It is then not so much that we have a ‘God-shaped hole’ within us, as I was fond in my religious youth of insisting, but that there lurks within us something of Locke’s ‘uneasiness’, a perennial desire for satisfaction that takes place at the metaphysical level as well as the everyday and material. We have a ‘meaning-shaped hole’ because we are story-forming creatures, and stories should not meander without a point.
