and personally at zero. My quest for understanding culminated in the attempt to answer these questions: to describe how ultimate truth may be recognised (Book 1); to show the essential nature of man (Book 2); and to find the roots of our self-identity and arrive at a clear definition of integrated personhood and personal integrity, as a pre-requisite for understanding our current social malaise (Book 3).
It is significant that, in exploring these questions, the methods of scientific investigation and explanation (in which so much trust is placed today for human self-understanding) were found to be, at best, irrelevant and inappropriate, and, at worst, seriously and profoundly misleading. Thoughtful readers, including scientists themselves, will identify recognizable aspects of the limitations of scientism and scientific method in all three books - but especially in Six Reductionist Statements about Man. Now, a reductionist cannot take a holistic, life-affirming view - by definition; for he resembles the philistine, who studies the rich tapestry of life and the artwork that is the human phenomenon in terms only of the chemistry of their pigments . . . Reductionist thinking is philistinism, whether we interpret man as the passive victim of his genes, a box of replaceable parts, a walking cerebral cortex, a naked ape or a ragbag of instincts. The implied disciplines preclude a whole-canvas approach, while the theory of evolution would be utterly crushed by it (in trying to account for, inter alia, the phenomena of convergence, the absence from the fossil record of transitional forms and the complex interdependence of life). For myself, I have sought meaning holistically, by observing life in the round, not by looking at one component part and then trying to make the tail wag the dog.
. . .The metaphysical question, 'Does life have any ultimate meaning?', which usually boils down to 'Is there a God?', I addressed indirectly by asking 'What is Truth?', 'What is Man?' and 'Who am I?' Our capacity to be continually aware of these questions arising in our daily lives inclines us, consciously or unconsciously, to address the larger one - and we do so by appealing to values and feelings without necessarily becoming religious. Moreover, the existence of God can only be known intuitively or by inference from the order and design in the universe. My own bias owes nothing to my Christian fundamentalist period that was not already my conviction, except for a view of the Atonement (the doctrine explaining the 'efficacy' of the Crucifixion) which I took, contrary to the orthodoxy that it was expiation-by-substitution. The last passage in Cogitator 2 expresses an alternative theological viewpoint, which I consider more ethical and less superstitious (without compromising the feeling for the sacred). The essence of theism, in my view, is to be found in reasoning no less plausible, and it begins where scientism breaks down - chiefly, in its theories of origins. In the sixth part of Six Reductionist Statements about Man, I have attempted a criticism of the theory of evolution. In the dialogue between Jeeves