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The question whether there is a God is one which is decided on very different grounds by different communities and different individuals. The immense majority of mankind accept the prevailing opinion of their own community. In the earliest times of which we have definite history everybody believed in many gods.

"At one point in "The Wizard Of Oz," Dorothy (Judy Garland) picks an apple and the tree she picks it off protests: "Well, how would you like to have someone come along and pick something off of you?" Dorothy is abashed and she says, "Oh, dear - I keep forgetting I'm not in Kansas," by which she means she's now entered an alternate universe where the usual distinctions between persons and objects, animate and inanimate, human beings and the natural world that is theirs to exploit do not hold. In Kansas and, she once assumed, everywhere else, trees are things you pick things off (even limbs) and persons are not. Persons have an autonomy and integrity of body that are to be respected; trees do not. A person who is maimed has a legal cause of action. A tree that has been cut down has no legal recourse, although there may be a cause of action (not, however, on behalf of the tree) if it was cut down by someone other than the owner of the property it stood on. All this seems obvious, but what the tree's question to Dorothy shows is that the category of the obvious can be challenged and unsettled. I thought of this scene on the last day of my jurisprudence course when we came to the chapter on animal rights and the rights of objects . The question of the day was posed by Christopher Stone's landmark article "Should Trees Have Standing? - Toward Legal Rights For Natural Objects" (1972), and was answered, it would seem, in Genesis 1:26, when God gave man "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." The dominion of man over animals and nature is established theologically, and it is established again in the modern period by classical liberalism's privileging of individual rights exercised by beings endowed (by either God or nature) with the capacity of choice. From Locke to Mill to Berlin to Rawls, the centrality of the

" Richard Dawkins in furious row with EO Wilson over theory of evolution Vanessa Thorpe The Observer, Sunday 24 June 2012 A disagreement between the twin giants of genetic theory, Richard Dawkins and EO Wilson, is now being fought out by rival academic camps in an effort to understand how species evolve. The learned spat was prompted by the publication of a searingly critical review of Wilson's new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, in Prospect magazine this month. The review, written by Dawkins, author of the popular and influential books The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and The God Delusion, has prompted more letters and on-line comment than any other article in the recent history of the magazine and attacks Wilson's theory "as implausible and as unsupported by evidence"."

"Protests by atheists against last week's papal visit to the UK have highlighted the age old friction between religion and science. But for hundreds of years thinkers with a foot in both camps have sought to reconcile these two beliefs, says Dr Thomas Dixon."

"God is dead in a very particular sense. He no longer plays his traditional social role of organizing us around a commitment to a single right way to live. "

"HERE IS A mathematician's nightmare I heard in the 1980s when that irritating, unconforming, self-regarding provocateur Benoît Mandelbrot was suddenly famous - fractals, fractals everywhere. The mathematician dreamed that Mandelbrot died, and God spoke: "You know, there really was something to that Mandelbrot." Sure enough. Mandelbrot created nothing less than a new geometry, to stand side by side with Euclid's - a geometry to mirror not the ideal forms of thought but the real complexity of nature. He was a mathematician who was never welcomed into the fraternity ("Fortress Mathematics," he said, where "the highest ambition is to wall off the windows and preserve only one door"), and he pretended that was fine with him. When Yale first hired him to teach, it was in engineering and applied science; for most of his career he was supported at I.B.M.'s Westchester research lab. He called himself a "nomad by choice." He considered himself an experienced refugee: born to a Jewish family in Warsaw in 1924, he immigrated to Paris ahead of the Nazis, then fled farther and farther into the French countryside."