Creation & EvolutionForum for the discussion of this important topic. This forum is open to non-believers. There is a Christians-only forum in the Christians-only section too.
sci·ence n
1. the study of the physical world and its manifestations, especially by using systematic observation and experiment (often used before a noun)
2. a branch of science of a particular area of study
3. the knowledge gained by the study of the physical world
4. any systematically organized body of knowledge about a specific subject
5. any activity that is the object of careful study or that is carried out according to a developed method.
What has compelled me to criticize Intelligent Design is the constant misconception, advocated by many on the forums, that ID is somehow empirically proven. This is utterly illogical. As all scientists know; true science will have results that come from tests, which do not involve supernatural inferences. Also, all science is falsifiable; there is always a chance for claims to be proven wrong. With Intelligent Design, claiming something was made by a supernatural designer is impossible to falsify, as there is nothing science can do to prove something — that can’t be proven in the first place — to be wrong. By simple definition alone, the study of the physical world and its manifestations, Intelligent Design cannot be science. It is inferring a supernatural being; something that does not exist in the physical world, and, therefore, should not be assumed to at all.
However, let’s look at the few claims ID proponents make for “empirical evidence of an intelligent designer”. They are not as numerous as they would like for you to think. This first post will go over one claim of ID.
Irreducible Complexity
Yes, I plan to start off with everyone’s favorite ID claim: irreducible complexity. For those of you who don’t know what irreducible complexity is, or you can’t infer it from the context of the words, irreducible complexity is basically stating that there are certain organisms in nature or certain biological systems that, if you were to remove a part from them, it would have a detrimental effect on the organisms or system’s functionality. Behe describes it as: "a single system which is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning ". (Michael Behe, Molecular Machines: Experimental Support for the Design Inference)
So, what organisms are mentioned by Behe and other ID advocates that are supposed to be proof of design?
Behe’s favorite seems to be bacterial flagellum. Behe says that there are three parts of this organism: the paddle, the rotor, and the motor, are all necessary to the flagellum, otherwise it would not be able to function in the system which it exists. The flagellum, which uses flagella to move around, could “not have evolved” because flagella are necessary to move around in the swimming system, and if they were not at the state they are now, the flagella could not swim. Image from http://www.ideacenter.org/stuff/cont...flagellum.jpeg
There are a few things wrong with this that one should notice right away. First off, Behe is oversimplifying the parts of a flagella. He is using his own way of breaking up the flagella, sectioning off certain parts to fit his own claim. Second off, Behe seems to have not conceived function change as a logical possibility. He also leaves out other parts, including proteins that aid the basic function of the organism, including his “motor”. The bacteria are not shown to need all of these proteins. Other similar bacteria use flagella in a different way in the same kind of swimming system that flagella live in. The main problem with Behe here is that, as a chemist, he seems to dismiss function change as an impossibility. Why is it illogical to assume that the bacterial flagellum, which one had shorter flagella, had some other function, but when they lengthened, the flagellum found it more beneficial for it to enter some swimming system that it now could conceivable function in? Not even that — what if it had a different function in such a swimming system all together, that changed once the bacteria had grown its flagella to the current size? Behe seems to find these natural answers less logical than an “intelligent designer” creating these. The same is true for the rest of the supposed IC organisms in swimming systems: cilium, archaeal flagellum, etc. Change of function is not accounted for.
Next, we have the ATP synthase molecular system. This system has been a lot harder to explain. It is a very small and complex system, six times as complex as the blood clotting system. Behe describes it as having two parts, a mushroom-like cap, and a stem. There are three sections in the mushroom-like cap that each are involved in processes of creating ATP. The stem rotates these sections in such a way as to cause chemical changes that allow ATP to be produced in the caps. Without a certain part, Behe claims, ATP cannot be made, and the synthase molecule would be utterly useless. Image from http://mulliken.chem.hope.edu/~krieg...se_diagram.jpg
Now, because I am not a major in molecular biology, I will not attempt to explain this one in great detail. What is basically hypothesized is that the system evolved from ADP and it’s reaction with ultraviolet rays. Certain photosynthesis-type reactions created certain types of chemicals that were released from the cell, but ultimately were created to stay inside the cell, leading to the creation of this efficient molecular mechanism.
Now, as you can see from the image provided, Bombardier Beetles have an innate ability to defend themselves from predators by spraying really hot chemicals on them from their rears. The chemical processes that occur within the beetle to produce this painful substance is amazing — so amazing that ID advocates said that it couldn’t have arisen set-by-step. Inside the beetle there are three chambers. Two store compounds in isolation, and the third acts as a mixing chamber for the chemicals, which then propel out of the beetles body at such a force that can be directed at predators. Now, I do not wish to plagiarize so I will just refer you to the hypothetical beetle evolution! The point being that the Bombadier Beetle really does not pose any threat to science or evolution. Such evolutionary processes can easily be explained.
We then, lastly, come to the blood-clotting system. The blood-clotting system has evolved in such a way that one protein will cause another to react, and another, and another, in a kind of “cascade”. Now, of course, because the proteins seem to only work when one goes after another, ID advocates claim that it must be irreducibly complex. I mean, if you took out one protein, what would happen to the rest? They wouldn’t work! Unfortunately for them, they don’t look at it from the other way around. They see it as D -> C -> B -> A; they don’t think it could have begun as A, and then evolved (by addition of enzymes and whatnot) to B, and so on and so forth. Again, the environment, and possibly a change of function could have led to the blood-clotting system. ID advocates claim that this isn’t possible, but only because they think of the blood-clotting system in such a way that if a protein was missing, they simply call it a missing part. They do not think of it as something that could have evolved from older organisms that had a different function for the system all together.
These are all the systems I can get around to in a single post, and all that I feel are necessary to mention. Ones such as the eye have already been mentioned by others on the site. My next little addition to this work will involve a critique of Dembski’s law of conservation of information. If anyone has read the book Unintelligent Design the first chapter goes into great length discussing the flaws in Dembski’s theories and his logic. I hope I have not made any errors in this work; if I have, just let me know, and I will edit them when I get the chance. So, look forward to part two of “Intelligent Design Is Not Science”!
Creation and Evolution
"The design theorists' critique of the naturalistic metaphysic that undergirds Darwinism can be reduced to an analysis of three words. The three words are creation, evolution, and science. Let us start with the words "creation" and "evolution." Suppose you are up on a witness stand and required to respond yes or no to two questions (if you refuse to answer yes or no, you will be taken out and summarily shot). The questions are these: (1) Do you believe in creation? (2) Do you believe in evolution? Could you respond to these questions with a simple yes or no, and still feel satisfied that you had expressed yourself accurately. Probably not. The problem is that the words "creation" and "evolution" both have multiple senses.
For instance, creation can be construed in the narrow sense of a literal six day creation as presented in Genesis 1 and 2. On the other hand, creation can also be construed in the broad sense of simply asserting that God has created the world with a purpose in mind, where the question of how God created the world is simply set to one side. Similarly, evolution can be construed as a fully naturalistic, purposeless process which by means of natural selection and mutation has produced all living things. On the other hand, evolution can mean nothing more than that organisms have changed over time.
Depending on how one construes the words "creation" and "evolution," one's answer to the question Do you believe in creation? and Do you believe in evolution? are likely to show quite a bit of variability. For myself, Yes, I believe that God created the world with a purpose in mind, and No, I don't believe that God created the world in six 24-hour day periods. No, I don't believe in fully naturalistic evolution controlled solely by purposeless material processes, and Yes, I do believe that organisms have undergone some change in the course of natural history (though I believe that this change has occurred within strict limits and that human beings were specially created).
Now it is the design theorists' contention that the Darwinian establishment, in order to maintain its political, cultural, and intellectual authority, consistently engages in a fallacy of equivocation when it uses the terms "creation" and "evolution." The fallacy of equivocation is the fallacy of speaking out of both sides of your mouth. It is the deliberate confusing of two senses of a term, using the sense that's convenient to promote one's agenda. For instance, when Michael Ruse in one of his defenses of Darwinism writes, "Evolution is Fact, Fact, Fact!" how is he using the term "evolution"? Is it a fact that organisms have changed over time? There is plenty of evidence that appears to confirm that this is the case. Is it a fact that the panoply of life has evolved through purposeless naturalistic processes? This might be a fact, but whether it is a fact is very much open to debate.
Suppose you don't buy the Darwinian picture of natural history, that is, you don't believe that the vast panoply of life evolved through purposeless naturalistic processes. Presumably then you are a creationist. But does this make you a young earth creationist? Ever since Darwin's Origin of Species Darwinists have cast the debate in these terms: either you're with us, or you're a creationist, by which they mean a young earth creationist. Darwin made this move in his Origin of Species. Philip Kitcher makes this move in his book Abusing Science (publication date 1982). When I debated scientists from the faculty of SUNY Stonybrook last April, they refuted not my actual position, but a caricature which they preferred to attribute to me. It is amazing what you can refute when you deliberately refuse to understand something.
But to return to the point at hand, of course it doesn't follow, logically or otherwise, that by rejecting fully naturalistic evolution you automatically embrace a literal reading of Genesis 1 and 2. Rejecting fully naturalistic evolution does not entail accepting young earth creationism. The only thing one can say for certain is that to reject fully naturalistic evolution is to accept some form of creationism broadly construed, i.e., the belief that God or some intelligent agent has produced life with a purpose in mind. Young earth creationism certainly falls under such a broad construal of creationism, but is hardly coextensive with creationism in this broad sense.
Let us now assume we've gotten our terms straight. No more terminological confusions. No more fallacies of equivocation. No more straw men. From here on in we're going to concentrate on the essence of the creation-evolution debate. Henceforth this debate will be over whether life exhibits nothing more than the outcome of fully naturalistic purposeless material processes, or whether life exhibits the purposeful activity of an intelligent agent--usually called a designer--who in creating life has impressed on it the clear marks of intelligence. Phillip Johnson has dubbed the first view the Blind Watchmaker Thesis--BWT. We'll call the second view the Intelligent Design Thesis--IDT. BWT and IDT are mutually exclusive and exhaust all possibilities. According to Johnson the key problem to be resolved in the creation-evolution controversy is deciding which of these theses is correct, BWT or IDT. How then shall we reach a decision?
The first thing to notice is that BWT and IDT both make definite assertions of fact. To see this, let's get personal. Here you are. You had parents. They in turn had parents. They too had parents. And so on and so on. If we run the video camera back in time, generation upon generation, what do we see? Do we see a continuous chain of natural causes which go from apes to small furry mammals to reptiles to slugs to slime molds to blue green algae, and finally all the way back to a pre-biotic soup, with no event in the chain ever signaling the activity of an intelligent agent? Or as we trace back the genealogy do we find events that clearly signal the activity of an intelligent agent?
There is a legitimate distinction here. Whole branches of science presuppose that features of the world can display unequivocal marks of intelligence and thereby clearly signal the activity of an intelligent agent (e.g., anthropology, archeology, and forensic science). Nor need the intelligences inferred in this way necessarily all be human or even earthbound (consider, for instance, NASA's Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence program--SETI for short--in which certain radio signals from outer space would with full confidence be interpreted as signaling the presence of an extra-terrestrial intelligence). There are reliable criteria for inferring the activity of an intelligent agent. Does natural history display clear marks of intelligence and thereby warrant such a design inference, or does it not? To answer this question one way is to come down on the side of IDT, to answer it the other way is to come down on the side of BWT.
Now Darwinists are very clear in asserting that natural history does not underwrite a design inference. They are quite explicit in affirming that BWT is correct and in rejecting IDT as incorrect. George Gaylord Simpson, one of the founders of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, in his book The Meaning of Evolution leaves us with no doubts about the matter:
Although many details remain to be worked out, it is already evident that all the objective phenomena of the history of life can be explained by purely naturalistic or, in a proper sense of the sometimes abused word, materialistic factors. They [that is, the objective phenomena of the history of life] are readily explicable on the basis of differential reproduction in populations [that's natural selection], and the mainly random interplay of the known processes of heredity [that's random mutation, the other major element in the Darwinian picture]. Therefore, man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.
But Phillip Johnson, Michael Denton, Hubert Yockey, Lecomte du Noüy, Freddy Hoyle, and even Francis Crick have all shown glaring weaknesses in the very theory to which Simpson is referring. Where then does Simpson get his confidence that BWT is right and IDT is wrong? How can Simpson so easily elide the glaring weaknesses in his theory, and then with perfect equanimity assert "it is already evident that all the objective phenomena of the history of life can be explained by purely naturalistic factors"? And how does Simpson know that when the "many details that remain to be worked out" actually do get worked out, that they won't overthrow BWT and instead confirm IDT? Science is after all a fallible enterprise. Whence does Simpson derive such certainty? http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articl...kiDesign.shtml
If you isagree that ID is a real science, then please refute with Dembski's arguments. Don't resort to strawmen. Don't resort to ad hominem. Don't resort to silly cliches.
To answer this question we need to examine how the third word in our trio gets employed by the Darwinist establishment, namely, the word "science." Although design theorists take the question Which is correct, BWT or IDT? as a perfectly legitimate question concerning certain facts of the natural world, it is not treated as a legitimate question by the Darwinist establishment. According to the Darwinist establishment BWT poses a "scientific" question whereas IDT poses a "religious" question. Thus, as far as the Darwinist establishment is concerned, IDT is a non-starter. Yes BWT and IDT taken together may be mutually exclusive and exhaustive, but BWT is the only viable scientific option. IDT must therefore be ruled out of court from the start.
Why is this? The answer is really quite simple. Science according to the Darwinist establishment by definition excludes everything except the material and the natural. It follows that all talk of purpose, design, and intelligence is barred entry from the start. To see that I am not making this up one has only to consider the following remark by the author of Chance and Necessity, Jacques Monod:
The cornerstone of the scientific method is the postulate that nature is objective. In other words, the systematic denial that "true" knowledge can be got at by interpreting phenomena in terms of final causes--that is to say, of "purpose."
Of course, the only way even to begin to justify a negative principle like this is to argue that science has uniformly failed to make headway when it has employed the notion of an intelligent or purposeful cause. And even this sort of argument cannot preclude the possibility that for all its past failures, a concept may yet prove useful in the future.
But back to the point at hand. By defining science as that form of inquiry restricted solely to what can be explained in terms of naturalistic, purposeless, material processes, the Darwinist establishment has ruled IDT out of science from the start. But suppose now that a design theorist comes along, and like most Americans thinks IDT is correct and BWT is incorrect. (According to a Gallop poll close to 50% of Americans are creationists of a stricter sort, thinking that God specially created human beings; another 40% believe in some form of God-guided evolution; and only 9% are full-blooded Darwinists. It's this 9%, however, that controls the academy.) The design theorist's first inclination might be to say, "No big deal. IDT is at least as good an answer to the origins question in biology as BWT. Science just happens to be limited in the questions it can pose and the answers it can give." Fortunately, design theorists are not so naive.
The problem is this. As Phillip Johnson has rightly observed, science is the only universally valid form of knowledge within our culture. This not to say that scientific knowledge is true or infallible. But within our culture, whatever is purportedly the best scientific account of a given phenomenon demands our immediate and unconditional assent. This is regarded as a matter of intellectual honesty. Thus to consciously resist what is currently the best scientific theory in a given area is, in the words of Richard Dawkins, to be either stupid, wicked, or insane. Thankfully, Richard Dawkins is more explicit than most of his colleagues in making this point, and therefore does us the service of not papering over the contempt with which the scientific community regards anyone who questions scientific assertions for other than scientific reasons (theological reasons being of course the worst offender here).
It bears repeating: the only universally valid form of knowledge within our culture is science. Within late 20th century western society neither religion, nor philosophy, nor literature, nor music, nor art makes any such cognitive claim. Religion in particular is seen as making no universal claims that are obligatory across the board. The contrast with science is here blaring. Science has given us technology--computers that work as much here as they do in the third world. Science has cured our diseases. Whether we are black, red, yellow, or white, the same antibiotics cure the same infections. It's therefore clear why relegating IDT to any realm other than science (e.g., religion) ensures that BWT will remain the only intellectually respectable option for the explanation of life.
But something isn't quite right here. IDT and BWT both inquire into definite matters of fact. If each of the cells that make up living things were to have emblazoned on them in clear script the phrase "made by Yahweh," there would be no question that IDT is correct and BWT is incorrect. Don't let the science-fiction character of this example distract you. The point is that IDT and BWT are both real possibilities so long as one doesn't impose any a priori conditions that restrict in advance what can count as a viable option in the explanation of life. Granted, cells don't have emblazoned on them the phrase "made by Yahweh." But we wouldn't know this unless we actually looked at cells under the microscope.
It's here that we come to the heart of the design theorists' critique of Darwinism. Logically, BWT and IDT are real possibilities. What's more, as mutually exclusive and exhaustive possibilities, one of these theses has to be correct (I'm sorry, but at this level of discourse the law of the excluded middle definitely holds). The Darwinist establishment has so defined science that BWT alone can constitute an appropriate scientific answer to the question How did life originate and develop? Nevertheless, when Stephen J. Gould, Michael Ruse, Richard Dawkins, George Gaylord Simpson, and their many disciples assert the truth of BWT, they purport that BWT is the conclusion of a scientific argument based on empirical evidence. But of course it is nothing of the sort. The empirical evidence is in fact weak, and the conclusion follows necessarily as a strict logical deduction once science is as a matter of definition restricted to purposeless, naturalistic, material processes. BWT is therefore built into the very premises with which we started. It is a winner by default.
Logicians have names for this--circular reasoning and begging the question being among them. The view that science must be restricted solely to purposeless, naturalistic, material processes also has a name. It's called methodological naturalism. So long as methodological naturalism sets the ground rules for how the game of science is to be played, IDT has no chance Hades. Phillip Johnson makes this point eloquently. So does Alvin Plantinga. In his work on methodological naturalism Plantinga remarks that if one accepts methodological naturalism, then Darwinism is the only game in town.
Okay, since BWT is so poorly supported empirically and since the scientific community is telling us that IDT isn't science, what's wrong with a simple profession of ignorance? In response to the question How did life originate and develop? what's wrong with simply saying We don't know? (Such a profession of ignorance, by the way, was the reason Michael Denton's book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis was panned by the Darwinist establishment.) As philosophers of science Thomas Kuhn and Larry Laudan have pointed out, for scientific paradigms to shift, there has to be a new paradigm in place ready to be shifted into. You can't shift into a vacuum. Napoleon III put it this way: "One never really destroys a thing till one has replaced it." If you're going to reject a reigning paradigm, you have to have a new improved paradigm with which to replace it. BWT is the reigning paradigm. But what alternative is there to BWT? Logically, the only alternative is IDT. But IDT isn't part of science. This is a case of Hobson's choice. There's no pleading ignorance and no shifting away because BWT is the only game in town.
Note that I'm not saying BWT is a tautology. The tautology criticism has been a long-standing criticism offered against Darwinism. Accordingly, Darwinism is tautologous because it asserts the survival of the fittest, but then turns around and identifies the fittest with those who survive. This sort of tautology is not what we've been talking about here. BWT has genuine content. It sets definite limits on the type of world we inhabit. BWT is not true simply as a matter of linguistic convention. The problem is that BWT purports to be the conclusion of a scientific argument based on empirical evidence, but is actually a strict logical consequence of a prior assumption about how to do science, namely the assumption of methodological naturalism.
In the words of Vladimir Lenin, What is to be done? Design theorists aren't at all bashful about answering this question: The ground rules of science have to be changed. We need to realize that methodological naturalism is the functional equivalent of a full blown metaphysical naturalism. Metaphysical naturalism asserts that the material world is all there is (in the words of Carl Sagan, "the cosmos is all there ever was, is, or will be"). Methodological naturalism asks us for the sake of science to pretend that the material world is all there is. But once science comes to be taken as the only universally valid form of knowledge within a culture, it follows at once that methodological and metaphysical naturalism become for all intents and purposes indistinguishable. They are functionally equivalent. What needs to be done, therefore, is to break the grip of naturalism in both guises, methodological and metaphysical. And this happens once we realize that it was not empirical evidence, but the power of a metaphysical world view that was all along urging us to adopt methodological naturalism in the first place. Yes, the heavens still declare the glory of God, and yes, God's invisible attributes are clearly seen from God's creation. But to hear what the heavens declare and to see what the creation makes manifest, we need to get rid of our metaphysical blinders." http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articl...kiDesign.shtml
If you have no intelligent rebuttal supported by real data then shutup[i]. Pretty please.
Copy and pasting Dembski… can you actually express your belief succintly, in your OWN words? Quit with the whole "I'm right, so shut up" thing — it is really arrogant. I put a few hours of work into my post INFORMING people, and you have to act like a jerk.
I assume you didn't even read my post. You ask for real data. The data is right there. I will get to Dembski in my next addition. It said so right there. Yet you went on and told me to "refute Dembski" or "shut up". You need to read things, even if they don't coincide with your own desire.
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I am not an Intelligent Design theorist. Few people could better express Intelligent Design better than those who have discovered it.
You made the bogus assumption that ID isn't science. ID has proven you dead wrong. Deal with it.
Can you actually express why Intelligent Design isn't science instead of resorting to character attacks and tired cliches?
You would have to read the vast array of ID literature with an open mind before you could even start to arrive at your conclusion.
Is your real motive reality or your philosophy?
May peace be upon thee with thy spirit.
ID provides no methodology for testing and doesn't explain anything or allow any new predictions to be made related to biology.
Can you provide a reference to ANY research article where the methodology was provided and based on ID, a hypothesis was made based on this ID methodology, it was tested against physical evidence using the methodology, the prediction was either determined true or false based ont he methodology.
Untill you can answer yes to this, ID is not in the realm of science but of metaphysics. Out of all the books you read, how many of the ID scientists spent time in the lab performing novel experiments using their methodology and have published the results? What can be taught about ID in a science classroom that provides any value over what we already teach? What 'labs' can be done using the ID methodology?
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Last edited by notto; 25th February 2005 at 08:31 AM.
If you isagree that ID is a real science, then please refute with Dembski's arguments. Don't resort to strawmen. Don't resort to ad hominem. Don't resort to silly cliches.
its easy to refute
show me where anyone did any research using the theory of ID (i'll save you the time, there isn't any, not even using dembski's wonderful filter)
I.D. is seemingly incapable of actually being tested scientifically, and so it all reduces to subjective opinion
If intelligent design is science, then would someone kindly point me to any peer-reviewed science journal article that details the ID hypothesis and presents the data to support it? I can't seem to find any such articles at all, not even by Mr. Behe.
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Matthew, you said in another thread that ID would be falsified if irreducible complexity were shown to usually have natural causes. I'm thinking Lucretius' examples are sufficient to show that irreducible complexity happens all the time without divine influence.
Methodological naturalism asks us for the sake of science to pretend that the material world is all there is. But once science comes to be taken as the only universally valid form of knowledge within a culture, it follows at once that methodological and metaphysical naturalism become for all intents and purposes indistinguishable. They are functionally equivalent. What needs to be done, therefore, is to break the grip of naturalism in both guises, methodological and metaphysical. And this happens once we realize that it was not empirical evidence, but the power of a metaphysical world view that was all along urging us to adopt methodological naturalism in the first place.
This is interesting.
If a self conscious knowledgable Christian is examining the evidence for evolution, there is NO pull effect from the materialistic worldview of Darwinianism (for want of a better label), but rather a push effect as the worldview opposes the Christian's theistic one.
I would point to very reluctant TE's such as BB.Warfield, J.G. Machen, (past heroes of the faith) and Terry Gray and Howard Van Till in our time, who, in their own words were dragged into an evolutionary framework for their science. None of them are(were) metaphysical naturalistics, yet all would, along with most(?) Christian scientists argue that methodological =/= philosophical, especially not this 'functionally equivalent' as science functions in a very truncated universe of discourse, which everyone seems to understand does not include metaphysics nor worldview elements like ultimate values.
why go backwards and reconfuse the issue with ID?
if the churches where able to show that supernaturalism was a unifying field of research rather than such a divisive one, then the idea of reintroducing the supernatural into science might be reconsidered, but history shows that people simply don't have a public access to this kind of knowledge. So it's reintroduction into science, basically by removing the methodological naturalism that exists and substitute some kind of theistic methodology, or by widening the universe of discourse for science to include the miraculous and supernatural, would allow science to fragment institutional as much as is the Christian church or even worse mirror the myriads of religious thought around the world. So we would have competing schools of science, conservative fundamentalist Baptists versus southern Indian dravidian Hindu, is this really what the IDer's want? or do they just want to get their interpretation of Genesis 1-5 in American high schools?
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__________________ i got a warning for flaming.
i find myself unable to participate here as a result.
this being the first of it's kind since i signed into FidoNet 20 years ago.
and am no longer posting to CF.
thanks to everyone who i have encountered over the years i spent here.
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