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

I had abandoned Catholicism, but even during my short militant atheist period I maintained an interest in western religious art and music.

One odd thing about the current debate between religious people and atheists is that the participants don't seem to care that they entirely fail to communicate with the other side. They therefore have no account of why the religious or the atheists believe what they do, except that they are stupid or deluded. I think philosophers should try and make sense of their disputes with their opponents as far as possible without treating them as idiots. This applies to the religious participants in the debate as much as to the atheists.

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

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

Wine is not discovered but made: it is an artifact that can be appraised that can be appraised aesthetically

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