George Bernard Nevison
"The Quest" is located at: https://independent.academia.edu/GeorgeNevison.
Unchurched and a convinced atheist, I had received a narrow, humanistic education, being earmarked for Classics at 13. ...показать больше"The Quest" is located at: https://independent.academia.edu/GeorgeNevison.
Unchurched and a convinced atheist, I had received a narrow, humanistic education, being earmarked for Classics at 13. It was Hobson's Choice, since science, which I would have preferred, was not catered for. Exposure to the Greek philosophers inspired my own musings, until my English teacher radicalized me, after leaving school disenchanted in 1971, to explore new avenues in social philosophy, following the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School (whose anti-capitalist weapons were Political Correctness and Multiculturalism). Realizing that radicalism would never ripen, I stayed with green issues, exploring nature conservation, until I realized that I should have pursued the Biological Sciences. After a multidisciplinary first degree, I studied M.Sc. Ecology at Bangor University (1981-2). This satisfied my desire to be grounded in testable facts about the natural world with an all-encompassing remedial discipline. Just before this, after reading Colin Chapman's "The Case for Christianity" and being convicted by it, I realized that I should have acquainted myself with what Marx disparagingly termed "the opium of the masses" much earlier in my life, and I dismantled my humanistic values and assumptions at once. After working at the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology in Bangor I spent the rest of the 80's trying to build a research career on the shaky foundation of a school curriculum that had made no provision for scientific subjects or method. I failed to find permanent paid work in nature conservation, having already committed myself to the more interesting lab-coated alternative, and teacher training in the sciences (1989-90) left no one convinced, least of all myself, that I could bluff my way through teaching science to youngsters with a more detailed and longer exposure to it than I had . "Hope deferred makes the heart sick" (Proverbs 13:12). After my academic career ground to a halt in 1992, I gave God three weeks to prove that He loved me. He "failed" that test, and I took the logical course of returning to atheism. Something that I resolved to do, while working as a Biogeochemistry research assistant at Bangor University in 1995, was indulge a childhood hunch to address deep issues, and later to write poetry. I was prompted to harness philosophical and scientific inquiry in my search for ultimate truth after my English teacher and mentor wrote to me, while I was a technician in the Chemistry Dept in 1994, and asked me to critique his magnum opus, based on nihilistic inferences from Kantian epistemology. I felt that poetry would add intuitive scope, especially since my familiarity with scientific papers had convinced me that none had a worthwhile message for me, and that I had none to give. On 1 January 1996 I began 11 months of intensive spiritual stock-taking on the themes, "What is Truth?", "What is Man?" and "Who am I?", publishing it a year later under the title, "The Quest - A Poet's Search for Meaning in the Age of Science by George Ames" (my pen name). Now that very attempt to put my own desperate quest for answers into writing brought me back, in a quite unforeseeable way, to the faith that I had resolutely abandoned - or thought I had - in 1992. I was able to do so from the entrenched position that I had adopted at the start of my inquiry, of rejecting scientism outright (the idea that scientists have the monopoly on truth), but rather believing in the absolute truth of moral conviction. The logical entailment of this, which I touched on in several poems, was that any religious system, that was wholly inspired by God, could not be inhumane, inherently absurd or based on unethical premises, and that there had to be facts that no reasonable person, including myself, could deny. Religious leaders and theologians are experts at spreading credulity and promoting patent absurdities. This was why, nearly two decades later, I wrote this PDF, that I only had the confidence to do after first reading Dr Malcolm Lavender's superb scholarly tome, "Greek Grammar and Syntax Versus Calvinism", and, more recently, A.J. Wallace and R.D. Rusk's "Moral Transformation - The Original Christian Paradigm of Salvation", that I cited on the fourth page of "The Truth About Easter", and at the end. I recommend both books, but the second convinces more by its simplicity and copious scriptural footnotes. I let my own very minor work speak for itself, just as Mssrs. Lavender, Wallace and Rusk do, in my inductive use of the inspired scriptures which I cite throughout my writing. I thought, after putting God to the test and "re-affirming" the truth of atheism, that I had the measure of Him. But He had the measure of me. God had passed His test with flying colours. He had proved His love for me, not with the miracle that I expected in 3 weeks, but by the only means that He knew would have succeeded: providing an unsurpassed opportunity to think it through. . .показать меньше
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