Backgrounds: Geoff

Notes on the lifes and interests of one of the people in our church.

I've lived in Shoreham for about 15 years now, with my wife and children, along with one cat and a number of budgies [not mine!]. I'm a software engineer by profession, writing scientific software. Recently I have started doing website development [for the technically interested, I really like using XHTML/CSS to develop simple and elegant sites]

Things that I deeply enjoy include cycling, reading and gardening. I'll start with some of my favorite authors:

• Classics: Austen, Dickens & Trollope
• Dorothy Dunnett - the historical novels [House of Niccolo, The Lymond Chronicles]. An open window into the late middle ages and late tudor. Wonderful word play, complex plot
• Patrick O'Brian - the Aubrey/Maturin series of sea books. Authentic, witty
• Alexander McCall Smith - the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency
• Alexander Solzhenitsyn - a day in the life of Ivan Denisovich, First Circle etc

Looking at these, they all share the same trait of being good reads, not trivial, but with warmth and excitement. I tend to dislike most books that appear in book lists, those that are deemed by the literati to be important, finding them flat & dull - the 'kings new clothes' syndrome!

Cycling. Well I'm not a professional or anything like. I don't do this competitively, but purely for my own enjoyment. Working at home, I often go at lunch time up to the top the Downs [a range of chalk hills] nearby, up a little used road - hard work, but once there, the quiet and peace, broken only by the sky larks, the views over the Downs and the Sussex weald. Then the rush of the air, and the warmth... ah.

Gardening we have a lovely walled garden, that I do a lot of work in. Over the last couple of years it has been mainly structural - patio, paths, power, workshop [buckets of sweat!], but next year I hope to concentrate more on the growing - plants and vegetables - finally see if I can have some success with tomatoes. I really want to grow a wider range of apples as well [James Grieve, Egremont Russet top my list].

By training I'm a physicist [from Imperial College] and specialising in Optics. In particular that branch which deals with the design of optical instruments [cameras, telescopes, microscopes]. There are good grounds for saying that the whole of the scientific/industrial revolution came out of this field!

Many people are surprised to find scientists who are christians, having been persuaded by the media that the two cannot coincide. In actual fact I am fairly sure that a higher percentage of physicists are believers than in the general population - for the simple reason that they are used to handling things they can neither see, touch or taste.

Intellectually, I find christianity to be much more credible than materialism. There are two basic positions [presuppositions] that we can adopt: either God created the universe, or it is purely the result of random process - a flux of sub-atomic processes. Despite the claims to the contrary, both are faith statements.

If I accept that God is, that he is the creator and that he has spoken to us, truly but not completely, then I find that I have solid ground for the validity of reason, for real moral right and wrong, for objective truth and for the 'humanness' of people, their value and dignity.

If I believe the materialist presupposition, then it is quite clear that several consequences flow from that. Any talk of 'right' or 'wrong' or 'truth' is meaningless , a sociological construct at best - The Holocaust, the Gulags, Cambodia, Rwanda, Apartheid are merely events, child abuse and murder are just facts. Humanness is denied, friendship, love and joy are just the results of flow of hormones in the body. Even reason, so important, is not the absolute it is usually taken to be, since it too has developed during evolutionary processes.

to me, the tragedy of the materialist position is perhaps best summarised in a short poem, by a Japanese poet:

Written after the death of his wife, it expresses the teaching that the everything we value is purely the meaningless foam of material behavior, and yet cries out in his recognition of real loss and meaning.

Of course, if I accept the christian presuppositions, then I have to seriously think about God and His call on my life: something that I suspect is the motive underlying a lot of non-belief.

It is certainly the area, for me, in which the 'pedal hits the metal', as I try to work out the calling of Jesus at home and in the community, learning to be a blessing and not a hindrance - something which can be very painful at times.