Someone may ask: “If you are not competent, why then did you write the book?” Ah, but I did not say that I lacked competence, only that I am a layman.  A problem often comes with books written by experts: only experts can understand them.  But I am an ordinary man writing for ordinary people.  My only advantage has been God’s gift of time and opportunity.

The above remarks, however, should be confined to those pages that employ physics and philosophy to present rational arguments for Christian belief.  Other parts of the book deal with biblical ideas, and are more familiar territory.  There, after forty years of ministry, I may reasonably claim to speak with higher authority.

Above all, I stand with you as a searcher after truth, yet one who recognises that all truth, whether sacred or secular, ultimately derives from God and must therefore be harmonious with his nature and will.  May he then, who is the Truth, open our minds to perceive his imperishable wisdom.

More than three hundred years ago an anonymous poet shrewdly observed that scholars are prone to see what they want to see -

Three wise men of Gotham,
As I have heard some say,
Would needs go forth a-hunting
Upon St David’s day.

And all the day they hunted,
And nothing could they find,
But an owl in a hollow tree,
And that they left behind.

One said it was an owl,
The other he said, Nay;
The third said ‘twas an old man,
And his beard growing grey.[1]

Such wise men they were! Only one of them saw what was really there (an owl), and even he rode away from it, for it was not what he wanted to see! That syndrome can still be observed.  We are all guilty to some extent, but the learned are sometimes particularly prone to a blinkered view -

[1]        The poem runs to many more stanzas, and has many versions, with the oldest known printing dating from the late 16th. century.

This book is now also available as an  ebook from Smashwords Strong   Reasons