Suddenly, atheism is the new religion. Successful books by Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have rubbished religious belief as unfit for anybody out of short trousers.

Yet many scientists are believers, and their seemingly contradictory perceptions of the world coexist without apparent strain. Others, while not actually holding religious convictions themselves, are respectful of those who do. Are they being soft-headed by refusing to recognise the incompatibility of science and religion?

I think not. While science answers the “how” questions, it leaves the “why” questions hanging in the air. There is no need to ask why mankind evolved or why the Universe exists once you know how, materialists would argue. To them, such questions are meaningless.

But this is to deny that any other form of truth can have legitimacy. That is arrogance: science is unequalled in ferreting out certain kinds of truth. But can literature, music, art and jurisprudence not also achieve truthfulness? Nobody denigrates Tolstoy or Mozart for lacking a GCSE in physics. The same applies in greater measure to religion. It is true that an absolutist belief in the Creation, for example, is incompatible with evolution by natural selection. This caused Darwin sleepless nights. But those who wear religious belief more lightly need not despair. They can see the Creation story as a parable, or a myth along the lines of Beowulf. Christian belief, at least in the Church of England (whose oft-derided spinelessness is actually a priceless virtue), does not depend on literal interpretations of the Bible.

Scientists who are believers do not see a confict because they do not seek to answer scientific questions by exegesis, or religious questions by devising experiments. These two approaches occupy different spaces in their brains and answer different questions.

To deny religion is to dismiss most of human history as an error, only now being corrected. It is possible, I suppose, to see Gothic cathedrals, the King James Bible and the robust hymns of the 19th century as the products of the easily deluded. (Other religions may supply their own examples.) But to do so is to exclude a whole universe of experience, and everything it has taught. Those who take that route risk stumbling upon something a whole lot worse.