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INCIDENT REPORT Diagnosing Faith The response below was written by Daniel Goodenough, the Takeda professor of cell biology at HMS. Incident: A lecturer made religion one of the major topics in a presentation, inferring that because Moses, Paul, and Mohammed were epileptic, religiousness is usually a neuropsychiatric disorder. Response: At our School, as in much of Western biomedicine, the accepted religion is empiricism. The historical roots of our religion come from monotheism, where there is only one God and only one Truth. We hold a Cartesian, Newtonian, mechanistic view of the world, and our reductionistic approach has yielded huge advances in our molecular understanding of life and the development of a lucrative biopharmacology. We often avoid, however, those questions about why we are here and what our existence means. It is typical of the truly faithful of our religion, as with other persuasions, to be intolerant of other points of view and to see other beliefs as naive, nonscientific, and indicative of unclear thinking. (It is notable that while our reductionist approach has yielded breathtaking success, we are arguably on the brink of our own extinction due to our inability to think systemically: we have global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations not experienced for the past half million years; we are in the largest mass species extinction since the dinosaurs; and we are on the verge of major global soil and water crises.) As with many of the issues highlighted in these Focus columns, our need to eschew differences is not only harmful to others, but also destructive to ourselves. Those targeted by our arrogance, our Catholic, Mormon, and Islamic colleagues, students, and patients, often need to keep their faiths a secret in order to avoid the disdain implicit in the incident described above. But the loss for us is even greater since we fail to allow into our world-view the multiple perspectives inherent in diversity. Perhaps an inclusion of the Native American belief that no one individual can own land might have helped us to develop a rational, sustainable land-use policy. Perhaps the inclusion of an ethical perspective of poverty would have permitted an early eradication of AIDS and multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. Perhaps an espousal of nonviolence taught by the Quakers or by Gandhi would have spared us 9/11 and all of the fear-mongering in its aftermath. Why are we so insecure in our own beliefs that we must denigrate those of others?