Book Description

Essence: The Search for Reality Ronald C Abarta read and analyzed more than sixty books and hundreds of articles to resolve the skepticism one college Zoology professor transferred to him through open ridicule of faith in God: a skepticism he wrestled with throughout his forty-year career teaching High School Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Astronomy. The resulting book, "Essence: The Search for Reality," proved to be an effort eclipsing that required of him to earn a Master of Science in Science Education. However, it pulled back the curtain of confusion surrounding his understanding of the philosophical roots underlying various scientific positions. Essence offers its readers a way to examine scientific and philosophical claims about truth for themselves while putting forth a coherent explanation of truth and reality capable of impacting any worldview. No belief system is free of faith-based components, and the scientific belief proclaiming that life will one day be shown as no more than the natural, unspectacular product of normal physics and chemistry (called reductive materialism), is no different. Still, scientists teach it as the "only serious possibility." In his preface to Mind and Cosmos, a book voted "most hated" by the scientific establishment, Thomas Nagel says, "(these) assumptions are unsupported and fly in the face of common sense... (moreover) everyone in our secular culture has been browbeaten into regarding reductive materialism as (sacred)... (suggesting) anything else would not be science." Essence: The Search for Reality builds off Nagel's position and offers significant scientific evidence suggesting that life and the cosmos could not have formed through random processes alone: that, as Nagel states, "there is more to reality than even the most fully developed physics can describe." Essence: The Search for Reality, while agreeing with the facts of science, disagrees with important philosophical implications and conclusions academic science has drawn. Essence: The Search for Reality offers its readers credible, science-based evidence strongly suggesting the opposite of reductive materialism: the existence of an immaterial (purpose driven) mind behind the staggering amount of information known to underlie and drive our material universe. Well-known humanitarians offer their widely respected understanding of how humanity gains from such a perspective.