Author: Richard R. Tryon, Sr.
The bulk of the life of my father, Richard R. Tryon was spent working with words. He became a reporter for the Toledo, Ohio Blade in the early 1920's, before going to Ohio State University. He left OSU in his third year with a sinus infection that caused an operation and an order to go live in Florida's sunshine!
He managed newspapers in Sebring and Palm Beach at the same time until the real estate collapse of 1926, and then moved to Odessa, Texas, started a newspaper and ran it for just three years. Then it was on to Cincinnati, Ohio and some years with the Associated Press that took him to Cleveland and to headquarters in New York City. For many years, after 1937, he was in and out of many printing and publishing jobs and worked mostly as an editor or as a writer of many feature stories for business and professional journals.
Throughout his life, he lived by the newsman's style to search for truth and for ways to report in the first paragraph, the who, what, where, when, why and how of any and all stories. It is not surprising that he sought a way to write a book that would do the same for such basic questions of mankind as how did we get to be?
Standard Christian theology can and does give us good reason to accept the idea that there are things that we can't prove about God and the Universe. It may even be sacrilegious for us to try to assume a power of finding evidence to prove as fact, ideas, that we are supposed to believe by faith. Therefore, the charge that, anyone who tries to prove such is suspect or at least "anti" faith.
However, it may not be correct to call such efforts blasphemous, if they are intended to give modern man a way to understand or explain in terms of the current age, ideas that were accepted on faith alone in an earlier time, that preceded a chance for a more scientific explanation.
Therefore, I have undertaken to publish the life long and unpublished work of my father, not because he or I want to prove that a better life is one without faith; but because explanation of many articles of faith in modern scientific ways is consistent with the ancient Hebrew word for God - Yaweh, or "I am He who reveals Himself". There is no special reason to assume that such revelation was accomplished once and for all time several thousand years ago.
The reader should keep in mind, that just because the explanations found herein that can provide a better basis for a reasoned sense of faith, nothing is found in the writing to show what came before the Universe and God were created; or why the cosmos was there. Faith is still a fundamental part of all religions for mankind.
While father tried hard to build explanations that passed the reporters test for truth, that is evidence that is irrefutable, such a goal eluded him in his life and he died in 1978, just a few days after returning to work on his book, after a hiatus of almost six years because of failing health and a lack of courage to battle again with the tasks that had previously left him discouraged by his own ability to find a logical flaw in some argument and not know how to correct it.
A priest (Fr. Brian) gave me the conviction that publishing his work is only important if it gives someone the chance to ask questions not asked before. I would add that giving better explanations for some of the history of our Judeo-Christian heritage is not a bad idea either.
The introduction and first chapters contain some interesting ideas to explain answers to some fundamental questions about which we tend to find most people either ignorant or unwilling to find time to challenge. As a people we are prepared to take a lot on faith because it is easier.
In later chapters this book attacks many contemporary ideas and institutions of politics, economics and the Church. Recent events in world history have reinforced some of the concepts developed in this book that help explain the collapse of communism as well as moral decay in the western world. If such is prophetic, so be it.
Richard R. Tryon, Jr. Feb. 1996
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