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George Monbiot has a typically robust piece in the paper today, lamenting that people don't believe the science on climate change, that there is no simple solution to reverse that disbelief, and that science itself predicts this might happen because psychology shows we tend not to be fact-following creatures and are bad at assessing risks.

There's no doubt much in what he says, though I can't help but feel his slightly sniffy attitude towards those who doubt the science means he misses other possibly quite good reasons why people do so. Here's two I can think of.

First, Monbiot notes that modern science is highly specialised; many scientists work in silos of expertise. And I suspect that ordinary folk think that's risky, for we're very alert to the dangers of silo-thinking. You only have to think of the computer-says-no phenomenon (the scientific way of life that can't think out of the box), or proffered dietary advice (specialist science that apparently quite routinely contradicts itself), or the mathematically brilliant economists who failed to predict the financial crisis. If that's people's everyday experience of science in their lives, little wonder they don't trust it.

Second, science has a poor record at predicting calamity. The most recent case in point was swine flu. More confusingly still, when one arm of science predicts we're all falling off the edge of a cliff, another arm of science predicts tomorrow's technological utopia. Who to believe: Gaia doomsters or transhumanist dreamsters?

Let me stress, I'm not a climate change denier! But there are good reasons, alongside the bad, for people doubting science. Monbiot might do well to factor that into his lament.

I was reading Choosing The Common Good over the weekend, and I think I understand another reason why I'm very wary of the Catholic bishops' advocacy of virtue ethics. It's because theirs is actually an amalgam of virtue description and rule prescription. Or to put it another way, it's a mix of life as a moral art and life as a moral science. And the two approaches don't mix very well.

The Catholic stipulations against sex outside of marriage provide a good case in point. To have a blanket ban can only come from a rule approach. It's wrong, period. But with a virtue approach, pre-marital sexual exploration, say, may be a great good, if not without risks - though virtue ethics requires the taking of risks to gain the practical intelligence it so values. Hence too the desirability of sex education. Also, a virtue approach doesn't see any strict distinction between sex and love, one flowing from the other in the good life. There are some sexual relationships its unwise, even bad, to pursue. But marriage as a inviolable demarcation comes to look rather arbitrary - and unjust in the case of lovers for whom marriage is not an option, as, in the eyes of the church, is the case for lesbians and gays.

Another of the individuals I met in the US was Samir Selmanovic. He must win a book category prize for witty youtube promos.

1. There's something, not nothing (call it existence).

2. We know we're existing (stones don't).

3. We can and often do celebrate the fact.

(With thanks to Linda Alcoff)

The Catholic Church is about to issue guidance on how its flock might vote in the forthcoming UK election, in a document called Choosing the Common Good. It's the pro-trad-family line that's been trailed, which is being interpreted as steering Catholics to voting rightwards. (Quite why is beyond me. I can't but think the Conservative fuss about marriage and taxation is a kind of displaced guilt from the real reason marriage is weakening: individual freedom, which in its neoliberal form has powered the policy of right for the last three decades.)

In some coverage of Citizen Ethics parallels have been drawn between some of the contributions in our pamphlet and Catholic social teaching. There is a common root that shapes my thinking, at least, namely Aristotle. He finds his way into Catholic social teaching via Thomas Aquinas. But our project is really very different.

We're not, of course, offering advice or guidance. We want to stimulate serious debate in a plural world. I'm not much aware this is something the Catholic Church encourages, 'debate' for the magisterium being about the problem of re-representing its 'timeless truths'. Doctrine works top-down. Debate works bottom-up. The document's appeal to the common good could be questioned too. It carries the implication that Catholicism speaks for the good of humanity, when in reality, pluralism forces any absolutist institution on the defensive. For common good it's hard not to read what's good for Catholic self-interest.

That said, I think there is an issue about ethics in a culture that marginalizes religion - not in the sense of whether you can be good without God (always a facile debate), but in the sense of the philosophical and imaginative resources from which a virtue ethics approach can spring. Virtue ethics doesn't look to timeless principles for a steer on life - such as maximising happiness or following categorical imperatives - but rather sees the ethical life as a question of practical intelligence that can only be learned in life, much like the skill of an artist. This means that institutions, culture and traditions matter, in the same way that they matter to the artist. So it interests me what religious thinkers have to say about ethics: they are peculiarly sensitized to certain issues that matter. However, there's no turning back. Inasmuch as religion is marginalized, it's usually for good reasons - good ethical reasons, one might add. The future requires a remaking not a restatement.

Buy the Guardian today, for Gordon Brown, Nick Clegg and David Cameron's response to Citizen Ethics in a Time of Crisis!

The investigation of Google by the European Commission serves to illustrate a point we're trying to make with Citizen Ethics. Google relies entirely on its algorithm to deliver search results. It presumably constantly tweaks it, but by relying on machines, claims disinterest in the results.

Which is ridiculous, of course, for the algorithm itself reflects the assumptions, or prejudices, of the programmers. It has a set of values built in, an ethic you might say. Just because that's buried in code doesn't mean it doesn't exist, though code might conceal it, for a while - perhaps the element the commission wants to bring to the light of day.

One of our key Citizen Ethics points is that values are buried in many features of modern life, from machine programming to market mechanisms. It cannot be otherwise, their origins being human, though we can and should seek to be more aware of it, and debate the ethic we otherwise slavishly follow.

1. Our political economy was described by Arthur Seldon as 'Government of the busy by the bossy for the bully.' Politicians were the bossy ones, for him; his capitalists, the bullies. But hey? After three decades of Blatcherism, that these roles should blur and merge can hardly be thought surprising.

2. That otherwise serious journalists should spend days working themselves into a lather about whether the prime minister sometimes shouts at people, to me only serves to indicate that our discussion of moral character has become almost entirely vacuous.

For Aristotle, a lack of anger is as much a vice as being habitually bad-tempered or unreasonably fierce about trivialities. Anger is an appropriate moral emotion, as it powers us to seek justice.

Philip Pullman, Michael Sandel, Rowan Williams, Alain de Botton, Angie Hobbs, Tariq Ramadan, Andrew Copson, Camila Batmanghelidjh, Mary Migley, Robert and Edward Skidelsky, Will Hutton, John Milbank and more. They all agree that something profound has gone wrong with the way we do ethics, ensure justice, pursue the good life.

Our download pamphlet is published this morning. Join in the debate too!

A piece on Harvey Cox's latest book, The Future of Faith, at the Guardian's Cif Belief. A taster:

'His snapshot of the contemporary religious scene is unapologetically taken from the mountaintop, and it is also unapologetically optimistic. Cox recognises the risks associated with some of the features of the age of the spirit – its fundamentalism, say, or the prosperity gospel. But he argues they can't last. They are essentially reactions against modern biblical scholarship, which means "a religion based on subscribing to mandatory beliefs is no longer viable". Hence the emphasis on the spirit. Neither does he worry that Christianity today so often feels like a Jesus-centred personality cult. Rather, Pentecostalism is a positive force, part of "an inexorable movement of the human spirit whose hour has come".'