Ruth Gledhill quotes Rowan Williams at this week's conference:

'The philosopher Pascal famously said: “The heart has its reasons of which the reason knows nothing.” That’s a wonderful line but …. slightly tends to suggest that there are two incommunicable sorts of knowing.

'There is the stuff that reason deals with and there is the stuff that something else deals with and as that division unfolds in our country history, it tends to lead to the view that reason deals with the hard stuff and whatever else is is, deals with the soft stuff.

'Reason deals with stuff that’s successful with everybody and at the end of the day is reasonably open, reasonably open to clear exception and to some extent, rational manipulation. The heart deals with the fuzzy stuff which is inside rather than outside and is incapable of providing clear resolutions.

'I think we all know some of the problems that are raised culturally and intellectually by this distinction between the hard and the soft, frequently matched directly onto the sciences versus the humanities and increasingly, of course, seen as a distinction between real or objective knowing and the rest which is subjective or impressionable or emotional, or whatever suddenly doesn’t belong in the same category.

'One of the rather bizarre, paradoxical effects of this, is that some people who find themselves cast on the soft side of this story panic and decide that they need to be hard, which is a little like the weedy teenager suddenly deciding that they’ve got to be tough.

'One of the least helpful expressions of this is, of course, Creationism. No indeed, the Bible’s not about soft, emotional stuff, the bible’s about hard, scientific stuff, and we can prove it – and that rather peculiar own goal on the part of some religious people in the last few decades simply has the effect to illustrate how deeply unhelpful the stand off is between the two kinds of view, hard and soft, real and fuzzy.

'I think, even more so today, it is good to keep in mind the risks of that model, because if you ask about knowing in terms of how people would use the language of knowing, or coming to know, or learning to know, you realise what a rich term it is.

'How you come to know things depends a great deal on the question you’re given. What counts as knowing in various parts of our cultural activity is going to be very varied.

'You don’t have to be totally committed to a philosopher like Wittgenstein to realise that the actual diversity and use in the way that we talk and the way that we use words ought to be given warning signs whenever we’re tempted to think that there is one real thing called knowing and the rest is farce….

'Pascal is right as far as his own vocabulary, context and purpose. It would be the greatest possible mistake to take that as licence for carving up the world into, as I said, the hard and the soft, the real and the unreal. What this conversation, I think shows is that there are indeed different kinds of knowing available as there are kinds of learning in our world. Being as precise as permitted, as clear about those kinds of learning, particular disciplines and particular rigour appropriate to each one, this is one way, I believe, towards a degree of intellectual clarity.'