¹ This and some of the later paragraphs related to humanism are taken from my Humanism: a Beginner's Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009)Google Scholar.

² The paper's opening is but the first few lines from Rupert Brooke's splendid poem. It is printed whole in numerous collections and also in my Humanism, op. cit. note 1. Its last few lines conclude this paper.

³ See Moore, G. E., G. E. Moore: Selected Writings, (ed.) Baldwin, Thomas (London: Routledge, 1993), 207–12Google Scholar and Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, tr. Anscombe, G. E. M. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), II.xGoogle Scholar.

⁴ This is not intended as a formal definition of ‘humanism’ and, of course, many humanists are agnostic at some level or other. Restriction to atheists here is merely for simplicity of exposition. Indeed, many agnostics are really atheists who yet highlight the fact that they could be mistaken. Similar highlighting would leave some to speak of being a-‘fairies at the bottom of the garden’-ist.

⁵ This is not to say that religions lack value. They have influenced many lives for the better and, of course, have been instrumental in generating some wonderful literature, art and music. It is silly to try to perform a calculation of overall harm or benefit.

⁶ I believe this quip derives from G. K. Chesterton.

⁷ These three puzzles, including ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, are discussed in more detail in my Can a Robot Be Human? 33 Perplexing Philosophy Puzzles (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007)Google Scholar.

⁸ There are many puzzles with some similarity to this. Think of a Groucho Marx wanting to belong to a club if and only if it does not want him – or of Catch-22 where requesting to be grounded ensures that one fails to satisfy the conditions for being grounded.

⁹ For discussion of these three paradoxes, their sources, relations to other paradoxes and further references, see my This Sentence Is False: an Introduction to Philosophical Paradoxes (London: Continuum, 2009)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ This quip derives from Ted Honderich.

¹¹ Ramsey, F. P., ‘Philosophy’, The Foundations of Mathematics, ed. Braithwaite, R. B. (London: Kegan Paul, 1931), 269Google Scholar.

¹² For display of a common structure to the three reasoning paradoxes, see Goldstein, Laurence and Cave, Peter, ‘A Unified Pyrrhonian Resolution of the Toxin Problem, the Surprise Examination, and Newcomb's Puzzle’, American Philosophical Quarterly 45.4 (2008), 365–76Google Scholar. For more work on these paradoxes, with further detail, see Sainsbury, R. M., Paradoxes, 3^rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Chalice is usually known as ‘Toxin’. All three paradoxes continue to be discussed in the journals.

¹³ Ramsey, The Foundations of Mathematics, 369–70.

¹⁴ There is a similarity with Harman's Paradox where if one knows that p, surely any evidence against p is misleading evidence and should be ignored. For outline, see Cave, This Sentence is False, 101–2.

¹⁵ For discussion, see Williams, Bernard, Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 3–21Google Scholar.

¹⁶ That God is usually taken to be a necessary existent may also suggest that belief in his existence is rather different from typical belief in items existing. For more on arguments concerning God, see Cave, Humanism: a Beginner's Guide.

¹⁷ Reported by John Wisdom. See the title paper in his collection Paradox and Discovery (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), 133–4Google ScholarPubMed.

¹⁸ This approach is found in Braithwaite, Richard, An Empiricist's View of the Nature of Religion, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955)Google Scholar. A seminal paper on this is John Wisdom's 1944 paper ‘Gods’, reprinted in his Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), 149–68Google ScholarPubMed.

¹⁹ I have in mind, for example, Martin Rees (now Lord Rees of Ludlow) regarding Christianity and the late Peter Lipton regarding Judaism.

²⁰ John Wisdom tells of a woman trying on a hat, looking in the mirror, undecided, unsure whether the hat would quite do. After a pause, her friend announces, ‘My dear, it's the Taj Mahal.’ The look of indecision leaves the face in the mirror; the woman now sees what is wrong about the hat. See ‘The Logic of God’, in Wisdom, Paradox and Discovery, 2–5.

²¹ This is the well-known puzzle of moral luck which seems to be the traditional free will problem in modern dress. Bernard Williams introduced the expression as an oxymoron: see ‘Moral Luck’ in his Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 20–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² This gives rise to a paradox of contrary choice, or self-knowlege. See ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary’ in Cave, This Sentence is False, 153–5.

²³ Dawkins, Richard, The Selfish Gene, 30^th anniversary edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 332Google Scholar.

²⁴ Williams, Bernard, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar, and Zuboff, Arnold, ‘One Self: The Logic of Experience’, Inquiry 33 (1990) 39–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a presentation of how to some extent we may be the same person, and to some extent not, see Lyon, Ardon, ‘Problems of Personal Identity’ in Parkinson, G. H. R. (ed.) An Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1988), 441–62Google Scholar.

²⁵ These considerations are taken from my What's Wrong with Eating People: 33 More Perplexing Philosophy Puzzles (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008)Google Scholar. Such muddles are also discussed in my Humanism op. cit. note 1.

²⁶ Nagel, Thomas, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976)Google Scholar.

²⁷ Perhaps I should not be so doubtful. With regard to the Sorites puzzles, some hold the curious epistemic position that there really are sharp dividing lines between heaps and non-heaps and between reds and oranges, though we cannot spot them: see Cave, This Sentence is False, 80–1.