Teaching All Kinds

For one of my lab courses, I have them write a one-page essay on “What I Want To Do With My Life.” Then, I meet with each of them individually to discuss it and offer some suggestions on getting to whatever their next step is. No, it doesn’t have anything to do with physical chemistry. But we do so little to help our students prepare for life post-graduation that I think it is important. Most of the students agree strongly. Many thank me saying none of their other instructors have shown personal interest in them like this. But that’s not what I want to talk about. (Though if it offers you any ideas, feel free to use them!)

It is interesting to see the variety of dreams and plans they have, and nice to be able to share in those with them. A number of them reveal they are Christians in various ways—some by writing their essay somewhat evangelistically, some by commenting somehow about their faith, or by a chance phrase they might say in the interview. Whenever I pick up on it, I enjoy sharing my faith with them as well, and it is a mutual encouragement.

But I also have students coming from the complete other end of the spectrum. One of the questions I ask most students is “What are you passionate about?” Today, one student grew emphatic about his antipathy towards incorrect thinking about science, “things like the Intelligent Design movement!” Though I did my best not to react, he must have picked up on something, because he instantly switched to some scientific inaccuracy in a “Doctor Who” episode he saw. (For my take on the topic, see here.)

The rest of our time continued as normal, and I helped him just as completely and enthusiastically as everyone else. Sure, that’s the ‘professional’ thing to do, but it is also what love does. Christ fed thousands of people, some of whom would later shout, “Crucify!” He healed ten lepers knowing nine wouldn’t thank Him. He did it because He loved them as His children, not because He would get anything from them. It is called grace.

He did it without a word of explanation, and most probably never realized who they had just encountered. It is the same with this student. I had the opportunity to show love to him and help equip him for a successful career, and I gave it to him, even if he chooses to use that career to attack my faith.

Ministering meets the need without asking anything in return, and even with risk of hurt. Jesus ministered and received crucifixion. Helping this student was a no brainer.

“Always share your faith. If necessary, use words.”         -St. Francis

SDG

File This Bill under “Ambivalence”

The Texas Legislature is in session, and a bill has been proposed to protect faculty and students from discrimination for studying “theory of intelligent design or other alternate theories of the origination and development of organisms.”

As you can imagine, this is simply igniting the blogosphere, mostly with outrage at how backwards Texas is. Pick your own favorite invective and it is surely being hurled our way.

I am having a very difficult time deciding how I feel about the bill. Part of me supports the general idea of protecting academic freedom from political correct whims. We have respected research on many esoteric and minutial topics, yet there are some topics that are simply taboo. The purpose of tenure is to protect academic freedom to explore extremely controversial topics with a minimum of blowback. To the extent that universities fail to hold themselves to that standard, such laws may be useful. Regardless of how folks feel about “Expelled,” there is a certain level of antipathy towards areas with theistic implications, whether or not they explicitly have anything to do with evangelical Christianity.

To be honest, there is also some controversy among scientists of faith as to how to define ID. Is it a theory, as the bill calls it, or something more vague? A theory implies a series of testable/falsifiable hypotheses that suggest research to answer specific questions. If ID merely suggests a different interpretation of the data, but does not offer insight on how future experiments can be performed that would reveal either an increase or decrease in the ruggedness of that interpretation, it is of limited scientific value.

Of course, I suspect some ID proponents would rebut with the idea that if they had the freedom to pursue ID research in the open, then they would be in a better position to move from the latter to the former. Fair enough.

For me, the heart of the matter goes back to the whole agent/mechanism dichotomy. When looking at origins, we need to be careful to distinguish the mechanism by which things occurred, from the agency initiating and/or guiding that mechanism. Both sides muddy this line pretty badly and it makes for increased antagonism.

The mechanism question is best explained thus: Did the various species on earth arise from whole cloth, either instantaneously or in a type of punctuated equilibrium, or by a series of gradual processes from simple to more complex? There are a number of variations from these descriptions, but basically this covers the various proposed models.

The agency question is quite independent from the answer to the mechanism question: What initiated the first thing we can clearly identify as a living organism and was subsequent development directed or random. If directed, how and by what?

Then there is the clincher agency question:  Can we definitively distinguish the difference between various agencies? If the mechanism is Darwinian evolution, how would we tell if it were motivated by an intelligence with a purpose or simply was a series of random mutations that now that we are here, we call ‘lucky?’ The same question can be asked for whatever answer we come up with to the mechanism question.

If we cannot distinguish between agency models, then the discussion is moot, and must firmly remain in the areas of philosophy. If, however, there were a way to distinguish between the agency models, then it seems like it is of paramount importance to pursue that course and resolve it. Otherwise, we are limiting our own progress. But to the extent the question cannot even be discussed in the academy, there will be a nagging question in people’s minds, “what if?” The Christian church has received a great deal of criticism over how it handled various key scientific discoveries and how if they had embraced the investigations rather than squelching them, more progress might have been made faster. Are we as the scientific establishment making the same mistake that we accuse the Church of making?

If ID researchers can garner grant money, attract students, perform competent investigations and help resolve even the clincher question, why not allow it? Why should universities care as long as they are getting their overhead? It certainly adds to the diversity of the community.

I know many in the scientific community see the issue as moot. They are upset because they genuinely believe the issue is settled, the horse is so dead that it’s already a fossil in the British Museum. At the very least, part of tolerance is allowing others to scratch their itch.

Also, many believe ID is just an excuse for quietly inserting religion into science. While many ID proponents are scientists of faith, not all are. While a few may have a hidden agenda, most don’t. I personally know many people in the ID movement, and they have absolutely no desire to post the Apostle’s Creed in their classrooms and recite it at the beginning of class. However, no matter how convincingly that is argued, I know that many naturalists cannot be convinced that ID is nothing more than a secret Christian conspiracy. All I can say is that it isn’t. You can choose to believe it or not.

(Some readers are probably asking where I come down on this as I am obviously sympathetic, but not quite embracing, and so wonder if I am adopting an artificially neutral position to ‘appear legitimate.’ I address that issue here.)

Going back to the proposed bill, the small-government, freedom-minded part of me isn’t terribly thrilled with it. Here is yet another law cluttering the books. Even if the universities do not discriminate and take the attitude I propose four paragraphs ago, would the ID researchers be able to obtain grant money or be reviewed fairly in the literature? Can this bill help with that? Should it try? How will the Law of Unintended Consequences have an impact on things? Many well-intentioned laws end up, through the vagaries of practice and interpretation, doing the exact opposite of their intended effect. If someone wanted to study the scientific implications of, say, the Hindu creation story, would that be covered by the protections of the bill? It is an equal protection bill? The wording appears so, but the challenges of a pluralistic society require us to examine such things, preferably ahead of time.

Did Representative Zedler consult with faculty and universities to explore impact before proposing the bill? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to “bite the hand that’s petting me.” I’m exploring the issue as a scientist—looking at it from various angles to see if it is needed, wanted and/or accomplishes the intended purposes. If the answer is no to any of those, it needs to be reexamined for improvements or possibly discarded as a nice try.

I have no doubt that my ambivalence on this issue will irritate folks on both sides. I think there is need for increased charity towards one another, and let the data lead where it will, but I’m not convinced this bill is the best way to make progress towards that.

SDG

Gaskell vs. UK #2: The Louisville Courier-Journal

Several days ago, I did a post on Gaskell vs. The University of Kentucky, and now have the first update. The Louisville Courier-Journal (LC-J) ran a story Friday about the case.  There are apparently a number of disconnects between what the story says and Gaskell’s actual words. My primary source for Gaskell’s position is his online essay which the committee read.

The LC-J article reports that he gave talks to various campus religious groups across the country [1. true statement] and that he believes that the theory of evolution has “major flaws,” [2. not a fully accurate statement of either Gaskell’s words or beliefs] and implies that is the dominant topic of his talk [3. decidedly false]. What Gaskell actually states is, “It is true there are significant scientific problems in evolutionary theory (a good thing or else many biologists and geologists would be out of a job) and that these problems are bigger than usually made out in introductory geology/biology courses, but the real problem with humanistic evolution is in the unwarranted atheistic assumptions and extrapolations.”

As 1. is true, there’s no point in commenting on it.

2. Perhaps “questions” would have been a better term for colloquial use than “problems,” but neither word, nor the context of his statement conveys the idea of “major flaws” (i.e. that the theory should be chucked as incorrect or wrong). Gaskell doesn’t even use the word “flaw.” In many areas, we use the term “problems” to indicate something that needs to be solved, rather than something that is incorrect. For instance, we will tell students to do the problems at the end of the chapter for homework, and no one interprets this as saying the chapter is incorrect. We try to solve innumerable problems in our research to refine and improve our explanatory models, theories and hypotheses. He is also careful to separate the scientific theory from the naturalistic philosophy commonly, but not necessarily, associated with it, and states that his primary "problem" is with the philosophy rather than the science.

{Note that this discussion is of what Gaskell did or did not say, not whether his statements are true. This is an important distinction for purposes of the case. He readily acknowledges in his essay the diversity of views out there.}

3. Regarding the LC-J article's implication that the talks focused on evolution, the above quoted sentence is the majority of what he says about evolution in the entire talk. In fact, he (with tongue in cheek) bemoans as an astronomer any time he has to talk about biology at all. The title of the essay is “Modern Astronomy, the Bible and Creation.” There is nothing about evolution in the title, and he only covers it in passing because Genesis 1 talks about the creation of life, so he’s obligated to at least mention the topic.

The LC-J article also mentions “he recommended students read theory critics in the intelligent-design {ID} movement.” This is only partially true. Gaskell’s purpose is to give an overview of the different perspectives out there and encourages readers to research all of them for themselves. This is the mark of an educator, not a demagogue. Furthermore, Gaskell specifically says that ID as a movement does not offer an interpretation of Genesis, but just asks if there is evidence for design in the universe by an intelligence, and is not about mechanism.

Later in the LC-J article it says, “But UK biologists said in their e-mails that evidence for evolution was so overwhelming that Gaskell had no scientific basis to raise questions about it.” Logic states (as Gaskell implies in his essay) that if there are no remaining questions about it, then why is it still a field of study?

The article also states, “Gaskell had given the talk to religious and other groups at campuses around the country, including one at UK in the 1990s.” According to Gaskell’s attorneys, this was an invited talk—with the invitation issued by the Physics and Astronomy Department after some department members had read the essay!

Finally, his attorneys also dispute the claim by UK that the reasons for passing over Gaskell included “a poor review from a previous supervisor,” saying the written review which the search committee had received actually rated Gaskell as “superior” and “superior-plus.”

Overall, apart from these issues, the article seems to be fairly balanced, but it does leave the impression that Dr. Gaskell is a religious extremist and it trumps his credibility as an astronomical scholar.

I’m sure as the February 8^th trial date approaches, media discussion will escalate. As significant events occur, I’ll post about them, but will not critique every document/article that comes out. If you are interested in seeing every jot and tittle, a Google search will provide a plethora of hits.

As always, do keep the Gaskells and their legal team in your prayers—for wisdom, peace, protection, and a fair hearing in the courts.

SDG

Vibrant Dance: Problems of Methodological Naturalism

This is the last post in the Vibrant Dance series, as far as I know now. The last two events were breakout sessions, and I was a TA at the last one, so didn’t take notes. I will offer a brief comment about it at the end, but I am ready to move on to a larger variety of topics. This blog will probably have a larger than normal posts related to science, since that is my field, but the intended audience includes all disciplines, so I try to be cognizant of that.

For the third breakout session, I attended one entitled, “Why it is a bad idea for Christians (or really anyone) to accept Methodological Naturalism,” presented by Paul Nelson of the Discovery Institute. I was particularly interested in this one because as a scientist, I understand that MN is how we are to “DO” science, though I would refer to it more as NM or a naturalistic methodology. In other words, it is how I do my science rather than how I do my philosophy. It’s a semantic thing, but like in most fields, semantics are important because words have meaning, so the words we use communicate what we do and think.

Nelson started out with a definition or rule of MN from the National Academy of Sciences, “The statements of science must invoke only natural things and processes.” {emphases added} He proceeded to contrast methodological naturalism (MN) with philosophical naturalism (PN), which is illustrated in the previous paragraph. He then asked if many who advocate for MN don’t hold to the PN, why do they object to the idea of Intelligent Design?

He stated that these scientists, theologians and philosophers are worried about a problem of impotent causality—in other words, “such and so phenomenon ‘can’t ‘ happen by natural processes.” In short, they are concerned such explanations are a veiled god-of-the-gaps argument, which is a valid concern.

Furthermore, as explorers of the universe, we have several toolkits available to us to aid in our exploration. Two of these are “natural causes” and “intelligent causes.” We tend to keep these separate from each other—another example of NOMA. We tend to want to exhaust all natural causes before invoking intelligence, but it is logically impossible to eliminate ALL natural causes {versus all KNOWN natural causes}.

Yet, and however, we DO infer intelligent causes! But, we don’t do so by performing impossibilities. We simply bypass natural causes in some cases because the intelligence is so obvious that the natural possibility is logically ludicrous. {Basically, when you find an iPhone on the beach, you don’t start coming up with a naturalistic mechanism for the construction of a theoretical missing link between the sand and the iPhone, you start looking for a human being who may have dropped it.}

In spite of this, there is a paradigm that defines the types of problems that can/should be tackled scientifically and also what types of solutions to these problems are acceptable, and Intelligent Design is simply not part of those things. (Think back to the ‘must’ and ‘only’ qualifiers from the NAS.) This limitation actually goes back to Thomas Henry Huxley, a friend of Darwin’s, the founder of the journal, Nature, coiner of the phrase “agnostic,” and grandfather to Aldous, the author of Brave New World. He is the one credited with defining science as MN. Interestingly, he actually doubted many of Darwin’s claims, but liked his theory anyway because it avoided all of that teleological stuff.

So how was science defined before Huxley redefined it? Newton said it thus, “Where natural causes are at hand, God uses them as instruments in His work, but I do not think them sufficient alone for the Creation.”

Nelson stated that the motivation of the Intelligent Design movement is simply to restore Newton’s vision to the toolkit. If ID is true, why shouldn’t we consider it? The NAS rule of MN as the only way to do science limits our freedom to seek the truth in science and in life, generally. Nelson’s point is that there isn’t an inherent problem with the MN toolkit, except, that it is smaller than the ID toolkit, which includes everything in the MN toolkit, and adds more tools for the scientist to use. He said, “I’d rather have the bigger toolkit, wouldn’t you?”

Nelson makes a nice argument. During the Q&A at the end, he and I went back and forth on the premise implied in his title, namely that we shouldn’t accept MN. Partly because I am so sensitive to the ease with which god-of-the-gaps arguments can slip in to our theories when we are hunting for explanations, I feel obligated to examine claims of intelligence with a hypercritical eye. To me, as a Christian who has experienced God directly in my life, it is obvious to me that God is behind Creation. The only questions deal with how He accomplished things, not whether He did. However, I know a number of people who were everything from anti-Christian atheists to nonchalant agnostics who, through the marvel and wonder of Creation as revealed through their scientific endeavours, found themselves turning to God in faith. So I cannot dismiss the apologetic that science can offer. I also take issue with the must/only phraseology of the NAS, but I still see MN as a powerful and necessary primary toolkit for the scientist. I balk a bit at the apparent intensity of Nelson’s presentation of the material, though it probably takes that to effectively push back at the 150 years of entrenched opposition to anything beyond MN in science. The issue I guess I still struggle with from his talk is that the title implies we should reject MN, but he concludes that the MN toolkit is a subset of the ID toolkit, so it seems that the issue is really with PN and its adherents dictating that MN is “all there was, is or ever will be.”

So it seems it goes back to worldview more than methodology. I see both Christians and naturalists comingle these so badly it is no wonder that the discussions are heated and folks talk past each other. If you have read many posts here, you will recall my soap box on this issue several times. I expect that most naturalists have no problem comingling them, and probably genuinely feel they are part and parcel of each other.  It is imperative, therefore, that we as Christians separate them clearly in our minds and in our discussions, so that we can be consistent in our terms, and eventually win a hearing among the more open-minded naturalists, and prayerfully, generate a little more light than heat in the discourse.

The final breakout session I attended (and for which I served as a TA) was by William Dembski (Southwest Baptist Theological Seminary) on “Randomness by Design.” It was a fascinating talk by a trained mathematician on how the very randomness sometimes found in nature points to Design. One argument that stuck in my mind was that it is strikingly difficult to truly get a random number because patterns are endemic in the universe, but are often hard to recognize as patterns at first. We seem to deem anything we don’t recognize as random, only to later discover a rich pattern intrinsic in it. Take for example ‘junk DNA’—we didn’t see any purpose in it and assumed it had no meaning or use—oops, wrong again. Dembski offered a richer argument than I provided here, and truthfully, some of it went over my head the first time around. This is just what I can remember without notes three weeks later.

A final comment on the Vibrant Dance: Andy Crouch offers an excellent summary of the conference here.

SDG

Vibrant Dance: Signature in the Cell

The final position paper of the day was by Stephen C. Meyer of the Discovery Institute entitled, “Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design.”

As Meyer got started by talking about natural versus artificial selection, it occurred to me that artificial selection is even found in the Bible, as far back as Genesis, when Jacob was working for Laban to earn Rachel’s hand. In order to increase his herd at the expense of Laban’s, when the strongest and best animals were going to mate he did certain things so that the offspring would be marked as his, and when the weaker animals were mating, he left them alone so they would be marked as Laban’s. Thus he was using artificial selection to create a superior herd and a weaker herd. (Gen 30) (NB: Jacob’s method of marking is rather suspect, but the fact that he was selectively breeding the stronger animals together and the weaker ones together is the point!)

Meyer asked a couple of introductory questions:  Is adaptation the only appearance of design? And, if not, has natural selection explained away all other appearances of design? In other words, the naturalists say that nature has the “appearance of design,” but not actual design, and that adaptation is a key factor that gives the appearance of design.

In answer, he quotes natural philosopher Bernd Olaf-Kuppers, “the problem with the origin of life is basically the origin of new information.” So, can either adaptation or natural selection be given as an initial source of the information density required for life?

Naturalists initially offered up Chance as the origin of information, but even they have rejected this as being insufficient. The next theory was “pre-biotic natural selection”—that certain arrangements of non-living (pre-biotic) materials was better able to transmit/promote life than other arrangements. Meyer showed that this doesn’t work because it is a non-sequitor:  how can a non-functional system reproduce to form a functional system that functions better? In other words, natural selection is defined as “A process in nature in which organisms possessing certain genotypic characteristics that make them better adjusted to an environment tend to survive, reproduce, increase in number or frequency, and therefore, are able to transmit and perpetuate their essential genotypic qualities to succeeding generations.” So how can something that is pre-biotic (not alive) survive and reproduce better than something else that is also not alive? If it is not alive, then it is by definition incapable of survival and reproduction.

Even Nobel laureate Christian de Duve recognized the problem by saying that theories of origin “need information, which implies they have to presuppose what is to be explained in the first place.”

A third and more contemporary scenario Meyer offered from the naturalists was the general category of “self-organization scenarios.” Here, the idea is that in some solution somewhere billions of years ago, molecular bits bumping around aggregated together in a specific order due to certain attractive forces based on the unique compounds that make up the DNA ‘letters’ and formed the first DNA or RNA molecule, and presto, this random assembly of chemicals happened to code for the first living thing. The problem with this proposal is that it doesn’t work. The DNA letters are chemical units called bases, which are attached to a molecule composed of a sugar and a ‘phosphate group.’ This molecule to which the bases attach is like a vertebrae that when connected to others forms a backbone, and the bases stick out from the backbone like a half-rung of a ladder. The vertebrae are all identical to each other and the letters only attach to the backbone in a way that leaves a given vertebra to attach to any other vertebra, regardless of the base attached to it.

An analogy would be a set of train cars. You can have box cars, flatbeds, tank cars, cattle cars and so on, but they can be placed together in any order because the parts that link them together are universal and identical. The couplers ability to latch to each other is 100% independent of what kind of container is place on top of the undercarriage. It is only the presence of an intelligence, the loadmaster, that determines which order the cars should be linked for the train’s itinerary. {Meyer used a different analogy- a prop he brought, but this conveys better in print.}

Meyer then asked, “can the design hypothesis be transformed into a scientifically rigorous argument?”

To address this, he showed how Darwin explicitly used an approach called “multiple competing theories” in arriving at his evolutionary conclusions. In other words, he looked at various possible hypotheses for the data to explain a historical event (origin of life) and used “inference to the best explanation” to eliminate the bad hypotheses. In plain English, he used logical inferences to see which hypothesis did not adequately explain the data and eliminated them from consideration. Ideally, this leaves the strongest hypothesis remaining.

Using this approach, Meyer drew on another priniciple, that of uniformitarianism—“the present is the key to the past.” The natural laws at work today were at work in the same way throughout the universe’s history. Given that today, “the creation of new information is habitually the result of conscious activity,” he reasons that the creation of life from non-life is the creation of new information and therefore must be the result of conscious activity.

Thus, he argues for Intelligent Design. I agree with Falk on one thing at least, that ID is a one issue view—is design scientifically discernable? And therefore, it is an umbrella over all three main creationist camps (young earth, old earth and evolutionary creationism). While there is a wide variety of opinion on mechanism within ID, they are focused on the issue of whether agency can be detected. However, the ID folks at the conference from the Discovery Institute were definitely old earth progressive creationists and seemed to spend as much time trying to show why evolution is not a viable mechanism as trying to show that God’s agency is scientifically detectable. While there may be some correlation here, and at the moment I tend to agree with them, it does seem to be a distraction from their main point and creates unnecessary (at this point) division within the Christian scientific world.

Random question to the masses: I’ve noticed that in all of these discussions, plant life is virtually ignored and the focus in evolutionary discussions seems exclusively based on animal life. It seems that it would be worthwhile to examine how evolution would ‘explain’ which came first, plant or animal? How did the transformation occur between the two? Where do protists fit in? I think the naturalists’ answer would be that a protist that metabolized via photosynthesis was the first life form and eventually plants and animals diverged from that, but how does that affect the time needed and what genetic traits are common to plants, animals and protists that would give clues to this common ancestor if such a critter did exist?

SDG

Vibrant Dance Day 1 Recap

There were seven plenary sessions today and one breakout session. It was kind of a marathon, but worthwhile. The first two plenaries, by Andy Crouch of Christianity Today and Ross Hastings of Regents College, helped set the tone of unity in Christ and the fundamentals we agree on and therefore the proper place of the different theories of Origins in evangelical Christendom. Dan Heinze then discussed “What is Science?” to establish the extent and limits of science. The remaining talks were speakers from the three major ‘camps’ present at the symposium. Hugh Ross and Fuz Rana from Reasons To Believe presented the Progressive Creation view as applied to cosmology and biology respectively. Darrell Falk from BioLogos gave the theistic evolution (or Evolutionary Creation) viewpoint, and Steven Meyer from the Discovery Institute discussed Intelligent Design (ID). This way, the entire spectrum of what is to be discussed was presented on the first day, so that remaining sessions can refer back to this foundation. It is a good plan.

I plan to give a short recap of each day’s sessions and in future posts discuss each of the talks I attended, so that it can be delivered in blog-sized bites.

I missed most of Crouch’s talk because I was helping with registration, but it seemed pretty good. Hastings’ talk was similar (only heard part of it), but we had a lovely discussion over dinner, and I respect and like him a lot. Heinze’s talk on science was a good evaluation of what science can and cannot do and why. Of the four position talks, I have to say that Fuz’s on the biological story of the earth from a progressive creationist perspective was the most solid and tightest. Meyer’s was pretty good, but I think Falk has it right that ID is a single issue camp that is really an umbrella for the others (including the Young Earth folks):  Did God do it or not, regardless of the How. Ross as usual had the slickest presentation, yet his reliance on overwhelming the audience with improbabilities makes it hard to truly evaluate the solidity of his assumptions, and some of his predictive tests seem to be God-of-the-Gaps things—‘we haven’t found evidence of X yet, so as long as we don’t, then it makes God a plausible argument.” How often do we find out that God can do things differently than we expect? Finally, Falk’s presentation was poorly done with difficult to read slides, which made it a little hard to evaluate how convincing his arguments really are, and he tried to cram too much into too little time. This last point was a bit endemic to all, and while it is an understandable problem, it might be better to give a more surfacy overview of the position in a few minutes and then thoroughly explore a single point or area to demonstrate the power of that position on that topic as an example of the overall quality of the argument.

I will come back and address each talk more fully after the conference is over. Note: I have advertised this blog to most of the speakers, so I say these things knowing they may well read them at my open invitation. My spirit in these posts is constructive praise and criticism both, and would express these sentiments to them directly were we to sit down together to discuss them, so I invite dialogue. It is in the best interests of all of us for all of the positions to express themselves at their very best for good scholarship and constructive dialogue between them and with the secular scientific community. They are brothers and sisters in Christ, and qualified scholars in their own right. I also think I may do a post on effective PowerPoint presentations!

SDG