To realise why, and why this is important, it is necessary to ask a rather profound question: what are we humans for? This, of course, seems a fatuous, trite and unanswerable question whose real answer is probably closer to “eat, reproduce and die” than anything glorious concerning God’s purpose or some grand design. Douglas Adams’s joke that the meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything is “forty-two” was funny because it summed up the futility of several millennia of navel-gazing.

And yet…. While the meaning of life may elude us, the purpose of life may not be so opaque. They are two different things. And while the purpose of humanity is, of course, open to debate, it is at least arguable that, if there is one, a clue to its nature is in the formal name we have given to our species, Homo sapiens, the “wise man”.

Some may consider this a misnomer; certainly we are not all worthy of the title. But as a species, we are certainly, if not wise, then very clever indeed. We may share 99 per cent of our DNA with our closest cousins on the tree of life, the chimpanzees, but in mental terms we might as well live in a different forest. The human brain is a quite unprecedented (in evolutionary terms) and extraordinary piece of kit, more complex than any other object in the universe. And if this brain has a purpose, then it is, surely, to discover as much as possible about the world. To date, the most effective way these brains have found of doing this is through the medium of science. That means spending money on telescopes and microscopes, spaceships and laboratories, student grants and huge machines like the Large Hadron Collider.

For science is, surely, the crowning triumph of our civilisation. The fire kindled in ancient Greece and Babylon, kept alive by medieval Islam and finally allowed to flourish under the beneficent aura of modern European Christianity, has now come to define our world. By ­“science” I do not mean any particular discoveries, exciting and ground-breaking though they may be. I do not mean particular people, or the technologies that may flow from scientific discovery, impressive and useful as they often are. It is more fundamental than that.

While great works of art can force us to rethink the way we see aspects of the world, only science has forced mankind to rethink the way it sees everything. Science says, “we don’t know, but maybe we can find out”. It is the ultimate deterrent against ignorance, and the antidote to intellectual fatalism: “it’s a mystery”, “it’s God’s will”, “it’s magic”. The benefits of scientific thinking — the rigour of the whole scientific method, encompassing as it does evidence-based decisions, experiment, replication, falsification, hypothesis and open debate — are so obvious and so far-reaching (applicable in the courtroom, parliament and even around the dining table as much as in the laboratory) that it is hard to believe that this greatest of mental tools could be under threat; but it is and from three different directions.