I think we atheists should tolerate the religious not because their views are just as valid as ours, but because experience has shown that we are unlikely to convert them, and so we have to find some way to live in peace with them, even if we find their views false or otherwise objectionable.

The thing I think I have learned from Wittgenstein is the importance of not making things up: philosophers should not invent problems, and they should also be conscious of the risk of inventing pointless 'technical' machinery which do not offer real explanations, but often just re-state the known facts in a more complex way.

Taken as hypotheses, religious claims do very badly. Yet the striking fact is that this does not worry Christians.

Naturalism is a methodological rather than a metaphysical view. It's because I am a naturalist, actually, that I am sceptical about physicalism.

Catholicism is the most philosophical branch of Christianity.

I like to think of myself as a naturalist - insofar as that term is at all clear.

One philosophically fascinating aspect of Catholicism is the very strange conception of reality it presents (the incarnation, the eucharist, judgement day etc.).

Since I don't believe in externalism, I don't think it can explain consciousness!

Unlike art which contains a message, wine conveys nothing, it has no intellectual or cognitive content

There are no a priori obstacles to the scientific knowledge of the mind, but the scientific knowledge of the mind is not all the knowledge of the mind that there is. This is not an objection to science, it is just a distinction between different kinds of knowledge.

There's that great Irish joke: a man is lost in the countryside, stops a passer-by: 'how do I get to Dublin?'. The passer-by says 'well, I wouldn't start from here'. Rather than starting by talking in the abstract about materialism, dualism, 'material stuff' and things like that in regard to the mind, I would rather start from somewhere else.

I do not claim to have any developed or sophisticated views in political philosophy, but I think that one of the lessons of the last few hundred years of history is that the greatest threat to human prosperity and well-being is fanaticism and intolerance, even in the name of apparently laudable goals.