#reductionist

“I grew up in a home where faith was not an important part of my experience. And when I got to college and people began discussing late at night in the dorm whether God exists, there were lots of challenges to that idea, and I decided I had no need for that.... [A]s I got more into this reductionist mode of thinking that characterizes a lot of the physical and biological sciences, it was even more attractive to just dismiss the concept of anything outside of the natural world.

At one point, one of my patients challenged me, asking me what I believed, and I realized, as I stammered out something about "I don't believe any of this," that it all sounded rather thin in the face of this person's clearly very strong, dedicated belief in God... I decided I'd better investigate this thing called faith so that I could shoot it down more effectively and not have another one of those awkward moments. 

[ I knocked] on the door of a Methodist minister who lived down the street and asked him if he could make any recommendations for somebody who, like me, was looking for some arguments for or against faith. He took a book off his shelf -- "Mere Christianity" by C.S. Lewis. Lewis had been an atheist [and] set out as I did to convince himself of the correctness of his position and accidentally converted himself. I took the book home, and in the first few pages realized that all of my arguments in favor of atheism were quickly reduced to rubble by the simple logic of this clear-thinking Oxford scholar. I realized, "I've got to start over again here. Everything that I had based my position upon is really flawed to the core.”

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