text:
What Every Rational Person Should Know About ID
By Paul E. Murray
Vice-President, Texas Citizens for Science
Austin, Texas
2008 September 25
Comments and responses to
"What Every Christian Should Know About Intelligent Design"
by William Dembski
The Bible and Modern Science Conference
of the Center For Christian Apologetics
Houston, Texas
2008 August 23
[Transcription by Paul Murray from a recording]
On August 23, 2008, Dr. William Dembski, noted professor, fellow of the Discovery Institute and Intelligent Design proponent gave a speech at a workshop put on by the Center for Christian Apologetics in Houston, Texas. The title of this speech was "What Every Christian Should Know About Intelligent Design". The entire transcript of this talk is available by email request to Paul Murray.
I always begin any analysis or peer review by pointing out the positives. Dr. Dembski is an excellent speaker, both entertaining and engaging. He was also gracious enough to entertain a few questions from me after his talk, and seemed very open and approachable.
It is there my praise must end, because the content of his talk was flawed in reasoning, contained false analogies, logical fallacies, circular reasoning, and in some cases, intellectual dishonesty. Given his knowledge and breadth of experience in this debate, I found it incomprehensible that he would continue to make arguments that have been thoroughly discredited.
The mark of a real scientist is they are willing to abandon discredited ideas and spend their time searching for new and better problems on which to spend their time. Dembski continues to promote ideas without scientific basis, and does so by redefining what is meant by science and so he can intentionally obscure well-understood lines between science and religion. This practice is both unscientific and un-Christian.
I began writing this as a paper, pulling quotes from the transcript and commenting on them. It quickly became apparent that, given the sheer volume of comments I wanted to make, it would be easier to intersperse them throughout. Therefore, I have indented Dembski's transcribed text of his talk. Any comments by me in brackets [] are of the nature of the transcription. They denote passages which are undecipherable and could not be clearly transcribed, words added to clarify meaning in written form, or indications of actual language by [sic]. Everything else is transcribed as-is to the best of my ability using limited equipment. Some pauses or misspoken words are removed to improve readability, but my strategy was to lean towards verbatim transcription unless it proved distracting to read. Likewise, all punctuation is my own.
Paul Shockley introduces William Dembski
[Speaker's Introduction (incomplete, beginning cut off):]
George Orwell once said that, "We have now sunk to the depth where the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men." The restatement of the obvious is one way to describe the empirical work of contemporary Intelligent Design theorists; moreover, one Intelligent Design scholar who has performed that duty very well—restating the obvious—one whose name is now common in philosophy of science is Doctor William Dembski.
Dr. Dembski is a research professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Cultural Engagement at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He holds a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Chicago and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He also has earned degrees in statistics, theology and psychology. He has written numerous scholarly articles and is the author of the critically acclaimed The Design Inference; Intelligent Design; No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot be Purchased Without Intelligence, and The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design. He is also a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture. Now more than likely this is not the first time you have been introduced to him. If you recently saw the popular documentary Expelled, which exposes suppression of academic freedom in institutions of higher learning, Dr. Dembski was one of the people interviewed by Ben Stein. And so it's our great privilege to end our plenary sessions with Dr. Dembski.
[William Dembski:]
Thank you, it's nice to be here with you. I want to—the title of this talk is "What Every Christian Should Know about Intelligent Design", and I think the way I want to cash it out is in terms of five words: evolution, creation, design, science, and nature. And to start the ball rolling let me talk about evolution a little bit.
About six years ago, I was asked to be part of a debate at the America Museum of Natural History (this is the big natural history museum in Manhattan, in New York City). When I got the request to take part in the debate, the debate title as it was given was "Blind Evolution or Intelligent Design?" (question mark). Blind Evolution or Intelligent Design? (question mark). And you know, as with most debates, thereís a question, which then will be debated, there will be pro and con. When I showed up at the auditorium in which the debate was to be held, there were program guides being handed out. And when I looked at the program, the title of the debate had been changed for some reason: "Evolution or Intelligent Design?" (question mark). I don't think the organizers meant any deception, in fact, I think they did us a service because what they did, in effect, was identify blind evolution with evolution, and indeed that's what is meant by it [evolution].
Well, when evolutionists talk about evolution, they do not mean intelligent evolution, a process that is guided by an intelligence to achieve some end. Francisco Ayala, probably the most widely published evolutionist this side of the Atlantic is at UC Irvine (former Catholic priest), [who] with Theodore Dobzhansky has said that Darwin's greatest achievement was to show that the functional organization of living things could be brought about without the need for a creator or a designing intelligence. And so, that was his achievement. Its not that God doesn't exist, but that God (as far as the evolutionary process is concerned) need not exist. Okay? And so that's the—that's the selling point; that we can get, basically, all the goodies that we attributed in the past to intelligence without the need for intelligence. That would be a great thing if you could get Shakespeare's works without Shakespeare, right? You could write a computer program or something that would just give you all these wonderful works of literature. Well, I think that'—so that's the impulse—that in this sense we might say that evolution is the ultimate free lunch and could work—if it could be made to work it would be quite a marvelous thing. I think that what we're now finding out though is that there is no free lunch in [undecipherable] evolution is more rapid [?] than we might call it.
So the question, though, then is really what is this theory of evolution? Let's—let's talk about that a little bit just to be clear on it. Because often I think we get hung up —especially if we take the Bible seriously—you know, it seems we don't have much support for the idea of organisms transforming into other organisms; we see the ideas that God created things according to their kinds, that things stayed pretty close to type; you know, our common experience when organisms reproduce, yes there's some variation, but it's "life begets life"—you don't find a slug giving birth to a mouse or something like that, you know, it's all very close together.
This is a very old argument, one that is often described as a "banana tree turning into a dog". Darwinian evolution has never claimed that one species gives birth to another. Since Dembski knows what Darwinian evolution actually claims, it begs the question as to either his intentions or how well-informed he is.
So, what—so, I think we often get hung up on the idea that there's this transformation over time (of organisms). Now that—that is one pillar of Darwin's theory, and it's called common descent and universal common ancestry; the idea that all organisms trace their lineage back to their last universal common ancestor.
Which would mean then that you, the bacteria in your gut and insects in this room, all living things are really cousins somewhat and trace their ancestry back to some great great great great grandparent which was some (presumably) some bacteria. It's like we're all cousins, but you know—you might have a third cousin once removed—well in this case you might be a billionth cousin five hundred million removed from a slug or something like that. So that's—that is the view.
The following point about theism is noteworthy because it will reemerge at the very end of the talk:
Now, I think biblically, it's hard to square yourself with that, but by itself, I would say that's not a problem for generic theism. I mean, God, presumably, could choose to create any way he wanted. I'm not there; I doubt that many of you are there in that view—but if that's how God created—if God moved in this process and a certain time you have suddenly there's a—maybe it's a massive evolutionary change at one point where primates evolve into human beings, that God puts in them spirit and all this—you know, that's still compatible with some form of design or purpose in this, okay? I mean, that's not flying in the face of theistic belief.
At the end of the talk, Demsbki revisits this point, only with the opposite sentiment. Dembski is referring to theistic evolution, a doctrine held by the Catholic Church which basically says all of modern science and all Christian doctrine are completely compatible with each other, assuming one does not attempt to read the Bible literally. For Biblical literalists, Protestant fundamentalists and YECs of all stripes, this is a major stumbling block as Demsbki notes.
That's not when Richard Dawkins says Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist, it's not the claim of common descent that made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist; what did is the second pillar of Darwin's theory. So we look...
A Darwinist says there is this great chain, this tree of life where all organisms trace back to a, presumably some bacterium, several hundred, several billion years ago, but the question then is well, how did that happen, because as I said in our experience we don't see organisms vastly changing, you know, from one generation to the next; organisms seem to stay largely the same. So what could drive that process from a single-celled organism to a multi-celled organism like yourself? You know, what could do that? Well that's the second pillar—and that's, I would say, the more important claim of Darwinism—that it is a blind material process [undecipherable], namely, natural selection acting on random variation. So what is that?
Well, the idea is that organisms, when they reproduce, they change. That is, there are going to be slight variations. If you have an organism—organisms that reproduce exact copies, replicas, there could be no evolutionary change, because from one generation to the next you'd just have identical copies. Okay, so there's got to be some variation. Now if there are variations, presumably some of those variations might conduce to help an organism survive and reproduce better than its siblings, okay? Those that had some sort of advantage would go on to survive and reproduce, those that didn't would get weeded out of the population. There's also a competition for scarce resources, also, organisms can't just reproduce without some being weeded out.
Take—there's a microplasma bacteria, for instance, that reproduces it's life cycles every twenty minutes. Over a three day time period, that bacterium ['s population] doubled, doubled, and doubled every twenty minutes; within three days, you'd have the biomass of that bacterium, of the offspring of that bacterium would exceed the mass of the earth. So that's how quickly it would go. I think Albert Einstein when asked what was the most powerful force in the universe said it was compound interest [audience chuckle]. All this compounding, this exponential growth will happen, you know, it's there in the organisms, so there's going to be this—this constraint, and natural selection is what's going to weed things out.
Now, the thing this, put that way, natural selection doesn't tell you anything about what is going to be selected, or given, taken out, and treated as an advantage. You might say, well, getting faster should be an advantage; well, in world of banana peels where going fast would cause you to slip and break your neck—that may not be an advantage, okay? So, just what is going to constitute "fitness", the theory really doesn't tell you. In fact, you've got to look and see after the fact. But the point, though, it's that process—it's really trial and error tinkering. You've got some random change happens, and it's not forward-looking, it's not purposeful; it's not that some change happens in an offspring where the idea is, "Oh, this is going to help in the future, this is going to weed somebody [out]". It's all just a random change without any correlation to future benefit, and then natural selection likewise is not thinking gee, you know, this feature of the organism isn't going to help me right now, think maybe there's some sort of light sensitivity [in] this skin (we talked this, about how the eye might have evolved), but you know, right now, we don't have any neural circuitry to take advantage of that, but let me keep that light sensitivity, and I'll try to develop some neural circuitry, then I'll coordinate them in a hundred or a thousand generations, you know.
If you are at all familiar with the evolution debate, you will recognize the importance of the evolution of the mammal's eye as a central component of the "irreducible complexity" argument popularized by Michael Behe. IDologues, of course, love to use Darwin's quote from "On the Origin of Species" where he questions how something as complex as an eye could evolve by natural selection. They always omit the following paragraph where Darwin points out several examples of different eyes in nature and lays out a possible evolutionary path. Darwin himself dispensed with this argument 150 years ago. I am positive that Dembski himself has read this paragraph, so why then does this example keep coming up? How is it that a man who can claim malfeasance and conspiracy at the highest levels of academia is himself engaging in such a ridiculous argument?
Natural selection doesn't work that way; it's an instant gratification mechanism which says, "What's going to help me right now to survive and reproduce?"
I disagree that natural selection is a mechanism of "instant gratification". Natural selection is not a wasteful process, but I take issue with the use of the word "instant". Even in modern human history, we have seen ecosystems change, species go extinct and new ones arise when outside pressures in the environment change; adaptations that were once beneficial could became a detriment under changing conditions. There is simply no way to know this ahead of time, as Dembski clearly states. This conclusion does not follow from natural selection itself. He goes on:
So it's thoroughly non-teleological.
This is real problem for theistic evolutionists when they come into this game because they want to take the science of evolution as it is and then say, "And God did it that way". But if they say, "God did it that way", it's basically God set up the conditions in which this evolutionary process takes place, but the process itself says nothing about any sort of intelligence behind it.
Here, Dembski commits the error of confusing scientific cause with a religious question about ultimate cause. Given that ID proponents often try to be coy about who the designer is and say nothing about the intelligence behind the design, I'm not even sure what point Dembski is trying to make here other than to take another stab at theistic evolution. Natural selection is non-teleological (teleology=argument from design), but this is a non-sequitur because it is not related to the problem Dembski poses.
All sciences say nothing about any kind of supernatural intelligence, not just evolutionary biology. Science gives us ways to understand natural processes in the natural world based on observing (not coincidentally) nature. Did God set cause every single particle in the universe to form and move according to his will? Did he just create the universe and let the experiment run? Is there a God? Is there no God? These are all metaphysical questions about ultimate cause that are quite separate from (and unrelated to) science. In fact, one may be a theist, deist, pantheist, religious agnostic, or atheist and completely accept all of science. Science is, by definition, agnostic about any questions that lie outside its boundaries, so it can't tell you anything about religion unless a religion makes a specific claim about the natural world.
Here, Demsbki's strategy is clear; by blurring the line between science and religion, he is creating a false dichotomy which says, in effect, "If you think you can have science and religion coexist, you're wrong, and therefore your views of both are also wrong".
And so, I think that's why you have people like Dawkins saying that Darwin made it possible to an intellectually fulfilled atheist. Will Provine, historian in biology at Cornell will say that evolution is the greatest engine for atheism ever provides [sic] because it gives you a purely materialistic creation story. Yes, you can always as a veneer put a theistic (if I mix my metaphor) spin on it, you know, but that's over and above; it's not something you're getting from the science. The science is telling you nothing about any sort of intelligence or agency operating in the evolutionary process.
And yet, later in this talk, Dembski will claim that ID theory makes no claim about nor tries to tell you anything about the ultimate cause (intelligence or "source of information") behind the design and that's okay—but if evolution doesn't tell you anything about the cause of life, that's a problem. This is hypocritical on its face.
And so, that's disconcerting, I think, especially if you take Genesis and the Scriptures seriously, but if, you now, if God is real, you would think that God would give some evidence of having done something in the physical world. After all, I mean, traditional Christian theism has always taught that Creation is a reflection—is designed to reflect God's work. And so if our science is not telling us anything, that should—that should cause some concern.
Why? If you accept the idea that God is somehow reflected in the design of nature, why does it have to appear in ways that humans perceive it? The argument goes that God designed things in such a way that man, through his intellect, would be eventually able to perceive his Grand Design. Of course, this is circular reasoning. It also leads to another contradiction we'll explore later.
So we've got a theory that really seems to allow no place for (I think Kurt used the quote from Lewontin) "no divine foot in the door". And so we've got a theory that has no real place for [God]—Darwin himself said he'd give nothing for his theory if it required miraculous intervention in any one place.
This quote is used/abused by creationists who want to portray science as anti-religious. (Kurt T. Wise of the CCA has used this quote on a number of occasions). In truth, NO theory of science allows a "divine foot in the door" otherwise it's simply not science. "God did it" is not a valid scientific explanation for any scientific problem. Once you allow "God did it" as an explanation, the need for further inquiry stops, the process of science ends, and the hope for any future knowledge dies along with it. Of course, Wise and his cohorts get around this by drawing a false distinction between "empirical" and "origins" science, which is meant to separate sciences of "actual observations" from "indirect" or "inferred" observations about past or distant phenomena.
In truth, ALL sciences are proximal. ALL measurements and observations are indirect, and all scientists accept that we must rely on objective indirect evidence that might be separate from our own experience. We attempt to explain what we observe by creating models that have some predictive power. We build the best models we can with the understanding that our knowledge is incomplete and imperfect. This is the quest for "proof without certainty" as Ashley Montagu wrote; this is science.
So I think now—I think it's important to see also why the evolutionist is so dead set against the Intelligent Design position. They really think it's an entirely disreputable position.
I agree with Dembski on this point; ID is disreputable at best. The following thought experiment by Demsbki is an example of false analogy and another self-contradiction:
From our vantage, you know, the evolutionary theory has real problems, but I think a way to appreciate what's going on in evolutionary theory is to think of the following little thought experiment.
Imagine that you're on the Mall in Washington, D.C., the big area; Martin Luther King [Jr.] gave his "I Have a Dream" speech there. So you got a million people there—a million people standing, and everybody has a coin, their coin in his hand/her hand, and we're gonna play a game. We're going to flip a coin, and everybody flips a coin, if they get heads they remain standing, tails they sit down. And we keep doing that. Well, what happens? Well first round, about half [the] people will sit down. Next round, about another half of those standing will sit down. So, first round, 500,000, then 250,000, then 125,000, 62,500 and so on. So we just keep going. We run the numbers, and on average after about twenty coins tosses, one person is going to be left standing. Now, when notice that one person standing, you go to that person and say, "You know, this is really amazing. You're just a terrific coin tosser. What's—what's your secret?" And how many of you have flipped a coin twenty times in a row and it's come up heads? That's a remarkable event, right? Well, I think likewise the evolutionist says look, you know, we see life, we see us, you know, all these nifty organisms, we see ourselves, and yes, you know, we think it's remarkable but we're just fooled by this. You know, if only you really understanding the underlying process—if you understand the underlying process of the coin toss at the Mall in Washington, D.C., you'll understand that somebody's bound to come up with twenty heads in row. Likewise, you're bound to see organisms like us come up given enough time and given the process of natural selection acting on random variations and various other [undecipherable] mechanisms that are there.
Now, that's their attitude; I mean, in a sense, it's like design is just utterly superfluous, it's not necessary. You know, you can talk about the skill of this coin tosser but it had nothing to with it; well likewise, design had nothing to do with this process. That's the view of a materialistic scientist. Now, I think where—where the design people would come in and say well, you know it's one thing to get 20 hits in a row where it's an expected outcome from a certain stochastic or chance-driven process. Well what if we saw a hundred hits in a row? What if we saw a thousand hits in a row, you know? And so, the question is—I mean, evolution is a chance-based mechanism. It's not pure chance, okay, there's natural selection is [sic] constraining you, but it is chance-based, and we can have some chance-based mechanisms. What—what is within the reach of those chance-based mechanisms and what's outside the reach? And that's the sort of question, then, that Intelligent Design is asking.
This is a simplified version of Dembski's "specified complexity" argument on how probable an event is based on statistics of random vs. non-random causes. The argument states if the probability of a known event X has a low probability of occurring at random, it is therefore more probable that a non-random process will cause X. Dembksi makes the leap that non-random must mean "intelligently designed", but that's not even the biggest problem with this argument.
As Dembski already admitted earlier in this talk, natural selection is not a process that can be judged in terms of prediction; one never knows what changes will make an animal more or less fit until some selective pressure is applied in the future. One only understands the evolutionary path in hindsight. The logic of Dembski's argument says that in order to first measure the probability, we MUST know the outcome, and therefore violates his own premise by assuming that any biological form was specified as a "final" outcome. This is known as "begging the question", where one assumes what he/she is trying to prove is true.
Put another way: the probability that homo sapiens evolved in their current form is remarkably—even impossibly—small, IF one is to look at it in terms of a specified final outcome; natural selection says we cannot. If we could re-run the evolution experiment of the last three billion years as many times, you'd probably never get homo sapiens exactly as we are today, but something would evolve, and the chance that some form of life would still be here after three billion years would be pretty good.
If we were to make an honest comparison of the coin toss experiment to natural selection, the real experiment is that someone would flip a coin twenty times in a row. Since the final outcome isn't an a priori constraint, the actual probability of flipping a coin twenty times is one-to-one, not one million-to-one.
So, I've given you the first word—evolution—okay, we said there were five words: evolution, design, creation, science and nature. So, let's talk a little bit then about Intelligent Design and what it's bringing to the party.
Let me give you this definition of intelligent design, and it's really the going definition. We define it as follows: the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the product of intelligence; [repeats for clarification] the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the product of intelligence.
When did pareidolia become an accepted field of scientific inquiry? If I see a figure of Jesus in an oil stain or the devil's face in the clouds of the World Trade Center rubble, does this not also indicate a pattern in nature that might be explained by intelligence?
If this is the best definition for ID that exists, I suggest they rename ID to "biological apophenia".
So, what we're looking at are patterns and are there some things about the patterns we see in nature that would point us to intelligence? You're driving through southwest South Dakota, you see this rock formation that looks like Teddy Roosevelt, Abe Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and you say, "Wow, that's just amazing what, you know, give wind and erosion enough time and here we get these, these presidents. Well, no, you don't say that right? Because you know that those sorts of material forces don't have the capacity to bring something like that about. You'd rather say that there was an eccentric artist that probably spent the greater part of his life chiseling and dynamiting portions of that mountain. And that's what's convincing to people; that's the conclusion that you'd draw. Even if you didn't know that Gutzon Borglum spent the greater part of his life—you didn't know the name—you were an alien that came to this planet and knew something about American presidents and human faces, you'd be able to figure it (that one) out.
So, it's—so, there are patterns that we can see that will point us to intelligence. Well likewise, when you look at certain patterns in biology, they point us to intelligence. And I think it's important to stress here that this is not an argument from ignorance. I think often were caricatured as saying, you know, it's just too complex—that's the tagline in the, among the media these days, you know: "Intelligent Design says that there's something in biology that are just too complex, so they must have been created by God, by a miracle or something like that", you know. But that's not what we're saying, okay. What are we saying?
Okay. That there's certain features of biological systems that exhibit marks of engineering—that, that we need to be engineers to understand them, they give signs of having been engineered. We know of no material process that is able to bring about those features, okay? And as a consequence, you know—and we do know that engineering principles and engineers can bring about systems like this. Therefore, it's reasonable to think that there's actual engineering there.
Here Dembski hits the outer wall of the NASCAR racetrack of circular reasoning. We see patterns in nature, we perceive them to be the result of the same sort of engineering that we humans do because that seems like a decent analog, so therefore it must be engineered; Q.E.D. Dembski may accuse Darwinian evolutionists of getting a free lunch, but this is the ultimate example of having your cake and eating it, too. It's an argument from human egoism. Are humans god-like engineers, or is God a fallibly human-like designer? God is all-powerful, his mind is beyond that of human comprehension, and his thought is far beyond any human comprehension... except in this single case where ID proponents happen to think that human engineering analogs are close enough to God's that it proves his existence. How convenient! Not only does this argument elevate humans to the level of God (surely this must be blasphemous to some ID proponents), it's also a case of special pleading.
So, that's—that's the sort of argument we're making. It's not an argument from ignorance, it's an argument from knowledge. It's precisely because of what we know about the causal probabilities [possibly "properties"] of engineers and intelligence that we say we're seeing the same sorts of things that we've created (through our own ingenuity) in living cells; therefore, it's reasonable to think that those are designed. If we didn't know about the engineering features—if we were like Darwin and thought that a cell was a blob of jello enclosed by a membrane—then we might think that life came about according to your processes. Notice how the argument from ignorance works there. I mean, prior to Darwin, it was accepted that life was the product of intelligence. And Darwin comes along and says, "Hey, things are simple, it could have just come about by natural forces," precisely because he knew so little, because microscopy of his day told him so little about the inside of the cell, he, from the argument of ignorance, rejected design. So it's an interesting inversion.
During the course of this workshop, I sat through an hour on why Darwin caused the Holocaust and another hour on all the "evidence" for why the Earth is only 6,000 years old. I write this so you have some context to understand what it means when I write that the previous line was the dumbest thing I heard that day. Are Kepler's laws the product of the argument form ignorance since he didn't have Newton's understanding of calculus?
According to Dembski, all scientists who are limited to the best scientific knowledge of their own time period all make arguments from ignorance because the future will provide more data—all scientists, that is, except for him and the ones with time machines, I suppose.
So here we find that, in fact, our best knowledge is telling us that we argue from design. Now we can ramp that up with this whole method of design detection I've developed, there are particular biological systems we can look at—the challenge for Intelligent Design, by the way, is not to show that every aspect of biology is designed. Richard Dawkins opens his book "The Blind Watchmaker" by saying, "Biology is the study of complicated things that given the appearance of having been designed for a purpose." But then he spends the next 300 pages arguing that it is merely the appearance of purpose.
Now, if I'm going to rebut that, what do we have to show? Do we have to show that every aspect of biology is designed? No; the negation of that is to show that there are some aspects of biology that are designed. So if we could go inside the cell, though, and show, for instance, that the protein synthesis mechanism inside the cell is designed—well, if an aspect of something is designed, the thing in which its contained is also designed. So if your protein synthesis mechanism is designed, that means your cells are designed, that means that you are designed. Now there maybe features of you that are properly ascribed to accidents of natural history, you know, maybe that's some viral DNA that's gotten into your genome, their bacterial DNA, now but that doesn't undercut the design. I mean, there's a lot of viral quote-unquote DNA that gets into your Windows operating system, you know, you gotta do various things to clean it up, and yet we think that there is intelligence at Microsoft and that gave us these operating systems and these systems. I was talking to my good friend Bob Marks who is also in "Expelled" and he told me that back when he was in Seattle he said there were more lawyers working for Microsoft than actual software engineers. So, I guess there's intelligence there, but the nature of that intelligence is itself suspect.
Okay. So that's intelligent design. Now, what about—how does that then relate to creation or creationism? And I think here we need to be very clear, because there is some intersection, but there is also—there are also some differences.
First off, I think "creation"—I mean, as a Christian, you are, you believe, hold to a doctrine of creation. Now "doctrine of creation"—what does that commit you to? It's that there is a source of being to the world. Now, what happens in Genesis? God gives "being" to the world and then organizes it. God speaks the world into existence, gives existence, and then organizes, makes distinctions, you know, draws—makes the separation of light and dark, separation of water, separation of heaven and earth, you know; different creatures are formed. So, there's—so the design really speaks only to the organizational aspect of preexisting stuff, it does not speak to where the stuff came from [sic]. So a carpenter is a designer, okay, but a carpenter is not a creator in the sense of giving being to the very materials that the carpenter gives arrangement to [sic].
I will revisit this comment a bit later, but it's important to note here the argument that Dembski uses. ID as a theory implies a designer, but that's a separate issue. It becomes important later, so we continue:
And I think that's an important distinction because in a sense, the design argument (or design inference) never gets us to creation; because what we do, I mean, we're looking, as scientists—we're looking around the room, we're looking at objects, looking at patterns in those objects—these are finite material objects—and we're saying are there patterns there that would point us to intelligence? Well, you know, we're not asking about the source of where that material came from in the first place, okay? And so that's—I think it's an important distinction. One way to drive it home is there's a joke (it seemed like it was more current to me a few years ago than it did now), but it's:
Scientists come to God and they say, "We can do it. We can do everything you can do."
God says, "Oh, that's interesting. Can you show me—show me what you mean by that?"
[Scientists]: "Well, we can make humans!"
[God]: "Okay, well how do you do this?"
[Scientists]: "Well first you take some dust in your hand, and you're about ready to go..."
And God says, "Okay, but get your own dust."
[laughs from audience]
So, where do you get the stuff that can then be arranged? And that's a question, really, science cannot answer, because science always presupposes a causal material backdrop against which then it has [undecipherable] its theorems. So that's, I think, what creation gives you, it's the source of being of the world.
Now, a doctrine—or rather, creationism seems to go somewhat further than that. It doesn't just get you a doctrine of creation, but it usually gives you some particular interpretation of scripture and then there's a conscious move to harmonize an interpretation of scripture with the science of the day. That—I think it's an interesting enterprise, it's not something that Intelligent Design is committed to, okay? In sense, there is, for instance, a controversy between old earth and young earth creationists about how to properly interpret Genesis; Intelligent Design really takes no sides on that, and you have young-earth and old-earth creationists who are part of the Intelligent Design community. In a sense, what Intelligent Design says is that the design problem doesn't go away if you give [it] thousands or billions of years. It's still there—a billion years doesn't buy you much—it doesn't help chance accomplish what the "chance worshippers" of Darwin and others hope that it will accomplish. So it's not committing you to a doctrine of creation, and in fact, there are many people and groups now who are finding Intelligent Design congenial but who are not Christians or even theists in a traditional sense. I spoke at a [sic] Oxford Center for Hindu Studies about five years ago, and they were all taken with Intelligent Design; they had no problem with it, okay, but they're not Christian theists.
This previous line becomes important during the wrap-up, as does the remark about theistic evolution noted earlier, when Dembski decries any religious view that doesn't accept the Bible literally as he does.
Now, I think just about anybody who sees some sort of underlying purposiveness [sic] to reality—most religious views do, you know? Why are you here? "Oh just going along. It's a meaningless world, there's no meaning to anything." That's pretty thin soup on which to build a religious faith, you know? Try to get adherence, you know, to that! I mean, the adherence that we have in this sort of post-modern realism is as a reaction against Christianity and against our Christian heritage. But you know, but most religious traditions, it seems, are inclined towards some form of Intelligent Design; they're—they would at least open to it.
Here are two points worth addressing in the previous passage. First, this is just an insulting and disingenuous attempt to say that any metaphysical view which does not accord with Dembski's must therefore remove all meaning from life, the universe and everything. This is simply ignorant.
Second, the comment about "most religious traditions" finding an accord with ID will later be revealed to be disingenuous. We continue on:
So, Intelligent Design is not creationism and yet insofar as creationism wants to make arguments for it being rational to believe in a creator, Intelligent Design certainly helps. It means there's an intelligence behind the world, you know, and the next question involves who or what would that intelligence be, you know? And as a Christian, you know, there's a ready answer. So it's the—the God that created the world.
It is refreshing to me that an ID proponent is willing to admit that the Christian god is the designer.
So—okay, so we've got evolution, Intelligent Design, creation and creationism—let's talk a little bit about science. So, is it [intelligent design] science? Well, you know, I'd ask is creation or creationism science? I think creationism, there can be elements of it that are scientific, but it does seem to commit you also to certain religious viewpoints, especially if you're committed to establishing a particular understanding of scripture and trying to back it up or assure it's harmonious with a certain scientific view, I think you're going to have a hard time (especially in this legal climate) to argue that it's science, or at least pure science. There may be elements of science that you're [undecipherable].
I would be very interested to know what parts of creation (a religious idea based in metaphysics) are scientific (a discipline based on epistemology, logic, and methodological naturalism). This is post-modern nonsense; you cannot have a meaningful debate about science and religion if you insist on constantly redefining the terms as you see fit during the course of a conversation.
But what about Intelligent Design? You know, is it scientific? Well, especially if you were at my last talk, I think often it's put as though you've got this designer—this spooky designer that's somehow getting in there and miraculously making things, materials out of nothing, putting, bringing about organisms and things like that. But, as I was arguing at the 2 o'clock lecture, you know, we can think of this as there are material processes have limited powers of self-organization, they require information to be properly organized. We see this in all sorts of contexts; I mean, this computer, for instance, the chips in it—they didn't just spontaneously assemble. That silicon and all the materials there—they had to be organized. Once it's organized, they can perform a certain function, and that organization did not come from the silicon, much as ink and paper also don't have the power to organize themselves into meaningful text. And so, that information has to come from elsewhere. Now, it may come from elsewhere in the universe; now, you can ask where did that come from? Well, maybe it came from someplace else, and so on, and so on, and so on, but ultimately, you're going to argue that it comes from a mind, from an intelligence. So, what are we talking about then? We're talking about a science of information transfer. Now, information—that is science! That's—isn't that right Bob, I mean, that's what engineers do? Yes, a thumb's up, soÖBob is a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Baylor—world-class people in this area. [Dembski is referring to Robert J. Marks II, professor at Baylor and colleague in the "Evolutionary Informatics Lab"]
So it is science. I think you'd be hard-pressed to argue that it isn't.
I will make the argument that it is not, and I find no difficulty in doing so later. We continue:
Let me ask you one other thing. What about Darwinian evolution? Is it science? [nearby chuckles]. You know, there is—I don't want to say that Darwin got nothing right, I mean, you know, if you look at, for instance, antibiotic resistance in bacteria or insecticide resistance in insects, that does seem to follow a Darwinian pattern. Insects will be exposed to insecticide; there are some that are going to be resistant, and then over time those that are more resistant are reproducing and the population will develop a resistance to that insecticide; so that seems to hold, but that's not the interesting or grand claim of evolutionary theory, [which] is how did you get those insects in the first place? Supposed to happen from a single cell evolving into this multi-celled insect. And that, I would say—there is no empirical support for that. You don't even have to qualify that with, "I would say there's no"—there isn't any! It's just not there, okay? So, insofar as these people are claiming that this is scientific—a scientific theory—the grand evolutionary story—I would say it's a completely unsupported claim and therefore it's not scientific.
So, the fossil record, paleontology, historical geology, geochronology, evolutionary and molecular biology, cellular biology, genetics—none of these fields, with hundreds and thousands of practitioners, publishing data and peer-reviewing each others' works in legitimate scientific journals for the last 150 years—none of that constitutes any empirical evidence for evolution? Really?
So, you know, there's all this talk about mandating Intelligent Design, should be it mandated, perhaps it should be mandated that evolution not be taught; at least, not those sorts of grand claims because it's not scientific. And there is evidence for intelligence and information producing in [undecipherable] system. There is no evidence for these undirected, unguided material processes doing the same.
And here we see Great Truth Number One about IDologues. This is not "teach the controversy", nor "teach the strengths and weaknesses of evolution"; this is not even "equal time"; this is intellectual fascism attempting to eradicate any ideas that disagree with one group's religious ideology.
Okay, so that's the science. You know, let me also say one other thing, [be]cause often it's said, well, you know, but if you have—okay, if you call it an information source, you know, okay, you're just get away [undecipherable] it's not really God, or a designer, an "information source", but, you know, how is that information source the subject of science, okay? I mean, you haven't—that it seems to be an immaterial entity and science studies material entities, it looks at natural causes. So we've often heard that sort of line.
Question: science only studies natural causes; is that a scientific claim? What sign of evidence shows you that that's what science only studies? It sounds like a—a kind of an arbitrary rule about how we're supposed to do science. You know, we get—I think we have this sense, sometimes (at least, it's present to us) that there is the scientific method. Percy Brigdman, Nobel Laureate physicist said the scientific method, insofar that it is a method is doing gymnastics of the mind, no-holds-barred. We're trying to understand the truth about nature, and we don't want to shackle our minds and our powers of inquiry with some artificial restraints which prevent us from knowing the truth about nature. That's what these sorts of assumptions—naturalistic assumptions—do. And there's nothing that says that in order to explain something, we need to explain the thing that's doing the explaining, you know. Explain to me the "Jupiter Symphony". Well, Mozart, this great musical genius, composed that symphony, probably just all in his head and then wrote it down. [Undecipherable] Okay, but you haven't explained Mozart. Where did Mozart come from, you know? Well, you know, all explanations end at some point, you know, and Intelligent Design is not asking for an ultimate explanation, it's a proximate explanation. You're asking for, "Was there design involved?" Where did the designer come from? Well, it's an interesting question, but that's not—you don't have to answer that question for design still to do some useful explanatory work. You don't put those requirements in other areas of science and inquiry; why should you do it here?
Evolutionary theory of all forms (from Darwin to modern evolution) makes no claim about the origin of life, the origin of the Earth, or the materials from which all things in the universe exist. It's a theory about biological diversity on this planet. It, like all theories, does not answer all questions about all things. Dembski invokes this precept to defend the compartmentalization of ID theory from the identity of the designer.
This is hypocritical for two reasons. First, Dembski posited a universe without a creator was devoid of meaning, then implied that because evolution said nothing about creation, it was an incomplete theory. Therefore, ID should be, in his view, a weak and incomplete theory since it makes no claims about the designer.
Second, the idea that ID theory does not have to provide any information about the nature of the designer is self-contradicting. If scientists were to agree that some piece of evidence in biology that was objectively proved to be designed, the very fact of its existence would be information about the designer. Archaeologists do this all the time when excavating ancient buildings or looking at primitive tools and artwork of long-dead cultures; engineers reverse-engineer devices. ID proponents again try to have it both ways.
But if the designer is the Christian god who is a supernatural force for whom the laws of the universe do not apply, how does one then tell what evidence in nature is supernatural and what evidence is natural? If you accept the ridiculous notion Dembski later proposes—that science should include room for supernatural forces—there is no way to test for or observe "supernatural" forces based on observation of the natural world.
There is no objective, empirical evidence for God's engineering or existence that can ever be demonstrated by any methodology, unless he happens to show up and write the paper up for "Nature" himself. Therefore, ID theory could never reveal the information it claims to seek. Not only is it an argument from ignorance and incredulity, it's a house of cards.
Adding insult to injury, it gets even worse for Christian ID proponents when they try to separate the "science" from the "religion" and get coy about who the designer is. This is antithetical for IDologues because if one ever did find incontrovertible evidence in the natural world for a designer, the science would force you to look for a natural designer in the natural word, not God. Oops.
Okay, and I suppose the final thing is nature, because I think there's an assumption throughout these dicussions as though nature is this purely material entity properly explained by purely material causes. And that's itself an assumption that's not scientifically based. The nature of nature is not something that we discover by scientific, empirical inquiry.
If we are to create models of natural phenomena based on observations of nature (this is what science does), then the nature of nature IS something that we can attempt to quantify through objective, empirical inquiry. Dembski is trying to imply that religious discovery (or self-dicsovery) is the same as scientific discovery. Both are valid pursuits, but only one should be taught in a science class.
I mean, in a sense, it's—there's a whole metaphysics that comes along with that.
Actually, there is no metaphysics that comes with science. Using the modern definitions that of the terms "science" and "metaphysics", metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that makes no claims about any specific science. "Natural philosophy" was used 400 years ago to mean what today we call "science". Modern ID proponents often confuse this with "philosophical naturalism", and Dembski and Wise both conflate this with "methodological naturalism"; each term is distinct and they are not synonymous. It is important to establish what is meant by terms like metaphysics, science, and philosophy if they are going to be the subject of debate. An audience not familiar with these concepts will be easily confused—and fooled—by these tactics.
And in fact, I mean, what we're finding out with Intelligent Design controversy, the materialists, they are finding ways to resist Intelligent Design by assuming that our universe is one an infinite number of alternative universes. The argument is that all this fine-tuning, all the features of the universe that make it life-permitting—they're so improbable that if our known material universe is the only universe, then it couldn't have happened by chance. So let's posit there are all these other universes out there, and this universe is just the lucky lottery in all these universes. And so just as you, if you won a lottery, would be surprised, overwhelmed by having one it, yet given all the other people that were playing, you know, somebody was bound to win it, and you just happened to be it. Well likewise, this universe just happened to be the lucky one, and we're here, we think we're lucky. We are, but most universes are unlucky and there's nobody there to observe how unlucky they were and so that's not a problem. [laughs]
Inflationary cosmology and multiple universe theories are not theories about evolution, nor are they on equal scientific footing (apologies to any astrophysicists out there) to evolution. Ideas such as these are on the cutting edge of science and are yet to be embraced as part of the core sciences.
Evolution, by contrast, is a well-accepted theory that is at the core of all modern biological science, with volumes of empirical evidence and well-established predictive powers. Of course, the average YEC non-scientist probably doesn't know this distinction, and so Dembski once again crosses philosophical wires to make a convoluted argument.
I kid you not—this is state-of-the-art thinking among physicists. I worked with Alan Guth when he presented his inflationary cosmology the first time at a seminar at Stanford, and we're reading this and Lenny Susskind, a physicist there, turned to Alan Guth and his first reaction was, "It's amazing what they pay us to do"óthat was his response. So, the nature of nature, I mean, it's not something that's just decided by scientific inquiry. I mean, I think science can point us in a direction, Intelligent Design is telling us there's intelligence behind things; and so I think it's point us to an intelligence behind things, but you know, if you monkey enough with the metaphysics, you can get rid of designóyou know, just get yourselves multiple, multiple universes and, you know, you can do it, you know. But it seems to me if thatóif you think God is disreputable, this is far more, you know.
Here we get to the real punch line, and Great Truth Number Two about ID and a few other astonishing revelations:
So, well, let me wrap things up. I suppose [a] question: why is this debate important? What's riding on it? And to talk about that a little bit, I want to tell you a story (and this is by way of wrap-up). About thirty years ago now, I was street witnessing on the streets of Chicago with some friends, and I was around Clark and Fullerton (mid-town area if you know the city), and I got to talking to two young men who were in their early twenties, and we were talking to them about the [undecipherable] of Christ. And initially they were just mocking us, ridiculing us, and they were drunk. And then after a while it turned somber and they started crying. It turns out that they had been Wheaton College students, they had graduated and gone to one of the liberal seminaries at the University of Chicago—around the University of Chicago there are about seven seminaries there—and they had lost their faith, and what they kept saying, over and over again is, "We wish we could believe the way you do but we can't anymore. We wish we could believe the way you do but we can't anymore."
Now what had they learned at seminary? Well I would say they learned two things very quickly: one, the Bible is not reliable, that it's a hodge-podge of various sources, usually put together by people who were not there within the events described. The miracles in the Bible could not have taken place. Well why couldn't they have taken place? Well, for another reason: because science has disproven the Bible because science has shown us that the world is constituted in such a way that miracles, God, things that are described in the Bible could not take place. So it's this materialistic view—view of science and nature—which precludes the Bible from not having any traction [sic].
You know, I think this is the great challenge of evolutionary theory, and this is the great promise of Intelligent Design. The challenge that evolutionary [theory] has given us a different creation story, that it's dispensed with God. [undecipherable] It's that this is all there is. It's that God—we've been shown how it all could have happened without the need for a creative intelligence. Okay, and then the promise of Intelligent Design is to reverse that, to show, no, without intelligence, this cannot happen; that the world is radically dependent on the need for an information source that organizes things; that the world is not, left to itself, does not have the power to bring about all the complexity [undecipherable], and that it does need an intelligence.
So let me tell you—since this is a theological discussion or context in which we're talking—let me say something then, because I've reflected on this—what I think the underlying motivation is for all this. I mean, it is (I will put it to you) a pelagiaism. Now that may not be a common word for many of you, but Pelagius was a heretic in the time of Augustine and he taught that basically God had given us everything we needed to procure our own salvation; there's no need for grace, okay? God's basically told us, "This is what you're supposed to do, and you just do it", okay? I think that's the impulse here at the scientific level. That the world's been given everything it needs to bring about all that it needs (and this is in terms of biology [und]), and then there's no radical dependence on God. And so it's an effort to get away from God. That's the impulse. And Intelligent Design is putting, sort of, Darwinists' feet to the fire and saying that it's just not in matter to organize itself in the ways that they claim.
Here comes Great Truth Number Two about ID:
And so, I think it's a big challenge to the scientific establishment, and it's very radical in the true sense of the word radical (going down to the roots), and it's much-needed. I think if this society is going to have any hope (I think it is), this is going to have play a big role in this because world view starts with the creation story; you mess that up, you've messed up everything down the line. What does a world view have? It's got a creation story, it's got [undecipherable] why we have problems, it offers a solution.
A materialistic solution, a materialistic predicament, this is not—you cannot build a sound public policy—one that respects Christianity—on that basis. Because, I mean, according to a materialistic creation story, our problem is that we spent most of our evolutionary past as hunter-gatherers that poorly adapts us to our current technological environment, our problems need to be fixed in terms of some sort of cognitive emotional therapy, with drugs, our genetics has damaged us along the way, and then the solution is that we are treated as a machine and we have to be fixed as machines. Well the problem is sin and rebellion against God, and then it's the grace of God and the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ that saves us—that's a very different solution.
I think Intelligent Design opens the way to that. Intelligent Design is friendly to Christian theism in a way that evolutionary theory is not; evolutionary theory has consistently proven itself hostile.
So, here we have it: ID seeks to resolve a false dichotomy between a meaningless, godless material universe and one designed by God with goodness, purpose, morality, rainbows and fluffy white kittens.
Perhaps my favorite statement is the following about theistic evolution:
I think, probably, some of the most dangerous people that we encounter right now are the theistic evolutionists that are telling us it's not a problem to combine the two.
At the beginning of his talk, Dembski said that you don't have to interpret the Bible literally in order to be an ID proponent, and the tent was big enough for young-earth creationists, old-earth creationists and theistic evolutionists of all stripes. But, if you don't believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, you are a dangerous person. There you have it: Pope John Paul II, Ken Miller—you are wolves in sheep's clothing. But if you're willing to get under the banner of ID so we can get our foot in the door, come on over, you evil, dangerous heathens, you!
So it's, this—there is a lot riding on this. You ask yourself, why is the evolution issue, I mean the things that are now coming from that—infanticide, euthanasia, eugenics [are] back—I mean, all these things are back on the table. Why is that? Well, I put it to you that [undecipherable]. So there's a lot riding on this for our culture.
I could not summarize this better. There IS a lot riding on this debate, but not merely for a small culture of fundamentalist Christians who wish to eradicate any views not consistent with their own; this is about our society as a whole which should respect all religions and beliefs, and teaches our children to understand the difference between science and religion while respecting both. ID achieves none of these, and encourages fear and animosity towards any who do not subscribe to its tenets.
Religion is a personal choice about personal metaphysical beliefs. Science is about what we can objectively glean about our universe using the best methods we can devise. We must understand and respect both if our society is to achieve something better for the next generation; otherwise we're just monkeys throwing bones at the moon.Paul Murray, txDOTpaulmATgmailDOTcom (send comments or corrections here) Texas Citizens for Science, tcsATtexscienceDOTcom (substitute @ for AT and . for DOT to email) Last updated: 2008 September 25


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Who is Niganit?
- According to the Lenape-English Disctionary:
- Niganigapawin, to stand foremost.
- Niganit, the foremost.
- Niganitawan, to run before somebody, to outrun some one; to come before somebody.
Rich has been participating in the Washington Men's Council of Greater Washington Men's Gathering at Buffalo Gap Camp since October 1992. He missed only one Gathering, in 2001.
Rich is proud to be a Brother contributing to the Leadership Council from afar. Rich maintains the Council's Web site that focuses on the fall Men's Gathering at Buffalo Gap Camp in Capon Bridge, WV. The Leadership Council plans and conducts the Annual Men's Gathering. He advises the Council on Web use.
Rich currently lives in Battle Ground, WA, just north of Portland, Oregon. He married his second wife, Carol, in May 1998 and his life is full of joy now. He is the proud grandfather of Alexander, born April 8, 2003 and Asher, born March 13, 2005 to Carol's daughter Mary and her husband Jonathan. Rich's first wife, Maureen, sadly passed away in 1997 after succumbing to the ravages of cholangiocarcinoma (liver cancer0. His one daughter of his first marriage, Jennifer Marie, lives in Northern Virginia and is married to a Fairfax County policeman.
Rich is on the faculty (since 1999) of Heald College, Portland, Oregon campus where he teaches community college level students a variety of subjects including Web page development, MS Office software, public speaking, math, and business courses. He maintains MrWteaches.net for his students. He is really proud of his Consider This part of his Web site.
Rich recently joined (April 2005) the faculty of Concordia University in Portland, Oregon and can't wait to teach there.
Rich has been hosting sites at Dreamhost since February 2004. I am really into Web Standards and make extensive use of CSS in all my current Web designs. I do use Dreamweaver MX 2004 quite a bit, and am learning more and more every day about PHP and MySQL. I blog on Consider This. I am an avid fan of MovableType. In March 2005 I almost landed a job as a Web Developer for a community credit union in the Portland Oregon area. I might still have a bit of a chance! Keep praying.

subset: commoncrawl


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"And then my father told me, 'It's time to feed the pigs,' and I knew it was time to take the leftover food from the Nazi soldiers and go downstairs to the basement where the Jewish families were living in our café."
Those words have been etched in my memory from the time I was a little boy, a story told time and time again when my Mom was a pre-teen girl in World War II in Scheveningen, a little coastal town in Holland. My grandparents ran a café and during the occupation of the Netherlands, the occupying German soldiers took over their café. My Swiss grandmother sang German songs to them, and I remember her saying, "They were just boys and they wanted to be home with their Muttis, too, so I tried to offer them some comfort."
Meanwhile, my mom watched her Jewish piano teacher and his family divided up at gunpoint and pushed onto different trucks going different directions. Slowly, the Jewish families in the neighborhood simply disappeared, and my mother never knew what happened to them. Some of them ended up in their basement. They stayed there a few days, a few weeks, and eventually they were gone in the middle of the night, and my mother (and my Oma) never knew where they went from their basement. My grandfather never said, and told them it was for the best that they not know. She never saw any of them ever again, but she later found out that many were safe.
At 15, my Mom was sent to a farm in the free territory of Holland where she pretended to be a daughter during the Hunger Winter of 1944. She wrote it all in a diary. For years she told those stories to school children at my sister's classes that she taught, and she brought the few pictures and the actual diary she wrote.
My mom, Rosamunda De Mos Szymanski, died on June 1, 2014 at the age of 84. If anything is fitting for a tribute or memory of her, it is that she was a survivor of so many things.
As a child, she survived the war and a father who was married three times. She survived a botched abortion done by a farmer in France and had to be fed raw horse meat to stay alive. She survived a tough marriage, a bout with alcoholism, and even kicked smoking cigarettes which she said "Must be as hard as giving up heroin" (not that she knew). She survived trying times with me, liking both my girlfriends and boyfriends, and eventually came to the March on Washington in 1993 that was the biggest march ever for GLBT rights. She wore a shirt reading, "My son is Bi, I don't ask why" and I wore a shirt reading, "My Mom is straight, but she don't hate."
When I was 6 we had a devastating fire that destroyed the two-story brownstone in Brooklyn where we were living. My mom tried to save us by throwing a flaming greasy pan out a window, but it fell over her and she was severely burned. She was told she never would regain the use of her right arm again, and sustained a series of grafts on her stomach, legs, arm and head. She worked her arm until she could move it again, and she ended up being a great tennis player—even later embarrassing us by calling us to say she won a tennis competition at a nudist colony!
She beat uterine cancer, she became an American citizen, she survived a few car crashes. She once had a boyfriend (in later years after divorcing my Dad) with a guy who became a bank robber and was gunned down on live TV, and had a whole other family!
We lived in Germany, Holland, Baltimore, New York, Dallas, Hawaii, Florida, all following my Dad's civilian job for the Army-Air Force Exchange Service. She loved Hawaii, taking up hula and even learning the language. She was a crazy red-head, who kept her hair unnatural shades of Lucille Ball-red and in various stages of curly or pouffy or short.
She loved visiting, and eventually living, in California. She attended the school shows and the community events in Studio City, Hollywood and Burbank, and eventually had a stroke and lived for the past seven years at a local nursing home.
Over this past week, as she was getting worse in health, I'd go hold her hand and read Facebook messages to her from the computer. My friend Richard, who sings Tin Pan Alley music, came over to sing "Second Hand Rose" to her. When we visited his show (even when she was in her wheelchair), he always made a point to sing that to her. We also read jokes that she kept in a folder. She could never tell a joke very well—it was more funny to hear them in her accent and how she mispronounced words—but she wrote them down when she heard them, or typed them out, and they were all in this folder. Many of them were rather blue, but Richard and I took turns reading them to her. Even the hospice helper there commented about how nasty they were. I think mom enjoyed it.
My sister Michele, a middle school teacher, was called when it looked like it was the end, and despite waiting and staying there, Rose seemed to want to hang on. Her grandkids whom she loved so much, Dante and Donovan, already said good-bye, as did my partner John, and I stroked her snow-white hair and told her it was OK to go.
But, she waited until moments after any family was out of the room to leave this world. It seems like the "surrounded by friends and family" is often only how it happens in the movies, and the reality is that many times people wait until their loved ones are gone to slip away alone.
Anyway, Mom was a survivor. She insisted on being buried in the same window-box with my Dad in a columbarium in Hollywood Forever Cemetery and insisted that "You move your father to the back, and my urn with the roses is up front." She is buried across from a friend of mine, Gary, who was known for doing amazing drag performer at the Queen Mary in Studio City.
My Mom once invited Gary to stay for dinner and called him "fatso" in a loving way, but he was insulted and retorted with, "At least I'm going to out-live you, bitch." Well, he didn't. Gary died last year, and now he's interred across the columbarium from where my Mom will be and they can throw teasing insults across the way from each other for all eternity.
Today, after making burial arrangements for Rose, I visited my Dad, who is pictured riding the Griffith Park Merry-Go-Round and told him that "Rose is going to be with you soon."
I "borrowed" a wilting rose from a nearby grave and used my gum to stick it to Dad's crypt as a reminder that his Rose will soon be with him again. I think she'd have liked the gesture. There was nothing second hand about her, she was a one-of-a-kind survivor. And her memories will survive in us.
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Suggested Links
- Hearing my dead Dachshund at Hollywood's most haunted spot
- My boyfriend (and I) featured in The New York Times Sunday Magazine
- What can motivate middle schoolers? Teachers doing silly ballet!
- Being dressed by Claudia Wells, see what it's like to get the star treatment
- Who is playing that carillon on Christmas eve?


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State Rep. Stacey Campfield described criticism directed at him during a legislative oversight meeting by Sen. Thelma Harper as "a little over the top."
Harper was unhappy with Campfield for limiting lawmakers' questioning during a State and Local Government subcommittee examination of the Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission.
Campfield, who chairs the panel, was about to wrap up the meeting when the Nashville Democrat alerted him that she had a matter she wanted to take up with ABC Executive Director Danielle Elks.
As Harper was about to speak, Campfield, R-Knoxville, interjected that he'd "give (her) the same thing, ten minutes" that he'd previously said was the limit for other lawmakers sitting in on the hearing who weren't regular committee members.
"Well, you can give all you want, that's fine with me," Harper responded. "But just realize that your constituents sent you here to serve and mine did too, so all these limitations and things…you're treating us like less than elected officials, and you want to put nooses around our necks to keep us from talking."
Later, Campfield told TNReport.com that Harper's reproach caught him off guard.
"A little over the top, don't you think?" said Campfield. "I was like, 'OK, you're not even on the committee.' But I just let her go off on her little rant."
"Other people have told me she's done that kind of stuff before," he added.
Harper said later she was offended "that they try to limit the questions that you can ask, and the time for the responses."
She offered no apologies. "I said what I had to say, and that was appropriate for the way he conducted the meeting. I gave him my expressions."
Harper's question for ABC dealt with a federal lawsuit over direct-to-consumer wine sales in Tennessee. Her questions and the responses by commission director Elks took just under five minutes.


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|Assistant Coach
|(910) 775-4241
|Previous College:
|Methodist, 2009
Blake Newsome enters his fifth season on staff with the UNC Pembroke baseball team as an assistant coach for the 2013-14 season. A former infielder himself, Newsome works primarily with the Braves' infielders on defense along with working with the hitters and catchers, while also serving additional duties including recruiting, camp coordination and field maintenance. He also serves as the Braves' first base coach on game days.
A native of Florence, S.C., Newsome made the move to Pembroke following one season as an assistant coach at his alma mater, Methodist. He played two seasons for the Monarchs and earned the Andrew T. Bell Teammate of the Year award as a senior. While in Fayetteville, Newsome helped lead Methodist to a 58-30-1 mark in two seasons, including a conference championship and NCAA Division III Tournament berth in 2007.
In addition to his time at UNCP, Newsome also served a stint with the Florence RedWolves of the Coastal Plains League - a wood-bat collegiate summer league that features some of the best collegiate players from around the nation. Prior to becoming head coach of the RedWolves, Newsome worked as an assistant under former coach Wes Davis and he was in charge of team defense as well as coaching first base. During his time as an assistant, the RedWolves had four players selected in the MLB Draft.
In the summer of 2010, Newsome managed the Tradewater Pirates in the KIT League and earned Coach of the Year honors. Under Newsome's tutelage, the Pirates won the regular season championship as well as the tournament championship and finished with a 34-15 record.
Prior to his NCAA playing career in Fayetteville, Newsome played two seasons for Curtis Hudson and Sean Heffernan at Florence-Darlington Tech where he was a member of the 2006 Region X Regular-season championship team.
Newsome also serves as lecturer in UNCP's Health, Physical Education, and Recreation Department.
He graduated with his bachelor of science in physical education from Methodist in 2009 and earned his master's degree in sports management from the United States Sports Academy in 2010.


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TC TO JEAN CARLYLE AITKEN ; 12 March 1857; DOI: 10.1215/lt-18570312-TC-JCA-01; CL 32: 102-103
Chelsea, 12 March 1857
Dear Sister,—Lest I be disappointed today as I was yesterday, I will begin this day by writing the poor word you affectionately request.
Jane is certainly not worse; I think her decidedly better ever since that bad fit which happened before my last writing,—and indeed she herself cautiously admits as much. She sleeps perceptibly better,—never one night absolutely without sleep;—has a better appetite too (which indeed it was easy to have):—in short I am again in hopes we have got over the hill; and that with the good weather in our favour, all will come right again before very long. She goes out every good day,—not a walk yet, but a drive; either somebody taking her, or in a hired cab of her own, with Nero for company: poor little thing she has had a sad four months of it, & they are not alone in our chronology.
As for myself I am sunk deep in wretchedness (owing to my impossible job &c &c), but feel withal as if any bodily health were mending: that is in fact nine-tenths of the battle too. Courage, courage!—
Aurora Leigh will evidently never be asked for again: keep it therefore with my blessing.1 Adieu again. Ever your affectionate
T. Carlyle


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Lisa Lazo, LMT, Founder of Massage Integration, LLC
In the spring of 2001, I experienced my first professional full body massage in Kula, Maui and in that moment my life changed. Suddenly, I became aware of how "unaware" I was about the overall health of my physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. My massage therapist told me something I will never forget. She said, "Most people think that massage is a luxury, but it's not. Massage therapy helps to maintain a balanced healthy body, mind, and spirit." She definitely had me convinced! I was 27 at the time and was waiting tables and bar-tending for a living while working on my music on the side. I had no idea how much tension there was in my entire body and after the massage I felt amazing ,very light and flexible!
Something else happened while on that trip to Hawaii. I realized how truly beautiful the planet is and how different life can be in various parts of the world. Everyone was so laid back in Maui. I realized that one's life is a creation and we can live however we want…in a big city, out in the country, with a little or with a lot. It truly is about living a life that makes us happy. I began to see how much stress I create for myself and how difficult and dramatic I can make things. The bodywork led me to a path of self discovery and spirituality. I began unlearning the bad habits and beliefs that had been driving my life that no longer served me. This process is never-ending.
Within a year of returning from that trip I enrolled into a massage school in Denton, TX, graduated, and started my own massage business. What a life-affirming transformation! I also took on part-time employment with a chiropractor to diversify my massage experience.
Since then I have moved to Dallas and with my various experiences working for myself, high-end spas, and chiropractors, I decided to start Massage Integration, LLC in 2008. My first client to serve and continues today is the Wyndham Dallas Love Field along with many other companies. I love being able to travel to my clients and creating job opportunities for other talented massage therapists. It is such an honor to help people feel better and educate my clients about holistic self care. I am very passionate about wellness and people living lives they love.
Through my personal life experience I believe that you can live to your fullest and highest potential if you get to know who you are (what makes you tick), passionate about serving others with your talents and gifts (we all have them), and feed your body, mind, and spirit with healthy activities, foods, relationships, environments, and spiritual practices. I am truly honored to live my life to serve others with my many skills, talents, and heart.
I will be continuing to update this website with more information on wellness, massage services , and products. Thank you so much for taking time to read about me and Massage Integration 🙂 I hope to be hearing from you soon!


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apricot pistachio squares
Let me just get the obvious out of the way because I know what you're thinking: what am I doing here? Shouldn't I be packing for our move, which is less than 24 hours from now? These are all valid questions, but you see, there is history here, a long history of kitchen-related procrastination. Two days before our last move, I sheeted pasta and peeled favas. I spent the last week of my pregnancy stocking the freezer with foods to
bribe charm labor and delivery nurses with. When I was done with that, I made a cake for people coming to visit the new baby. When my induction was trudging along pitifully slowly, I pulled out my laptop and wrote up a new recipe I'd made in the days before. Thus, it should be no surprise that on Tuesday, with a totally straight face, I made the argument by turning the last splash of heavy cream, handful of chocolate chips and a half-pint of vanilla ice cream leftover from this into hot fudge sauce, I was "packing." But yesterday, I didn't even have an excuse; I just needed a break from having exasperating conversations a store that lost the mattress we ordered and could maybe get us a replacement sometime in September, arrgh.


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The process of buying a new Hyundai car or truck can seem overwhelming if you don't know where to begin. Edmunds.com can get you started on the right track with a convenient directory of Hyundai car dealerships in and around Bradenville, Pennsylvania. Compare online price quotes on the new or used car, truck, SUV, minivan, or wagon of your choice to locate the best deals. Edmunds.com makes it easy to find trusted Hyundai car dealers in Bradenville, saving car buyers time and money on what will be an important purchase.
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Review of Zynaptiq's Reverb Reduction Processor – Unveil
Reverb reduction is kind of like the Holy Grail of audio processing. Many people, myself included, have had to rely exclusively on multiband expansion to do things like increase intelligibility of poorly recorded dialog, or to make a "must use" reverberant recordings sit better in the mix. Unveil isn't brand new to the market. It first came to my attention about a year ago. It's also not the first reverb reduction plug-in to the market. What Zynaptiq brings to the table with Unveil is a processor with a high level of control. In fact, there is a such a fine level of tuning built into the processor that it is possible to INCREASE the amount of reverb in a signal.
My initial experiments with Unveil's demo left me very impressed with its capabilities. I did not, however, spend a great deal of time plumbing its depths. Since developing my first impressions of the processor, a number of reviews have popped up in the community. All are very positive, but I have yet to see one explore the processor to its limits. Zynaptiq recently sent us a review copy of the full retail plug-in, and that's what I set out to do…examine both its capabilities and limitations.Read More


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Special Feature
Who Knew?
Is this better than that?
by David Schardt, June 2011
Decisions, decisions. What we eat often comes down to weighing whether A is better than B. Fried or baked? Butter or margarine? White meat or dark? Organic or conventional? Name-brand or generic?
In some cases, the answers are no-brainers. In others, not so much. Here's a little help with a few you may have wrestled with.
Krill oil is "a slam dunk winner over fish oil," claims Joseph Mercola's popular Web site mercola.com (where, not surprisingly, you can buy krill oil).
Bayer, which owns One A Day, apparently agrees. The supplement giant dove into the market this year with its Arctic Wonder Krill Oil ("Better than fish oil to support your health").
Maybe that's one reason people fork over $4 to $8 for a bag or tub of popcorn when they enter a movie theater. It sounds like they're munching on a stalk of broccoli, for goodness sakes.
Krill are shrimp-like crustaceans that occupy a spot near the bottom of the Antarctic Ocean's food chain. They are eaten by whales, seals, penguins, squid, and fish. Krill oil, like all fish oil, contains EPA and DHA, the two omega-3 fats that help prevent sudden cardiac arrest.
"There's some evidence that maybe 20 or 30 percent more EPA and DHA is absorbed from krill oil than from regular fish oil," says omega-3 expert William Harris of the University of South Dakota's Sanford School of Medicine. "But it's not that much more to warrant krill oil's much greater cost."
The DHA and EPA in krill oil cost at least 10 times more than the omega-3s in regular fish oil (which typically comes from menhaden, sardines, and herring).
Claims that krill oil can lower cholesterol, reduce symptoms of PMS, and relieve the discomfort of arthritis are based on studies funded by a Canadian manufacturer, Neptune Krill Oil.1-3 But krill oil lowered cholesterol only in combination with a statin drug. For those not taking a statin-like drug, krill oil was no better than a placebo.4 And no one else has tested the effects of krill oil on PMS and arthritis.
"There's certainly no convincing evidence that the health benefits of krill oil are superior to those of regular fish oil," says Harris.
Is krill oil better? NO.
"There is a difference between calcium supplements," claims the Citracal Web site. "Citracal is made with calcium citrate. Unlike calcium carbonate (the main ingredient in many other calcium supplements), calcium citrate does not need stomach acid to be broken down."
That's true. So if you typically take calcium on an empty stomach, citrate is the way to go.
"But if you take your calcium supplement with a meal, there's no significant difference between calcium carbonate and calcium citrate pills," notes Robert Recker,director of the Osteoporosis Research Center at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. That's true even for people who take drugs for acid reflux like Tagamet or Prilosec, which reduce stomach acid.
What's more, calcium carbonate is cheaper and less bulky. To get the same amount of calcium, you need to take twice as much citrate as carbonate.
A recent analysis of past studies suggested that taking calcium supplements is linked to a slight increase in the risk of heart attacks.5 (See Quick Studies, p. 10.) Until more is known, shoot for no more than the Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA)—1,000 milligrams a day from food and supplements combined for women 50 and under and men 70 and under, and 1,200 mg a day for people older than that.
And there's no point in taking more than 500 mg of calcium at a time, since the intestinal tract can't efficiently absorb more than that in a single dose, says Recker.
Is calcium citrate better? DEPENDS.
Weight Watchers and the Atkins and South Beach Diets have all told dieters to limit the food they eat at night. For generations, people have believed that food eaten when they're less physically active is more likely to be stored as fat than burned for energy.
But that's not based on hard evidence.
When researchers tracked the eating habits and body weights of more than 7,400 U.S. men and women for 10 years, for example, the percentage of their daily calories that they ate after 5 p.m. had no bearing on changes in their weight.
"I know of no credible evidence that the time of day has any impact on the storage of fat," concludes Albert Stunkard, an obesity expert at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia.
On the other hand, if you eat extra calories because you're tired or bored or stressed (and nighttime is when you're more likely to do that), expect those to eventually show up around your waist.
Is eating earlier better? NO.
Light tuna typically has much less mercury than white (albacore) tuna. That's because albacore is a larger, more predatory species than skipjack tuna, which is canned as light tuna.
In January, Consumer Reports magazine analyzed 42 cans and pouches of tuna purchased in the New York metropolitan area. The light tuna samples averaged 0.07 parts per million of mercury, while the albacore averaged 0.43 ppm—six times as much. The results are consistent with past surveys of canned tuna from other cities.
Young children, as well as women who are pregnant or nursing or who might become pregnant within a year, should limit canned albacore tuna to no more than 1½ ounces a week for every 50 pounds they weigh. And they should limit canned light tuna to a total of no more than 12 ounces a week. Others can probably safely consume up to three times that much of each.
If you're willing to spend more, you can find albacore with mercury levels much closer to those of light tuna, says Michael Morrissey, director of the Oregon State University Seafood Laboratory in Corvallis.
It comes from smaller, juvenile Pacific albacore that are pole- or troll-caught in the coastal waters off northern California, Oregon, and Washington state. The juveniles, which haven't had as much time to accumulate mercury as larger albacore, average about 0.14 ppm of mercury.
Northern Pacific pole- or troll-caught albacore is one of just six "Best of the Best" species on the Monterey Bay Aquarium's "Super Green" list. Green-list species are low in mercury and PCBs, rich in omega-3s, and "abundant, well-managed, and caught or farmed in environmentally friendly ways." (The other five species: wild-caught Alaska salmon, farmed rainbow trout, wildcaught Pacific sardines, farmed oysters, and freshwater coho salmon farmed in inland tank systems in the United States.)
Several brands of canned northern Pacific albacore—including Raincoast and Wild Planet—are available at some groceries, direct from the companies, or on Amazon. For more brands, see albatuna.com or pacificalbacore.com
Is light canned tuna better? YES.
Tomatoes and prostate cancer have been linked since 1995, when Harvard researchers reported that among the nearly 48,000 men in their Health Professionals Follow- Up Study, those who ate at least 10 servings of tomatoes (including tomato sauce) a week were one-third less likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer than those who ate fewer than 1½ servings a week.7
Since then, however, most studies that tracked the eating habits of large groups of men for years have seen no link between prostate cancer and either tomatoes or lycopene, the major carotenoid in tomatoes.
Ideally, researchers would feed men tomatoes or give them lycopene or a placebo and wait to see how many in each group get prostate cancer. But that kind of study is expensive and difficult to pull off, so it isn't likely to be done.
"We do have impressive animal studies, though," says lycopene researcher John Erdman of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
In one, rats exposed to a prostatecancer- causing chemical who consumed a diet containing finely ground dried whole tomatoes were 26 percent less likely to die of prostate cancer than rats who got lycopene or a placebo.8 And when Erdman and his research group transplanted prostate tumors into rats, the tumors grew more slowly in those given tomato powder, but not in those given lycopene.
"It looks like you may need an array of bioactive ingredients that you find in the whole tomato," says Erdman. "Lycopene is one of the important components, but it's not the only one."
Of course, rats aren't people. "Eating tomatoes may or may not protect men from prostate cancer," concedes Erdman. "Still, they're a nourishing food." As for lycopene pills, "it doesn't make sense for men to take them in place of eating tomatoes."
To absorb the most carotenoids from tomatoes, eat them cooked, says Erdman. Or, if they're in a salad, make sure the dressing or the rest of your meal contains at least 10 grams (two teaspoons) of fat.
Are lycopene pills better? NO.


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Thursday Dec 02, 2010
Friday Oct 01, 2010
OWB Synchronization in Code Samples
By David Allan-Oracle on Oct 01, 2010
Thursday Sep 23, 2010
OWB 11gR2 – Errors and Line Numbers
By David Allan-Oracle on Sep 23, 2010
Friday Sep 17, 2010
OWB 11gR2 – Metadata change management
By David Allan-Oracle on Sep 17, 2010
Monday Sep 13, 2010
OWB 11gR2 – Lookup operator
By David Allan-Oracle on Sep 13, 2010
Monday Sep 06, 2010
OWB 11gR2 – Debugging
By David Allan-Oracle on Sep 06, 2010
Wednesday Aug 18, 2010
OWB 11gR2 – Mapping productively
By David Allan-Oracle on Aug 18, 2010
Monday Aug 16, 2010
OWB 11gR2 – Copy Paste for productivity
By David Allan-Oracle on Aug 16, 2010
Friday Aug 13, 2010
OWB 11gR2 – Mappings and Inline SQL
By David Allan-Oracle on Aug 13, 2010
Tuesday Jul 27, 2010
OWB 11gR2 – Collections
By David Allan-Oracle on Jul 27, 2010
Sunday Jul 11, 2010
OWB 11gR2 – Incremental Update
By David Allan-Oracle on Jul 11, 2010
Thursday Jun 17, 2010
OWB 11gR2 - Early Arriving Facts
By Dawei Sun on Jun 17, 2010
Tuesday Jun 15, 2010
OWB 11gR2 – OLAP and Simba
By David Allan-Oracle on Jun 15, 2010
Wednesday Jun 09, 2010
Oracle Magazine - Deriving and Sharing Business Intelligence Metadata
By David Allan-Oracle on Jun 09, 2010
Monday May 03, 2010
OWB 11gR2 – Degenerate Dimensions
By David Allan-Oracle on May 03, 2010
Ever wondered how to build degenerate dimensions in OWB and get the benefits of slowly changing dimensions and cube loading? Now its possible through some changes in 11gR2 to make the dimension and cube loading much more flexible. This will let you get the benefits of OWB's surrogate key handling and slowly changing dimension reference when loading the fact table and need degenerate dimensions (see Ralph Kimball's degenerate dimensions design tip).
Here we will see how to use the cube operator to load slowly changing, regular and degenerate dimensions. The cube and cube operator can now work with dimensions which have no surrogate key as well as dimensions with surrogates, so you can get the benefit of the cube loading and incorporate the degenerate dimension loading. What you need to do is create a dimension in OWB that is purely used for ETL metadata;
- the dimension itself is never deployed (its table is, but has not data)
- it has no surrogate keys
- has a single level with a business attribute the degenerate dimension data and a dummy attribute, say description just to pass the OWB validation.
When this degenerate dimension is added into a cube, you will need to configure the fact table created and set the 'Deployable' flag to FALSE for the foreign key generated to the degenerate dimension table. The degenerate dimension reference will then be in the cube operator and used when matching.[Read More]
ETL, CDC, Real-Time DI and Data Quality for the Oracle Database from the inside.
Recent Posts
- OWB-TO-ODI MIGRATION PATCH FOR OWB 220.127.116.11 TO ODI 12.2.1 released
- ODI 12c - Migrating from OWB to ODI - PLSQL Procedures
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- OWB to ODI Migration Utility now available for OWB 18.104.22.168 +CP3 Linux and Windows 64-bit standalone installation.
- OWB to ODI Migration Utility released for Windows 64 bit.
- OWB to ODI Migration Utility Webcast - Thu 12th December
- Planning the journey from Oracle Warehouse Builder to Oracle Data Integrator
- OWB to ODI Migration Utility released.
- OWB - 184.108.40.206 Windows standalone client released
- ODI 12c is GA


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Concrete is arguably the most important building material, playing a part in all building structures. Its virtue is its versatility, i.e. its ability to be molded to take up the shapes required for the various structural forms. It is also very durable and fire resistant when specification and construction procedures are correct.
The complete building structure can be broken down into the following elements: -
- Beams horizontal members carrying lateral loads Slabs horizontal plate elements carrying lateral loads.
- Columns vertical members carrying primarily axial load but generally subjected to axial load and moment.
- Walls vertical plate elements resisting vertical, lateral or in-plane loads.
- Bases and foundations pads or strips supported directly on the ground that spread the loads from columns or walls so that they can be supported by the ground without excessive settlement. Alternatively the bases may be supported on piles.
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