A distant view of home
NASA's distant image of the Earth and Moon, taken by the Cassini probe in orbit around Saturn, is the perfect homage to the famous Pale Blue Dot
Ideas
Six degrees of atheism
A new study proposes some categories of non-believer and reveals not all atheists are angry
Art versus science at Westminster Abbey
Amongst the faithful throngs, Rory Fenton sings the praises of the physicist Paul Dirac, for whom physics revealed the simple beauty of creation
Thinking machine: an interview with Daniel Dennett
With his new book Daniel Dennett provides both a valuable toolkit for good thinking, and a reminder that for him philosophy is a contact sport. Caspar Melville meets him
Revelations
Ecstatic states, the sense of a powerful truth others cannot see, emotions with the force of revelation. Religion and mental illness have a lot in common, says Robin Lawrence
Seeing reason: Jonathan Israel’s radical vision
Historian Jonathan Israel's magisterial three-volume history of the 'Radical Enlightenment' is the intellectual version of a JCB, ripping up the terrain around him. Kenan Malik follows him down the dark…
Your cousin the scientist
JP O’Malley has a family reunion with the geneticist Steve Jones
It’s complicated
It is tempting for secularists to simplify and imagine that religions are all bad, but that is to miss the history of faiths acting as a check on the arbitrary…
Book review: Why Genes are not Selfish and People are Nice by Colin Tudge
Colin Tudge's attempt to overturn "dangerous" neo-Darwin materialism fails spectacularly, says Craig Purshouse
Introducing the Rationalists’ Parliament
With its focus on reason and evidence, our parallel assembly goes deeper than jeering and groupthink, says Adam Smith