The Quest - A Poet's Search for Meaning in the Age of Science is a compilation of three books of poetry, written while I was working as a part-time research assistant in the Biogeochemistry Lab of the University of Wales, Bangor. It owes its origin to the concurrence of three crises in my life with my own scientific research experience.
Three events brought to a head many years of searching for answers to life's deep questions: total disillusionment with my fundamentalist Christian faith in 1990 (a 9-year exploration of the frontier between faith and credulity in penance for my previous, brief espousal of Marxism); the sudden awareness of my own mortality, after a death in the family, which underlined the urgency of setting my thoughts down on paper; and the receipt, two years ago, of a bold and original treatise on the cognitive limits of liberationist philosophy by my former English teacher and mentor, with which I disagreed at the time, but which I thought deserved a more balanced and coherent response than I had given him in my letter - one that would also express my appreciation of a lifelong friendship.
Related to my search for meaning was my training and research experience as an ecologist, which made me wish to affirm, in the light of much anti-scientific prejudice, the aesthetic and inspirational motivation of many scientists and the tendency for discoveries (especially in Quantum and Chaos Theory) to uncover deeper mysteries of a metaphysical kind. At the same time, being myself aware of the limitations of scientific thinking, I wanted to argue against Scientism (the belief that science gives insight into the whole of reality), Reductionism (the tendency to reduce complex human behaviour to simple terms, e.g. evolutionism, human ethology, genetics, behaviourism) and Determinism (the proposition that consciousness is not free and rational but shaped by unfathomed causes in the unconscious, e.g. Freudianism, in our instinctual make-up, e.g. ethology, or in the materialistic forces and relations of production, e.g. Marxism and liberal variants).
These simplistic models of human nature and society are the fallout from the relentless, mechanistic causality of Newtonian physics (see Knowing by Causes) and seem out of place in the enigmatic, complex and dangerous world of E=mc², a world that needs desperately to evolve towards freedom and self-awareness in human beings if the promise of the millennium is to be realised. If man - and woman, as understood by my generic use of that word - is to find himself, is to come of age, is to grow to full humanity and humaneness, then I believe that he needs answers to three key questions: What is Truth?, What is Man? and Who am I? For without a love of the truth and a grasp of our unique potential and value as a species and as individuals we are culturally