Science will explain how but not why. It talks about what is, not what ought to be. Science is descriptive, not prescriptive; it can tell us about causes but it cannot tell us about purposes. Indeed, science disavows purposes. Second, technology: technology gives us power, but it does not and cannot tell us how to use that power. Thanks to technology, we can instantly communicate across the world, but it still doesn't help us know what to say. As for the liberal democratic state, it gives us the maximum freedom to live as we choose, but the minimum direction as to how we should choose. The market gives us choices but it does not tell us what constitutes the wise or the good or the beautiful choices. Therefore, as long as we ask those questions, we will always find ourselves turning to religion.

Religion isn't the only source of answers; there are other spheres that offer them, such as literature. But religion remains the main repertoire of those meaning-based questions. The fundamental argument that I make in my book The Great Partnership, subtitled "God, Science and the Search for Meaning", is that science and religion are extreme cases of two different ways of thinking about the world. I use a metaphor to explain this, and I don't mean anything more than a metaphor because precise neuroscience it isn't — the brain is very complex and plastic — but I've said that science is the paradigm of left-brain thinking: it is atomistic, it is analytical, whereas religion is synthetic and integrative, a characteristic right-brain way of thinking. To summarise 120,000 words in a single sentence: "Science takes things apart to see how they work; religion puts things together to see what they mean."

Those are two irreducibly different ways of thinking, and in the book I give lots of examples of other situations where we have two completely different ways of thinking. I look at the educational psychologist Jerome Bruner, who writes about the difference between systems and stories. Or the Harvard neuroscientist Carol Gilligan who writes about the different ways that men and women think about morality. Men tend to think in atomistic terms — what are my duties?-whereas women tend to think in relational terms: how do the various characters involved relate to one another?