Some 10 to 15 percent of all patients either suffer from a delay in making the correct diagnosis or die before the correct diagnosis is made. Misdiagnosis, it turns out, is rarely related to the doctor being misled by technical errors, like a laboratory worker mixing up a blood sample and reporting a result on the wrong patient; rather, the failure to diagnose reflects the unsuspected errors made while trying to understand a patient’s condition. These cognitive pitfalls are part of human thinking, biases that cloud logic when we make judgments under conditions of uncertainty and time pressure.

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The European Court of Human Rights has ruled against the use of crucifixes in classrooms in Italy. It said the practice violated the right of parents to educate their children as they saw fit, and ran counter to the child’s right to freedom of religion.

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Governments have a history of not listening to their scientific advisers. Politicians, popes and princes want things that can be said unequivocally, while scientists know that their advice is necessarily provisional, and sometimes open to dispute.

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I am not whining (in fact I am rather proud) when I point out that a rather loud group of my fellow atheists, generally today known as the “new atheists”, loathe and detest my thinking. Richard Dawkins has likened me to the pusillanimous appeaser at Munich, Neville Chamberlain. Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution is True, says (echoing Orwell) that only someone with pretensions to the intelligentsia could believe the silly things I believe. And energetic blogger PZ Myers refers to me as a “clueless gobshite” because I confessed to seeing why true believers might find the Kentucky Creationist Museum convincing. I will spare you what my fellow philosopher Dan Dennett has to say about me.

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