Mankind's Search for God and Meaning in all Life

Ian B Mackintosh The Author is a retired civil engineer whose work took him to thirty foreign countries including extensive travel in the United States specialising in dams and tunnels. His five previous books of world travel narratives over seven centuries were published twelve years ago. The study of human behaviour in other societies overtime reveals religion and perplexity in attempts to understand our place in the natural world. This book asks a question whose ultimate answer eludes us. The book describes the search for meaning in life with texts from distinguished theologians and philosophers. Ian writes now in my nineties, following ten years study, this Collection is a Last Testament if I may use the title of Pope Benedict's 2016 book. There he replied "I had for a long time excluded the question of truth, because it seemed to be too great. The claim: 'We have the truth!' is something which no one had the courage to say, so even in theology we had largely eliminated the concept of truth. In these years of struggle, the 1970s, it became clear to me: if we omit the truth, what do we do anything for? So truth must be involved. Indeed, we cannot say 'I have the truth', but the truth has us, it touches us." I should like that to express the message of my book. Paul van Buren 1972 wrote "Theistic language is 'a case of walking language's borders' where going further, 'we fall off into a misuse of words, ." Joseph Needham 1929 wrote "Religion, whatever we may say against it, has its roots deep in human nature, and is as natural as walking, singing or being sceptical of all intangible things." Rowan Williams 2014 wrote "But in addition to bodily predicates there are mentalistic predicates, like 'knows' and 'loves', and these would be claimed by many theologians to be literally true of God."