A.C. Grayling on how religion imprisons societies and why he can't get a China visa

A few weeks ago, Professor Anthony Clifford Grayling gave three talks at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival. In Britain, his fame has been forged on three fronts: he's a philosopher; he's the founder and Master of the New College of the Humanities, in London, which is an independent educational establishment for undergraduates; and he's an atheist. The last tends to get the most publicity: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Grayling have been described by the British media as the unholy trinity of non-believers. (Hitchens died in 2011 and no word has yet filtered back suggesting a change of opinion.)

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Grayling is also a prolific writer. His latest book, The Challenge of Things: Thinking Through Troubled Times, contains a list, almost two pages long, of previous titles, which include: The Meaning of Things, The Reason of Things, The Mystery of Things, The Heart of Things and The Form of Things. When people refer to him as a "militant atheist", he always says, "How can you be a militant non-stamp-collector? You just don't collect stamps." The literary impression, however, is of an eager boy, entranced by the sheer thinginess of human existence, who loves to gather observations, tidy them into notes and put them in various albums.

The stamp-collector comment came up in one of the talks he gave at the University of Hong Kong, at which a woman had addressed him as a "die-hard atheist". After his usual non-philately comparison, Grayling said, "Humanism is a deep, rich view. It invites us to be our best selves in relation to others." Then he added, patiently, "But you can be a militant secularist, like my friend Richard Dawkins."

Grayling himself doesn't do militancy. He's exceptionally courteous in person - listen to him in debate with Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury, and the after-you-no-after-you tone of both men is barely distinguishable - though slightly less so in print. ("There was, in recent years, an op-ed in The New York Times by the Dalai Lama, headlined 'Many Faiths, One Truth'," begins an essay in The Challenge of Things. "He is, of course, right; there are many faiths and there is one truth: viz. that all the faiths are bunkum.") At a panel discussion on how literature can find its place in our digital culture, also organised by the literary festival, he spoke beautifully, deferred to others and congratulated questioners on the excellence of their points.

That talk was at the Museum of Medical Sciences, where I happened to be sitting at the back, next to a display on artemisinin. While Grayling (author of Scepticism and The Possibility of Knowledge) talked of Socrates (died 399BC) and Plato (died 347BC), I could see, out of the corner of my eye, a drawing of Ge Hong, who had written the Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies, in AD341. In this tome, Ge had recommended Artemisia annua - sweet wormwood - for its anti-malarial properties.

Some readers of the Handbook had tended to pooh-pooh such advice. Or, as the display put it, "However, the West was extremely skeptical. How can a previously unknown natural herbal remedy be so effective?" But alongside Ge was a photo of Professor Tu Youyou, who, 1,600 years later, had decided to explore his faith in Artemisia; she was jointly awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine.