kind of language that might help to recharge our moral imaginations too, as Treasury cuts bite in the months ahead.'

Piece on Cif belief, on how uncertainty seemed to be a theme at Hay last weekend, at least in the talks by Karen Armstrong, David Eagleman and Nassim Nicholas Taleb. A taster:

'Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of The Black Swan is religious – not in the sense of being able to summarise his metaphysical commitments on the back of an envelope, but in the sense of being committed to the religious practices of his native Greek Orthodoxy. Why? Because, he said, the interdicts of religion are the best way to deal with the exposure that results from living in "extremistan", a world in which uncertainties will catch you unawares.'

One, at the Guardian's Cif, comparing and contrasting Terry Eagleton's On Evil and Peter Hitchens' The Rage Against God.

Two others, at The School of Life blog, on John Kay's notion of obliquity and seizing the day. (Must say, that I'm very glad the 'by-product' approach to matters like happiness appears to be gaining some ground. I heard that Tim Harford, the 'undercover economist', is writing a book on similar themes now too.)

Have written a piece for the Guardian on Howard Jacobson's film on the Bible, broadcast last night, which was pretty good. A taster:

But Jacobson's issue is different. How can he, a person repelled by both absolutes alike, find a way of appreciating a text that is holy, for want of a better word. "In the beginning God created heaven and earth." The exquisite beauty and serenity in those lines was noted repeatedly, as was the power of a poetry that speaks to our existence, that roots us in the drama of our own story. It addresses Jacobson's humanity, which is to say it enlarges his humanity. Could he, as a non-believing secular Jew, find a way to honour that?

It’s difficult to review a book by Malcolm Gladwell - though you might like to read mine of What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures. His star rides so high in the literary firmament that it is not so much the words which count as the experience – which is presumably why his publishers realised there was money to be made from producing a book of essays that are already freely available on the internet. The bound book as fetish. There could be millage in that, in the age of the e-book.