She appears to be studying him. Under her gaze he feels a little like an intelligent chimpanzee, but continues, If you can show this conclusively, it’s a triumph for atheism.

That’s only one way of reading it, she says. I’m guessing you’re not up to speed with the work that goes on at the Alterman Centre.

Fill me in.

She looks ready to hand him a banana.

The public perception of neuroscience is that it’s there to back the materialist worldview. By which I mean, the idea that through science, we will prove that consciousness is a function of brain processes and that all the complexities of human thinking, behaviour and emotion can be reduced to the firing patterns of neurones. But some of the neuroscientists who have attempted to do that over the last fifty years have concluded that our model is wrong. If you believe consciousness is an evolutionary by-product, you should know there is a significant body of empirical data that argues against that orthodoxy. The Alterman Centre is not Government funded, Dr Logan. It is funded by private individuals concerned that scientific discovery be allowed to continue free from the constraints of Dawkinsism and dogma.

You speak of science as if it were a religion.

It’s the new religion, she says. Scientism. True science is something else. Genuine enquiry. No taboos.

She is watching him, he perceives, with an air of gentle amusement.

Your process. Have you tried it on atheists?

She sips her coffee before she answers.

The study was – unusually for us – dependent on Research Council funding. The focus was therefore on religious believers. A study of a pathology, from the current political perspective. A study of normal human tendency, from an anthropological one. The tendency to believe in a higher power is fundamental, Dr Logan. Still dominant in most cultures and most parts of the world.

But we have outgrown it. Evolved beyond it.

Or have we looked around at our miserable English lives, Dr Logan, and at the wider state of humanity, and simply despaired? She squeezes his arm disconcertingly and seems untroubled by the fact he’s disconcerted. Have we, in fact, discovered a way to directly connect with God through the use of electrical stimuli? Because so far I’ve not been able to ascertain any fundamental difference between what you call an actual experience and one that is induced.

Your question assumes God is real, he says.

We can't measure God. But no one’s measured Love either. Or Compassion. Would you argue they’re not real? Of course, there are those who don’t experience love and compassion, and when questioned, will deny their existence…

You’re saying God is just a feeling? An emotion? Rather than a deity?

Humans make God ‘a deity’. I’m working on a different theory.