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Thank you for the excellent coverage of "Seven reasons why people hate reason" (26 July, p 41) . As Immanuel Kant said, "Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another" (p 42) . If culture is akin to a person, what this describes is perhaps an 18-year-old young adult. What we …

Lawrence Krauss warns of the Templeton Foundation's apparent desire to use science to reveal the existence of God (2 August, p 52) . I suggest that it represents a danger to science on a deeper level: not because it mixes science and religion, but because it confuses religion with God. The necessity of belief in …

Vivien Marx's article on male circumcision, for which we were interviewed, contains some useful information and is certainly timely (19 July, p 40) . However, a few errors appeared. There are already over half a dozen randomised clinical trials (RCTs), covering more than just HIV. These show no changes in sexual satisfaction, function or behaviour, …

Your report on a gene variant associated with transsexuality called female-to-male transsexuals "transsexual women" and vice versa (2 August, p 14) . This perpetuates the myth that a transsexual person is a member of their assigned sex with a mental problem, rather than a member of the sex they identify with who happens to have …

Michael Brooks asserts that the Catholic Church ought to alter its position on in vitro fertilisation (26 July, p 18) , but fails to deal with its reason for not doing so. To persuade the church of IVF's benefits requires convincing it either that the embryo is not as morally inviolable as its teachings state; …

Chris Collins asks about the possibility of a "milk machine" (2 August, p 23) . My father, Frank Weldon, for many years president of the UK's Society of Dairy Technology , worked in the 1950s and 1960s with at least one company trying to replace the inefficient cow with a machine for turning grass into …

Reviewing Guesstimation by Lawrence Weinstein and John A. Adam, Matthew Killeya tells us that "never again will you take a newspaper figure at face value without feeling the need, and confidence, to guesstimate your own figure" (19 July, p 47) . In the same issue we are told that "the amount of space heats with …

Gary Rosen from the Templeton Foundation claims that his organisation promotes worthy debate with discussions such as the one entitled "Does science make belief in God obsolete?" (2 August, p 22). This raises the question as to why people believe in gods – if it were for scientifically supportable reasons there would be little scope …

• We said the Antiproton Decelerator facility at CERN is "due to switch on in the next year or two" (2 August, p 15). In fact it has been running since 2000; it is an experiment to study the deflection of low-energy antiprotons that will start soon. • Reporting doubts about the diagnosis of dementia, …

I find it entertaining to note that even in their criticisms of reason, the authors of your special report (26 July, p 41) all resort to arguments in this form: if we depend on reason then some outcome that they find undesirable will follow. As far as I can tell, the biggest problem associated with …