TRANSCRIPT

– Melody Gray Block – She is a certified financial planning professional and has been involved in the financial services industry for 19 years. She helps small business owners and individuals get their financial house in order through a comprehensive financial planning services to include insurance and investment management services. She is a retired army veteran serving over 20 years and is currently serving on the SAGU business faculty. Please help me welcome: Professor Melody Gray Block. Thank you very much. Please give a hand for Coach Harmon Did’t she do an excellent job? Excellent job! You know, for those of you that don’t know, I used to play basketball. And I mean, I love to play ball. So anytime you want to go to the courts, let me know. So excellent job. I learned a lot of great things. So, what I’m really excited about is this opportunity. Thank you so much, Dr. Sanders, Dr. Taylor, Dr. Brooks, for allowing me to have the chance to just share a few things with you today. Of course, just like Coach Harmon was saying. I wasn’t really sure what I was going to talk about, but of course, the Lord always kind of comes through with that. Don’t you know? One of the things that I wanted to share with you is about money. A lot of times people go,’well why do you have to have this conversation,”. Right? We are in the spiritual realm here. Wait, ‘why do we need to talk about money,’? Don’t you know that a lot of us have a lot of doubts? How many in here have doubts about money? What is it? How do you make it? How do you manage it? Is it okay to manage it? Can I have some? Can I not have some? Right? What does the word say about money? Right? There’s a lot of doubts out there. If you go to a bookstore you’re going to find a number of different things out there. Even about just how to manage money. Right? Just, how to create a budget. Something very simple. But there’s going to be tons of books out there about how to manage or create a budget. Right? Wouldn’t you say? So it creates a lot of confusion, a lot of confusion. Even just how do you manage it. How do you make it? What do you do with it? What does the word say about it? So what my goal is today, and what I want to share with you is: four principles or four perspectives, I should say, that allow you- so that you can take a hold of what I want to share with you today. It will be more impactful to you than anything else that you learn about money. And I know that’s a pretty broad statement. You’re like, ‘Man, that’s a pretty huge guarantee,’. I’ve worked with people that struggle month to month, with people who are multimillionaires, and I have to tell you that the word of God has a lot of powerful words to say about money. Don’t you know that? There’s over 2,600 scriptures if you were aware about money and possessions. This is a big deal. Right? God spends a lot of time talking about this because it is a really big deal. So what I want to share with you are not only these perspectives but I’m going to also end with five different habits so that you can take these habits and you can apply them to your life. You will make a difference. And it doesn’t matter if you’re managing a $100 dollar allowance from your mom every month or if you’re managing $100 million dollar business. The principles are the same. The perspectives are the same. So I want to and I’m looking forward to sharing some of these with you. So why is this so important? Why does God say so much about money? It’s because of this, in Matthew 6:21 it says: “For where your treasure is, is where your heart will be also”. Where is your heart when we have a relationship? We’re called to have a relationship with God. Right? Relationships are to the heart. Right? It starts with trust. All of those things. So where is your heart? When we take a look at our finances? You could probably take a look at your finances and see how do you spend money every month and be able to learn a lot about your habits and what’s important to you. Right? If any new game comes out and you’re willing to go get that new game before you tithe. Right. Maybe showing that we really wanted that game. Right? Then where are we with the Lord? As you start taking a look at how do you spend your palm and how you spend your money, everybody’s going to be slightly different with that. And there’s nothing wrong with that. We all have different values. We all have different perspectives and principles. But I will tell you, with God, where is your heart, is where year treasuries is. Where is your heart? And so that’s why it’s so important. Money alone has the power to pull you closer to God than you would ever think that you could get or further away than you ever think was possible. It has that power. That’s why it’s so important that we get this right. So important. So what I’m want to share with you are four different perspectives. And so it starts with our heart. When you deal with money, just like anything else that you do, just as Coach shared, that we have to have the right lens the right way to be able to see things or view things. So that right lens. As we begin to take a look at that and I want to share with you. Four perspectives or four lens to look at money. Okay, we’re going to talk about stewardship. We’re going to talk about faith. We’re talking about wisdom. And we’re going to talk about contentment. So let’s start with stewardship. Stewardship perspective: Song 24:1, ‘The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it. The world and all who live within it,’. Guys, God owns it all. Right? He owns it all. He owns everything. What I love about this versus is that it tells me that the pressure is off. Right? I don’t have to own it. Right? The lord owns it. He owns everything. Everything He gives you, He owns. – I’m sorry. I think I’m ajusting a little bit. Is that okay?- But he owns it all. So God owns it all. And if you could really get in your mind, ‘Wow, anything the that the Lord gives you, He owns it,’. Right? Our only responsibility is-switch to this? Can you hear me? Is that better? Okay- So God owns it all. Right? So He owns everything. And when we can get that perspective that He owns it and our only job is to manage it, then it takes a lot of pressure off. Right? But the great thing is, is we don’t even have to know all of those things. He teaches those things. How to even manage that money in our word, and in the word. So our role is just to be a steward of His resources. It’s to the point where we can. Once you adopt the attitude or stewardship mentality, you’re poised to go to on an unforgettable journey and adventure with God. When you can get to the point that you can hold out your hand and everything that you have and you say, ‘Lord what would you have?’ and where you can just say if He comes to you and says, ‘We’re short. I want you to write $10,000 to your neighbor”. and you can easily say without a shadow of a doubt, without first questioning, ‘How is that going to affect my retirement planning? How was it going to affect that thing that I was want to save for? How is that going to affect this that and the other?’ and you can literally just say, ‘Lord, absolutely. You want me to write a check to this person? I got to write it,” with an open hand. And when you can get to that spot, and when you can get there with that perspective, then you’re going to go to some amazing places with God because God is looking not just for stewards, but He’s looking for sons and daughters. Sons and daughters that He can trust. Right? He’s going to do a huge move of God. There’s a huge move of God going on right now. There’s no doubt in my mind that the people and the students that are here at Southwestern are going to be going to be world changers. He’s going to impact you in ways that not only can you impact others within your community, but within businesses that you have. But He can only do that if He can trust you. Right? Only if He can trust you with those resources. So, when you can be in that position, where you are a son or daughter of God, and that you say, ‘Lord, what would you have for us to do is what I want to do,’ because we won’t have to be concerned about that. Right? Because He says He would never leave you nor forsake you. So you don’t have to be concerned about what I’m going to do or how am I going to take care of myself. or how am I going to take care of my family or how am I to do this? Right? The lord has all of that in mind. So when you can have that perspective that God owns it all, the role, and our role is understanding our role is that we are stewards of his resources. It takes that pressure off. The other perspective we want to take a look at is the faith perspective. In Hebrews 11:6 it says that, ‘Without faith, it is impossible to please God, because anyone who is,’- I can’t really read that- ‘when it comes, they must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who diligently seek Him’. What would you do? What would you have me do with the financial resources that you have? It takes faith. Right? Sometimes when you first- when God first tells you, ‘Hey, tithe,’ sometimes that first tithe check takes faith. Right? Like truly a tithe?. Right? Not just your $20 right? A true tithe. When you really have and you take that step you’re like- but I want to have that bill. Right? But it’ll be all right. I mean, I did have that journey when the Lord first told me to tithe, then I was like, ‘How Lord?’. He’s like, ‘I got this thing.’ I was a single lady and I don’t have any other resources. Nobody else to call on. Lord are you sure? I had to literally sit and just read it over and over and over. “Trust the Lord, lean not on my own understanding.” Right? When you have to continue to get that, but when you can get that, when you can have that faith, to step out and manage finances this is the way the Lord says, ‘There is a reward.’ Actively trust. The hard thing about it is, I can’t always see that it’s very good. Sorry, guys. Actively trust Him to uniquely guide and direct our steps. Guys there’s so many verses in the Bible that talk about money and the impact of money. So He’s there to guide you and direct you even within your finances. Sometimes people think, ‘well, that’s world stuff,’. Right? ‘God doesn’t know about money.’ Have you ever heard that? Am I right? This is the real world stuff. Right? My dad used to say that to me, ‘This is real world stuff melody,’. Right? I’ll tell you what: God knows way more about money than we do. Right? He has so much to say about money and how to run a business inside the word of God. So we can actively trust Him? Just like we can absolutely trust Him to guide us to the right person to marry. Right? The right job to take. We can trust Him when we have a situation or financial burden or a bond or a situation we’re dealing with. We can say, ‘Lord what would you have for me to do in this situation?’. Right? He’s there to guide us and direct us. As I’ve said before, having that position where you can literally hold your finances out and say, ‘Lord, what would you have me to do with this?’. If he was a blessed Professor Watson with a million dollars first decision is not, ‘What am I going to do with that,’. Right? The first decision is, ‘Lord, what would you have?’. Right? What would you have? What was, what is your goal with that? Well, we can also be in that position that it doesn’t matter how much I have or where it comes from. The father, ‘You have a plane and direction,’. I trust that. Right? When you can have that position to really just hold it out and really seek his direction. But that’s hard. Right? I mean, when the first time you get a huge jump in pay, or you might get a huge influx of cash, it’s really tempting. Right? Truthfully, right? It’s tempting to go, ‘man, I’m going to do this, and I’m going to do this,’ and we’ve already got it set in our mind. Right? But when you can consciously go before the Lord and say, ‘Lord, whatever you would have,’ and honestly position it and lay it at his feet, you will see amazing things happen. As we continue to walk by faith thinking about God’s direction, God will and can sometimes use money to test our lives and to sharpen us. Know that one of the greatest things that, and I’ll talk more about it in a minute, but, one of the great things that Paul said is, ‘Whether our base are bound, I learned to be content.’. Right? So it doesn’t matter as we begin to walk things out. God may put you in a position that allows you to make additional money and learn lessons. Right? You might be in a position where He recruits you to go someplace that you’re like, ‘Lord, how are you going to make it work?’. Right? But it takes faith knowing that wherever He directs, He provides. It may or may not be in the way that you want or how you want. You may not be able to get that car that you want or that other situation you might want, but we can trust Him that he’s going to direct us. Where he directs, He will provide. And of course connecting your faith journey with your financial journey. Guys there’s no doubt in my mind that as I began to go to the Lord more and more and more when it came to my finances, as I began to see clients go more and more and more to the Lord to find out more and getting closer to the Lord with their or their spiritual life, and combining that with their financial journey. Guys it will bring you so much closer to the Lord than you would ever think is possible. And I would challenge you to try to attempt that. The other thing that I want to share with you is wisdom perspective. Wisdom Perspective in James 3:17, “But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all purer than peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy, and good fruit, impartial and sincere.” There is so much when we start taking a look at the word. There are so many verses and so many parables about money and possessions because this is the one area that can obviously pull us away from the Lord. God’s works and speaks, of course, with authority. It is timeless guys. It never changes. Right? What Jesus talked about 2000 years ago applies today. And it will apply in 2000 years from now. So having the wisdom, the financial wisdom, the business wisdom, that is our work and in the word of God- it’s timeless and it will supply all and apply to all financial decision making skills or making decisions you need to make. Contentment perspective: First Timothy 6:6, ‘But godliness with contentment is great gain.’. In the world we have this perspective: more money, more things. It’ll make me more successful. It’ll make me more secure and I’ll make and be more significant. Right? That’s the world’s perspective. And sometimes it’s really easy, even as Christians, that we think, ‘Well, we have to be prepared, and we have to do these things, and the word says we need to do this,’. And it says we need to do that! Right? There’s so much that it’s so easy for all of us to get so caught up in making sure about we have and pursuing those things that we feel that everybody else on Facebook or Twitter or whatever else we follow says that we need to have to be successful and secure and insignificant. I going to tell you, there’s only one thing that you need to have to be successful, secure, and significant, and that is Jesus Christ. That is Jesus Christ. And when you have that, and you’re following what he has called you to do, whatever that is then that’s going to be more impactful in your life and in those lives of those lives around you. More than you would ever think is possible. Paul as I shared said, I need to learn that. He had learned to be content whether he had much or had little. He had- So whenever we have a position, or we have an attitude, that doesn’t mean that we don’t continue to strive. Always strive but continue to pursue things that the Lord would have. Right? It doesn’t mean, we sit back and watch Netflix all day. Right? Then, I mean, we do that. But it does mean that, you know what, I’m content with whenever or wherever I’m at. Whatever the Lord has me. That’s where He has me. I’m there for a reason. Whatever that reason is. And that we can trust that He will provide And He will never leave us nor forsake us. And that He will provide whatever needs that we have and to keep our lives free from the love of money in all be content with all that we have. It is important that, as we continue to go forward, that we have that contentment for these four perspectives. If you can grab a hold of these four perspectives. It will make a huge difference in how you approach money and how you approach your life. The other thing that I would share with you and leave with you are like, ‘Okay. Well now what?’. God gives simple financial principles and scripture. When you apply them your financial future is more durable and more stable. These five principles. These five habits will make a huge difference in your life. These principles will apply whether you’re managing a little or you’re managing a lot. And that is basically the five things here, which is, 1) spend less than you earn right. Whatever you earn, whatever that is, you spend less than that. 2) You avoid the use of debt. Anything that you can do to avoid the use of debt would be advantageous over your life. If you’re using credit cards stop using credit cards. Right? Find another way to go about handle that in your day to day expenses. 3) Give generously. We should always give generously. Giving is the antidote to greed. Giving is the antidote to greed. So if you begin to find yourself, and in your own heart beginning to stir up because you have more and more, maybe you have an opportunity to be able to get a nice paying job or what have you, it’s easy to allow that money to take a hold of you. The antidote to that is to give. So give generously. It will continue to position your heart in the right spot. 4) Plan it for financial margin. That basically just means guys things happen in life. Good things, bad things. Maybe you’re doing just fine. But maybe your parents need something. Or maybe your child needs something. Or maybe a friend needs something. Be to operate within a financial margin within your life. And of course: 5) Set those long goals. A lot of times with goals or long term goals, we might set as car as a course. And we say you know I’m going to save for this or we’re going to save for that. And then on that journey with the Lord, the Lord’s going to say, man that’s a great job being a Steward of those resources that I’ve asked of you. Now I’d like for you to take so much of that. I want you to give this to this other person over here. So it’s going to be an amazing journey that if you can just take these perspectives and these principles. And if you just take this alone. This will make a huge difference, and huge impact in the life that you have today and in the future. So with that, thank you.

TRANSCRIPT

– [MUSIC PLAYING] [PLAYING TROMBONE] [APPLAUSE] Thank you, thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. That was called “Bye-bye Blackbird,” which is a great standard that was done by Clark Terry a lot during his tenure, especially when he was doing lectures for students such as yourselves. When he was out doing concerts it was one of his favorite tunes to do. Of course, it was made famous by another trumpet player. And so this leads us to what we’re going to talk about today. Do you guys know what a trumpet is? I’m going to guess that you do. There are several jazz trumpet players that are important for us to look at, but one we’re going to look at today. When you think about jazz trumpet players, probably one of the first names that come to your mind is Miles Davis. He was instrumental in starting having just basically leaders, and his band spawned some of the greatest jazz players around from Chick Corea to Kenny Garrett or Wayne Shorter, just to name a few who are in one of the bands that he led. But we’re not going to talk about Miles Davis today. Here he is right here. Very cool cat, great recording, 1959, Kind Of Blue, which really kind of changed the jazz scene. It’s one of those pieces that– or one of those albums that just changed how people looked at jazz. Another player that you might think that we’re going to talk about that we’re not is Louis Armstrong. Of course, you know him as Satchmo or [SCATTING] oh, yeah. [INAUDIBLE] you guys. Thank you so much. [APPLAUSE] Mess up one time I’m doing it. But Louis Armstrong– in the jazz world, we actually know Louis Armstrong as Pops is what we usually refer to him as. Also we might think about Dizzy Gillespie. Dizzy Gillespie is back there in the Bebop Age, along with Charlie Parker, who are the voices of the jazz language that’s happening at this time. Really fast, rhythmical plane, moving up and down scales, telling a story. But today we’re going to focus on a very prolific player or trumpeter who’s also revolutionized another instrument known as the flugelhorn. Now, flugelhorn, which is on my– I guess is on your left, too, correct? So as I’m looking at it on the left, it’s a little bit bigger than the trumpet, which is smaller. Matter of fact, in the jazz world, if you look back in the 1940s, 1950s, they actually refer to it as fat girl because it’s bigger than a trumpet. So this is what they’re calling. And Clark Terry is to the flugelhorn what Satchmo was to the trumpet. He just really, really plays this instrument to the full capacity and really exploits it 100%. Clark Terry is also known as the father of jazz education. He begins to, later in his career, going around to different schools, talking about jazz, encouraging jazz ensemble, encouraging others to actually play this music. Just as a note for you, when we’re looking at the full spectrum of music, the only contribution that America has to this vastness of liturgy– not liturgy, but of literature that we have, is jazz. That’s the only thing the United States has contributed, so it’s uniquely ours, combining rhythmic notation or rhythmic playing of Africa with harmonic structure of Europe, along with our own taste of improvisation create this whole ideal and this whole music of jazz, which is uniquely our own. Now, you might wonder, is Clark Terry really one of these people we really should be looking at? Let me give you a few of his accolades. Clark Terry has been on over 900 recordings. He has over 250 awards, medals, and honors, including he was inducted into the Hall of Fame at the Jazz at Lincoln Center. He was the 2010 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, Downbeat Jazz Hall of Fame, the National Endowment of the Arts Jazz Masters, 16 honorary doctorates, several keys to cities. He was a jazz ambassador to the United States in the Middle East and Africa, and a knighthood in Germany. So this is a cat that we– I would use the word cat a lot. It just kind of comes out. There’s a whole story of how that came about, but that’s for another lecture. But this is– he’s one of these that we should study. Clark Terry was born December 13, 1920. He was number 7 of 11 children. Clark Terry wanted to play trumpet after he heard the Duke Ellington Jazz Band. He wanted to play trumpet so badly that he went to the junkyard and got a water hose, and found three things of wire, put it around the water hose, and started playing it like it was a real trumpet. If that’s not determination, I don’t know what it is. So he played, and finally he got in high school and he played more. And eventually, he makes it to the Navy band, which then I have the same thing. I was also in the Navy and in the Navy band, and went to Great Lakes. And if you’re a part of the Navy, we usually don’t call it Great Lakes. We always call it Great Mistakes. So you never go there again. But Clark Terry goes there, he contributes to the military music. But prior to going there, he decides to do one season– and there’s a reason why it’s only one– with Ruben and Cherry Carnival. So he’s travel with this carnival and they’re playing this music, and of course, there was segregation that was happening during this time in the early 1940s, late ’30s. Segregation is deep, especially in the south. So while he’s traveling, he’s experiencing the separation even more so than in St. Louis. One incident is that he couldn’t go necessarily to a circus that was for whites. There was a sort of a circus for blacks or African-Americans and a circus for whites. But he was walking around and he noticed that one of the performers of music was playing this note for an extremely long period of time, and people would go crazy. He can hold the note over five minutes. And Clark Terry just watched them, and he figured out what he was doing. It’s a thing called circular breathing. Basically, you’re able to blow air and at the same time fill your cheeks up with air, push that air out and breathe in through your nose for another breath, and so the note never stops. He figures out that’s what– if you guys ever watch Kenny G, is exactly what he’s doing. It’s a nice little trick, but in the music world we figured out what they were doing. So if you hear this [INAUDIBLE]—- so Clark Terry figures this out. And when we start– we’re going to listen to some of his music. He will play these incredibly long musical lines and he never takes a breath. He just keeps going because he figures out this trick that is going on. Now, when Clark Terry was going at the end of his one year with this carnival, he realized that he doesn’t make really any money. The carnival takes every bit of money he was going to make, so when it was time to go home, he had no money to get home. So the leader decides, we’ll let you go with this. But you can’t ride in the cab of the truck with us. You’re going to have to get into back with the animals. And he’s like, I don’t want to do this, but he has to get home. So Clark tells this great story about him getting in the back, and there’s this monkey in a cage. And the monkey’s looking at him and he’s looking at the monkey, and it’s almost like he can read the monkey’s mind going, what are you doing back here, as Clark is saying, what are you doing looking at me being back here? I want to go home just like you. So they developed this respect. If you don’t do anything, I won’t do anything. He said he remembers that monkey, and he says I never, ever want to be back here again. So when he makes it back to St. Louis, he kisses the ground, and he starts playing different venues and clubs. And all of a sudden, he finds himself, of course, in the Navy. And then after that, he goes to two iconic bands. The first band that he gets involved in, which is the Count Basie band. The Count Basie band– Count Basie he is one of these performers since moving out. We’re talking specifically African-American. So he’s watching this band growing, and the leader is growing him. Especially– I talked about the improvisation, which is a huge part of jazz. And he told him, slow down. Actually use this space and use the rhythm section in your solos because that’s a part of it. It’s not about how many notes you can play, even though it’s great. But listen to the time. Now, with Count Basie, to prove this point, there’s a piece that’s written by Neil Hefti call “Little Darling,” and it kind of goes, be bum, bum, bum, bum, boo doo da. When he first wrote it, it was at a medium tempo. So it was like, be bum, bum, bum, bum, boo do da. So it was faster. And Count Basie, once the band read it the first time, he was like, no, Neil, no. We need to slow this down. Let me show you. So he re-does it, and it becomes be bum, bum, bum, bum, boo do dum. And it goes this whole way, and you just lay back and the tune really swings hard to show that Count Basie really had this wonderful feel of how music should go. And Clark Terry is picking up on all of this, and Clark calls this whole initiation or acceptance into the jazz genre. So as he’s going through this whole thing of learning what Count Basie’s doing, in 1951 something else happens to Clark. He meets Duke Ellington. And he’s like, I saw Duke. He’s the reason why I’m doing this. So Duke Ellington hears him in 1951 and says, I like the way that Clark Terry plays, and I want that sound in my band. So what happens? Duke approaches him and said, hey, I want you to be a part of my band. Clark goes, yeah, I want to do that. But I’m in Count Basie’s band. He’s like, yeah, I know. I’ve got a plan. You’re going to take a leave of absence because you’re sick, and go back home to St. Louis. And when the band travels through, you meet up with us, and you’re in the Duke Ellington band. Great, that works for me. So he has to go to Count Basie and tell Basie, hey, man, I need to take a leave of absence. Well, at the same time, Count Basie has come up with this thing or, I don’t want to lose this kid. He’s great. So with him being great, all of a sudden, he wants to keep me in. So in keeping him in, he gives him a raise in $15. Guys, $15 back that was a lot of money. That was a lot of money. So he gives him this raise, but he goes to him, he’s counting on this money to get him all the way through. So he goes, hey, man, I need to pick up my money. I’ve got to go back to St. Louis. So Count Basie pays him all the money minus the $15. And he goes– but he knew we couldn’t say anything about it because then that would give up that he was actually leaving the band. So he couldn’t figure out how to get out of it. So he goes back home, meets up with Duke Ellington, and he begins to play in the Duke Ellington band. Duke Ellington is extremely instrumental in growing him. He plays with Duke Ellington basically from 1951 until 1959. And this time she grows and he does a lot of things. Before I play a clip for you with him playing with the Duke Ellington band, it’s important to know that we have this one thing that’s [INAUDIBLE] that Duke Ellington– not Duke Ellington, but Clark Terry doesn’t get his money from Count Basie, and he feels like he needs to clear the air. So finally, years later, he goes back to Count and says, hey, man. You remember this situation? And he says, yeah. He’s like, man, you realize you never paid me that $15 for that. He says, yeah, I know, because I knew you were leaving the band. He was like, man, the whole time? So then he said he wanted to go back and get the air cleared. They both laughed about this situation, that they were able to be friends and it wasn’t in between. And meeting Clark Terry, he’s one of these people who he’s very integral. He’s always good to his word, and he tells you exactly what he’s thinking. But he does it in a nice way sometimes, and he is just integral, 100%. So when he joins there the Duke Ellington band, he’s able to be around really great players– Johnny Hodges, who’s playing alto sax. He has Tricky Sam Nanton, one of my favorite players on trombone, Lawrence Brown on trombone. So he’s around all these guys, and he’s also around great trumpet players. So in this we’re going to watch a little scene of them playing. This is– playing, this is Cat Anderson on trumpet, known for his high playing. Hopefully, you guys can hear that. [MUSIC PLAYING] This is actually Clark Terry playing. And this is Shorty. Can you guess why his name was Shorty? Shorty Baker. Ray Nance, wonderful hand player, [INAUDIBLE] player. Listen to the way he uses space. So we can stop right there. So this just shows that she’s using things that she’s learned in Count Basie’s band as he’s moving forward into Duke Ellington’s band. So it’s just it’s him just growing and growing as a player. After he leaves– he stays with Duke Ellington all the way until 1959. He leaves then and he begins to– he joins Quincy Jones, and he’s playing with Quincy Jones’s orchestra. And during this time, they do a piece called “Free and Easy.” It was premiered, and once it was premiered, it didn’t get great reviews. But it pushed Clark Terry’s name more out in front. All of a sudden, he’s becoming one of the jazz people on the scene that people need to reckon with. The reason this [INAUDIBLE] also was important, it was during this time that the Urban League actually approached NBC and was wondering why there were not more African-Americans in television. And of course, at the time it was stated that it was African-Americans couldn’t play on TV. So the Urban League decided to send a questionnaire out– are you saying that African-Americans cannot play? And they say, so on the questionnaire it says, who can play studio music, who could read music, who could play in a trumpet section, and who could play first trumpet, which first trumpet being in the highest part. And the name that kept coming up and up again was Clark Terry. So Clark Terry actually got hired from being in maybe a lackluster opera playing the trumpet, but it was enough to get his name pushed to the front. When he was hired to play on television, his career really took off. He started playing not only for the television station. He start recording more, he started getting gigs, doing jingles, all over the place. He’s playing so much music at this time, and that’s what he’s wanting to do. But as he was on TV, he realized that he was a model. He was a role model for– everyone was looking at him. He knew his suit had to look good. His shirt couldn’t be dirty. His pants has to be creased. He had to be on time. There were things that had to happen because this is what was expected, and he knew that he was paving the way for others to follow behind him. So he took on that responsibility, and he really began to grow. All of a sudden he fires us up on The Tonight Show band. So he’s playing with The Tonight Show band, and in The Tonight Show band there’s a wonderful thing called Stump the Band segment. Basically, what Stump the Band is, I would go out to here– Johnny Carson would go out, and he goes, OK, it’s your time to name a tune to see if the band can do it. Usually, the band was great unless they did some song called “Camp Wackadoo” or something they learned at some children’s camp. Then it was like, yeah, we don’t know this. So the audience member who could do that would win maybe some cheap dinner someplace. So that’s what he did, but this is when Clark Terry developed something great. And that’s something he does it’s called The Mumbles. And so basically, it would be like playing 12-bar blues under him, and on that 12-bar blues, he would just [MUMBLING]. He just makes up any syllables, just kind of like he’s mumbling. Basically, this kind of comes out of a thing of when he was in St. Louis, there was a person in the street who would like to partake of spirits. And when he took of too many spirits, he would just– [MUMBLING] No one knew what he was– but you almost knew what he was saying because of his facial gestures. So Clark Terry takes this and actually makes it part of his gimmick, his thing that he does. And he actually is really known for doing it. Clark Terry, during his time that he’s working, he’s working a lot. And he’s working on The Tonight Show, he does something that is unique. He begins to go out into schools. He’s teaching about jazz education and the importance of moving jazz forward, and so he’s out with several more people on The Tonight Show band. And while he’s doing this, he realizes that these kids are really taking to it. So we also get him going to schools, he’s traveling, he’s doing summer camps, he’s doing youth camps. And so finally, he establishes the Clark Terry Institute of Jazz Studies. So this is this big Institute where students are going to learn more about this language of jazz. And also during this time that he’s– well, before we jump there, we need to hear what Clark Terry sounded like when he went to The Tonight Show band. You will hear the growth and the amount of things that he’s doing. Remember space, but also remember earlier in the lecture we talked about circular breathing, which allows him to play long phrases without taking a breath. Let’s see if he’s able to accomplish this. [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] So you see he was able to go a long– play a lot of notes, use time, and to be able to make these long phrases where people like me, mere mortals, have to take a breath because I can’t go that long. I can’t circular breathe. Well, he’s doing mentoring, he’s working, he’s doing things with the NAACP, he’s working with Bob Brookmeyer. He’s spending long hours just working all the time. There’s many accounts of him staying up to 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning, gigging and working, and getting up to be at the studio at 8 o’clock in the morning ready to play. So he’s not spending a lot of time [INAUDIBLE],, but he realizes his time at the NAACP is extremely important. He’s fighting for racial equality all over the United States. He feels like this is something that is his task, something that he must do. So he takes it on full fledged. And at the same time, he’s still mentoring. He mentors two important brothers, and those two important brothers are Wynton Marsalis and Branford Marsalis. Wynton Marsalis is important because he has taken up this whole mantle of jazz education, in which he is going through [INAUDIBLE]. He’s in charge of Jazz at Lincoln Center now. So we’re seeing that he is working hard to further the message in the language of jazz. And Branford Marsalis, who is his brother, who replaces Doc Severinsen, who was actually instrumental in getting Clark Terry hired, also he takes over Doc Severinsen’s role as the leader of The Tonight Show band in 1997. Well, this brings me to what’s the most important part to me. I actually had a chance to meet Clark Terry January 13, 2015. I actually went to his house, and I am extremely, extremely grateful to his wonderful wife, Gwen. They just really welcomed me in and a colleague of mine, and so I decided to take a lesson with Clark Terry. Now, what’s weird about this lesson– Clark, at this point, is 94 years old. He’s blind, he’s almost deaf, he has two legs amputated from his bout with diabetes. But still, in all of that, he still was really modeling in giving us a lesson. And while we were– we were talking about the jazz language, how to do doodle time, which is this fast tonguing, going up and down the scales in order to create solos, and to deepen our knowledge of improvisation. So he’s going through– and Clark was a tough teacher at 94. Do not be fooled and think 94-year-old people aren’t tough. They’re really tough and they’re really demanding. I was over and he was like, come here, boy. Let’s see what you got. I was over there, and I’d go, [SINGING].. He said, [INAUDIBLE],, you ain’t getting it. Get over in that corner and try again. So I would come back. And this lesson started somewhere around 7 or 8 o’clock at night. It ended about 12:30. So for all of you who take lessons and you have an hour lesson, wah. You have not been beaten until you’ve been beat by a 94-year-old man with no legs who can’t see you. That does something. So we were there, but it was great because I didn’t want to leave. So I had to rush to get back. Actually, I was driving back here to teach at Southwestern, so I left at 12:30 and drove from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, back here. He was actually artist in residence at the University of Arkansas Pine Bluff, UAPB, and that’s where I was able to see him. Clark felt that it was extremely important that what he was doing was passing on everything that he learned to the next generation. So I want to read this one thing that I actually wrote about Clark a while ago. It says, Clark Terry was a musician educator, and his story is one of determination, love of people and the music, and covered under the umbrella of responsibility to pass on everything he learned along his journey. That’s exactly what he did. And my job is to take everything that I have worked it’s a passing out to all of you. So in essence, you guys have become students of Clark Terry just about being here and listening to what’s going on and who he was. Before this, many of you may have not even known who Clark Terry was. But now you’ve been exposed to him. I invite you to learn more and more about Clark Terry. You will be inspired by his story. You will be inspired by the things he had to go through, and still he overcame and was able to give the next generation and generations after a rich knowledge of the history that belongs to us, which is jazz. So what I would like to leave you with is this one thing, and that is the mumbles. Nonsense words, but it was great. Before I do, I’d like to think Dr. Malcolm [INAUDIBLE].. I’d like the thank Dr, [INAUDIBLE] for inviting me to always be a part of these series. But it’s always wonderful and it’s always great to see you guys come out and listen to stories about jazz and jazz musicians. So here is the mumbles. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUMBLING] But you know, if I keep talking like this, [INAUDIBLE] Thank you. [APPLAUSE]

TRANSCRIPT

– [MUSIC PLAYING] You might be wondering what hockey has to do with strange American stories. We place a lot of emphasis in sports and our politics. Think about the United States and basketball and what happened in 2004. We won the bronze medal and what immediately happened? Every professional basketball player that was American signed up to commit to play for the next three Olympics and we won gold beating every team. That’s exactly the way the Soviet Union was in the late 20th century. They wanted to demonstrate their superiority to the world. The way they chose to do that, one of the ways, was their sports specifically ice hockey and the Soviet Red Army team won the Olympic gold medal in 56, 64, 68, 72, 76, 84, and 88. Parenthetically in 60, 80, it was the US that beat them. But that’s a different story. That’s next year’s story. They revolutionized the way hockey was played. Specifically what became known as the Russian 5. Sergei Fedorov, Igor Larionov, Viacheslav Fetisov, Vyacheslav Kozlov, and Vladimir Konstantinov. All five of these players played for the Detroit Red Wings in the 1990s and changed the game of hockey forever. The problem was how were we going to get them over here to play. Sergei Fedorov was drafted in the fourth round in 1989 by the Detroit Red Wings. The problem was the Soviets had the Iron Curtain. They would not allow any player to come over and join them. They were everywhere the team went internationally. You had KGB agents and you had spies making sure that Soviets stayed with the team and never traveled. So the Red Wings call a beat writer for the Detroit Free Press by a man by the name of Keith Gaines, who just so happened in the 70s was a Russian analyst for the NSA station in West Berlin. So he could speak Russian. So the Red Wings invite gaines to lunch and basically say, hey, we will pay you six figures to go to Helsinki where the Soviets are playing in a pre-season tournament. And just tell Sergey Fedorov and Vladimir Constantinov that we’ve drafted them. And then they can come over here and play. We just need a letter. Now the journalist hesitated. Your journalistic standards, ethics supposed to be covering the team. Now the team offered to pay him as like a subversive pay plus if he gets caught he’s basically going to Siberia when they ever see or hear from him again. That’s the way the Soviet Union works. But he decides to go. And in August 1989, he cashes in some air miles. He flies to Helsinki, Finland. He gets off the plane and then he just finds somebody and says where is hockey being played and they take him on to the arena. He has no ticket. He wanders around into the building. He wanders through the first period of the game finds the promoter that organized the festivities and tells them, hey, I’m an American reporter. I work in Detroit. I happen to be over here on vacation. The Red Wings drafted Fedorov and Constantinov. Is there a chance that I could meet them and talk to them? And of course, the guys are excited about press being there takes it. And after the game, he is brought down into the locker room and he’s able to meet Sergei Fedorov and Vladimir Constantinov. And he basically shows them a list of all the players, the Red Wings drafted and says, “Hey, look Sergei, you were drafted right here in the fourth round. Vlad, you were drafted right here in the 11th round. And he talks to them. And he notices off to his shoulder the KGB agents standing there watching everything he says and at the same moment he hands them a media guide of the red wings with those letters written in Russian that basically said we drafted you. We will pay you. In fact, come to the United States and play for the Detroit Red Wings. He gives them the letter, he gives them the folder. They’re flipping through it. Sergei Fedorov sees the letter and just keeps flipping completely stone-faced. He knows that if he’s caught, both he and this American reporter are going to be in trouble. So he leaves, he flies back home. Nothing happens. That Christmas, the Russian team is in Chicago and the Red Wings meet with Sergei Fedorov. They’ve got a car in the basement of the Drake Hotel. They’ve got a contract. They’ve got money. They’re ready to hightail out of Chicago Sergei Fedorov. Sergei Fedorov says not yet. I want to come. But not yet. He wants to finish up his military contract which expires on January 1st. So he doesn’t want to become a deserter and have the military coming after him. So fast forward to July 1990. The Russian team is in Portland, Oregon. The Red Wings greenlights their immigration reform. They fly out there and they’re waiting at the hotel and literally this is the scene. You’ve got a sedan in the back alley of the hotel. You’ve got a driver. You’ve got Jim White sitting in the lobby and they’re basically waiting for Sergei Fedorov to arrive back to the hotel from the game. He walks off the team bus, walks into the lobby, goes up to Jim White and just casually says “you ready to go Jim?” And they just get up and they walk through the kitchen. They walk out the back alley. They get in the car, and they get on the plane and fly back to Detroit. When they get back to Jim White’s house. Phone rings. It’s the State Department. Jim White, do you know where Sergei Fedorov is? Yes, I do. OK phone hangs up. Three minutes later, a Russian diplomat calls him yelling out in Russian. Why did you kidnap Sergei Fedorov? We want Sergei Fedorov. It basically says Sergei gets on the phone and basically says, I want to play hockey. I’m not coming back. And they file paperwork and Sergei Fedorov starts the 1990 season for the Detroit red wings. The next man Vladimir Constantinov also known as Vlad the Impaler because of his hits that he would unleash on the ice is a different story. He’s a family man. He’s got a wife. He’s got a kid. And he has a 25 year contract with the Red Army. If he defects to come play hockey, He will be considered a deserter which would classify him as a felon which means he won’t be able to get a visa to come work in the US. So they’ve got to figure out how do we get him out of his military contract to come play. And so the red wings use the help of a Soviet journalist by the name of Valerie Mataev who basically concocts some plan. I will take money. And I will bribe doctors and we will get Constantinov diagnosed with an incurable disease that will get him released from his military contract. So he flies over to Moscow. He’s got about $60,000 in cash and he’s sitting there getting to pay these doctors in the hospital diagnosed him with some sort of stage four brain cancer that he’s going to die. He can’t play. The Red army is not going to fall for that. They basically take it to a military hospital. They want all the tests redone to re-diagnose these this decision when they come out. So he, of course, the room says, hey, I need more money. So they just ship more with more money, more cash to Moscow. And he bribes military doctors. They’ve almost got it figured out. But the last military doctor doesn’t want cash. He wants a car. He wants the biggest American car You can get. Well, this is Detroit. So it’s like, OK, so the red wings go and they buy a Caprice Classic. That’s a 1990s big boat car, put in Mataev’s name. They ship it off to Moscow. They give him his car. They all sign off. He’s got cancer. He’s dying. He’s never going to be able to play again. So they’re beginning to walk out. They’re headed to the airport. Vlad’s not quite sure this is real. They put his passport on a no-fly list. So they can’t fly us. So they go back in. They call say, hey, we can try and get out by train before they shut the borders. At this point, if you’re old enough to remember history. This is the exact moment when the Soviet army unleashed the coup against Gorbachev and the fall of Soviet Union. So as they’re trying to get out all of a sudden you have demonstrations, you have tanks you have the military presence all through the streets of Moscow. I mean, the military is taking over and they can’t get out. So they get caught up in the midst of the protests when they finally get to the car. Windows are broken, briefcases stolen. The briefcase has all his medical paperwork, all the fake document plans, his passports, and still about $20,000 to bribe him. They’re like somebody Stole this. It’s going to turn up at the KGB. We are all dead. They get a call. I’m a big hockey fan. I found your briefcase. I give it back to you. And of course, they thought like this was. And then and they get a call to go leave to a park at midnight they’re like, this is the KGB setting the stage. They’re going to come and track us and take us over. When they get out there it actually was just a hockey fan that happened to have a briefcase. So they signed the glove signed sticks signed a jersey. He gave the briefcase still with the bribe cash and everything still in it and now they’ve got everything back. So they call the Red Skins and say that we can’t get out. All week, I can’t get into the US, I can only get into Budapest. So they get on a train and go to Budapest. Jim White gets on the plane, flies to D.C., picks up the immigration lawyers. And then they fly to Budapest. They work on immigration paperwork. They fly back. Vlad is able to come to the US both with his wife and his daughter. So he is not coming to start the 91 season with his entire family. The next person that comes, Vyacheslav Kozlov was the 15-year-old hot shot in the Red Army. At 15 years of age with comparisons to Wayne Gretzky. Even if you don’t know hockey, you know him. He was supposed to be better than Wayne Gretzky to the point that he had a $250,000 contract with the Red Army at 17 years of age that they were paying him that in the Soviet block to play hockey. He was that good. He had no intention of coming over to the US. But he toyed with the remnants that they drafted him in the third round in 1990. Every time, the red wings would come and meet him on an international stage it was like, let’s go drive a car. He just wanted to drive the sports car the red wings rented wherever they were. That’s how he learned to drive was basically driving the sports cars the red wings would rent. The would say come components over to the US and you can buy whatever car you want. Instead, he said at 19 years of age, one month into the season in 1991, he wrecks the car killing his best friend and teammate, and puts him in the hospital. His face is mangled. He loses the peripheral vision in his left eye. I don’t even know if he’s ever going to play again. The Red Army stops paying. He’s in a hospital bed. They don’t care about him. The Red Wings send over their agents, send over their doctors. They’re with him in the hospital 24/7. Again, Mataev gets involved. OK we’re going to bribe these doctors again. But this one’s a little bit more believable that he’s never going to be able to play again. After all, Look at him. Look at him. He can’t see, brain damage in in his face. And again, you have the same situation. They bribe. They get him over here. He’s released from his contract. He’s playing. He starts playing in the spring of that season of 1991. In March, the Soviets take the Red Wings to court. Basically they hired lawyers and they sued the red wings for stealing their players. After all, they lost Fedorov Constantinov and now Kozlov. Eventually the Russians have no money. They can’t pay the lawyers and the case is dropped from the court system. They now have three of what becomes known as the Russian five and he is miraculously healed. At one point, the general manager for the Russian army just travelling happens to watch a Red wings game sees Fedorov, Constantinov and Kozlov playing and he looks at the general manager of the Red Wings and goes… Looks like Constantino is still sit. He was kind of clueless going to be played a bad game that day. So they still had issues. The other two players that joined the red wings were not the not the fet out of the Soviet Union. Right here, Viacheslav Fetisov was a captain of the Red Army team in the 1980s. He is drafted in 1983 by the New Jersey devils. He has promised because he’s at the end of his career, He’s in his 30s now He’s not the prime of his early 20s that he’s going to be released from his Red Army contract to come play. And he basically fights for four years. And finally he’s allowed to come over in 1989 and play for the devils. He just doesn’t play a system. He has trouble with it. And eventually in the summer of 1995, he is traded to the Detroit red wings to help be a mentor to Federov, Constantinov and Kozlov. The final piece of the puzzle is Igor Larionov, center from the Red Army. Now he comes over and starts playing in 1989 but he’s still under Red Army contracts and the way the Soviets were so desperate for cash that they actually let their top players come play and 80% of their contract went back to the Soviet Red Army. So he’s playing he’s not he’s playing for three million a year. And he basically gets about $3,000 a month, all the rest of it goes back to the Soviet Union. So when the Soviet Union falls in 1992, he plays as a free agent and goes and plays in Switzerland. So that his contract will expire because he’s now looking at Federov who’s making eight million a year. He’s looking at Kozlov who is making like five million a year. He’s like this is ridiculous. Why am I not making all this money going back to Russia if all my compatriots are coming up here to play. So he goes and plays and comes back and signs as a free agent with San Jose in 1993. And again, he doesn’t fit. See, the Russian system was a five man unit. You have three forwards and two defensemen but they play as a single unit. At North American Hockey, You have a foreign line, and you have defensive pairs. And they don’t play together. Forwards change out, defense changes, but they don’t change out the five man unit. The red wings and the Soviet system did. So finally, in October of 1995, The red wings traded Viacheslav Fetisov. So now you have what is called the Russian five there in Detroit. And for the very first time in October 27, 1995, they played together for the first time.

[VIDEO PLAYS]

They played for two years. The 95, 96 seasons 96-97 season as a five-man unit and completely changed the game of hockey. In 97, They won the Stanley Cup for the first time since 1954 for Detroit and if there are any Detroit fans here, That’s a big deal. I’m a Stars fan, I hate Detroit But that’s a different story. Everybody wants to play this style of game. Now their festivities were short lived three days after winning the 97 Stanley Cup. A limo carried Vladimir Constantine off his wrecked and putting him in a wheelchair. He will never play again. Back when they relive-when they re-win the cup in 98 they actually have Vladimir on the ice in his wheelchair carrying the cup in celebration for that. I think you’ve seen that one of the But everybody wants to play the Russian style. It’s called puck control and you still hear it to this day. In fact, they so revolutionize the game that these are some of the top players in the NHL today and they are all Russians. Alexander Benjamin just won the Stanley Cup just last year Evgeni Malkin and the penguins over there. You don’t like the penguins. Vladimir Tarasenko for the blues. The top score in the NHL this year, Kucherov right here. And then, of course, you got Stars players. The game of hockey was forever changed and it was changed because sports are just as political as they are entertaining. And they got involved in Cold War espionage and smuggled three players out of the Soviet Union to come and play for them. So if you’ve got some free time after the spring break, We can all fly to Michigan and watch this movie.

[VIDEO PLAYS]

Does anybody want to go to Michigan? And that’s the story of how the game of hockey was changed at the end of the Cold War with the Detroit Red Wings.

TRANSCRIPT

– [MUSIC PLAYING] Recent studies have shown that ancient libraries in the Mediterranean world kept in circulation scrolls and codices Book form usually for a minimum of 150 years often 200 and the most valued books if they started to get worn were re-inked. Someone would very carefully with indelible ink trace over the letters that were there. So that Codex Vaticanus, one of the big complete 4th century copies of the New Testament, was re inked in the 9th century after 500 years of continuous use so that it could continue to be used. Dr. Rosdahl said that I travel a lot, too much. Each time I say I’m gonna slow down. Strange things happen like my older daughter who lives with her British husband in England finds out she’s having twins this summer. And well, we just have to get over there. But I teach in Ireland on average about once a year for a week or so at a time at the Irish Bible Institute, which is just a short bus ride away from the museum open to the public where you can go in and see these and other documents from around 200. And I tell my students there it is completely possible that when you’re looking at those documents you are looking at copies of the original still well within 150 years. Now given the history of getting manuscripts as far from the Middle East as it is to Ireland, they’re probably not copies of the original but they very well could be copies of copies. You don’t have to see how many times you can say the word copies and that’s not the case with any other book or collection of books we know about anywhere in the world from antiquity. That’s what I just said. And I think I said that too. But “what if” is your mindset. Are you a “what if?” person? Any seniors here willing to admit it most of you have done your chapel already. What if I graduate and don’t immediately have a job? What if five years down the road I still have huge amounts of student loans? What if I haven’t yet met my life partner? Life is over. “What if?” And you can go through life torn up in knots about all the what ifs and never make a responsible decision and the same is true when it comes to biblical scholarship. What if tomorrow’s internet were to say that there was a discovery in the sands of Egypt of a document it could be conclusively dated to the 1st century and a fragment of it was pick a gospel-the Gospel of John. And in this particular verse it said something different and it was really different. Well, the answer’s pretty straightforward unless you can come up with an all encompassing conspiracy theory 300 years before Christians had any power base to even possibly execute conspiracy theories how all trace of that distinctive reading was lost from 25,000 manuscripts continuously traceable decade by decade from the beginning, then the only logical thing for scholars to do is say that’s eccentric. That’s an anomaly. Maybe we don’t know who did it or why they did it but there’s not one chance in h.e. double toothpick that it represents the original. So don’t lose sleep over the what ifs. Dan Wallace just up the road at Dallas seminary who is probably the leading American evangelical textual critic maybe the leading American textual critic and his center for textual inquiry likes to say slightly tongue in cheek. Holding up a Greek New Testament, I have the English here, you do have or we do have the originals or translations of the originals. We just don’t always know if it’s in the text or the footnotes and that’s not quite true. But it’s a lot closer to the truth than any of the stuff Herman says and maybe the most important point of all, not a single Christian doctrine teaching, ethical belief, perspective for a living, statement about worship. You guys do good worship. I wish I could take you back. You know what happens when you go to seminary? You’ve got a chapel and you’re just totally brain dead and you go, “We praise you Lord. “We praise you.” It’s so fun to see your enthusiasm. But you’re not one of the 12 disciples or Greek students, you’re not part of the elite. I’ll just stop. Stop saying that. You read and hallelujah. One of countless English translations and they’re all great. Glad you like that one. Why so many translations? Which one is the best? You want to know the only right answer to that question? None of them is the best for all situations. Every one was produced for a particular reason, a particular kind of audience. Somebody asked me, what do you recommend is the best English translation of the Bible? My knee jerk reflexive reaction is- For what purpose? And then we can have a conversation. Boiling a huge topic down to a very simplistic chart, there are three major philosophies- one says preserve the form, the word order translating the same Greek or Hebrew word with the same English word as long as it doesn’t lead to something ridiculous even if at times it’s not as clear or intelligible. If it starts to sound too much like Yoda, you’ve got to do something. But otherwise, go word for word. Formal equivalents at the other end of the spectrum is what’s called dynamic equivalence. Make it clear. Is there a sin greater than obscuring the word of God? Yeah, probably. But you know child abuse and things like that. But prioritizing intelligibility and clarity even if at times things aren’t quite so literal And of course, today, you probably know we mean “literal” to mean lots of things besides literal like I could have slept for 10 weeks literally…not literally.. that’s not humanly possible. But that’s another story. And then the third approach is optimal equivalence. I am not going to prioritize either at the expense of the other, passage by passage, verse by verse, phrase by phrase, I am going to try to have my cake and eat it too. I’m going to try to be as clear as possible and as accurate as possible, but knowing that without prioritizing one or the other. There will be times when the formal equivalent translations are a little more accurate and there’ll be times when the dynamic equivalent translations are a little more clear. And for those of you who like graphs, I was told you don’t have an enormous science department here, but maybe a little bit of math. Formal equivalence will make that the y-axis dynamic. equivalence wants to make that the x-axis. Here are some translations. Probably the two most used today. The ESV and the new Revised Standard version. The New Living Translation. some other ones that aren’t known as well. Great examples of dynamic equivalence and optimal by far the best known is NIV but there is also the Holman Christian standard now revised just called the Christian standard. There’s the net. There’s the common English Bible there’s some strange things that don’t fit into any clusters. And then there’s the Message, which is paraphrased it blows every category away. But even at the end of the day, they’re not that different. Most of the time, if you have logos or Bible works or accordance or some program where you can put 12 translations on the screen at once, you’re never going to look at those and go “I think they were translating different verses.” Now you will recognize when there is a very puzzling word that people aren’t sure what it originally meant like what about the little parable of the friend at midnight-the guy who wants to provide some bread for a friend who’s come after a long, tiring journey in the middle of the night. He doesn’t have any. He calls to his neighbor and Luke 11:8 says “even if the man will not get up and give him what he wants because he’s his friend yet because of his are. – is the wonderful Greek word and the King James Bible to this day has a perfect translation because of his importunity. Anybody know what that word means? And if you don’t. What good is it to have an accurate translation? The ESV is a little better. “It’s because of his impudence.” Now both my parents were school teachers. So I know they had a little bigger vocabulary than some, but my brother and I got accused on more than one occasion as we were growing up of being impudent. But I talked to seminary students today and they have no clue what the word means. Now just from what I told you, you might guess there’s a negative tinge to it. Well, how about the NIV- “because of your shameless audacity”- maybe five more people understand it. How about the New Living Translation? “because of your shameless persistence”- getting better. It’s persistence with an edge. And maybe the best English translation is a Yiddish word . And when somebody says that stay away from the splash zone Moxie-I don’t know this audience well enough to know if I can get away with this, but I’m leaving tomorrow, So why not.. slang, it would be “boy, he had brass ones.” OK, I’ll stop. OK, well going from the fire into the frying pan or whatever that metaphor is I won’t even ask what anybody thinks of when they read God’s words to Saul who became Paul in the King James version- “Why persecutest thou me? It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.” Is that what you want to read in church when all the high school kids are sitting in a group in the front and the junior high are behind them? Well, the new American standard won’t raise any eyebrows. There won’t be any Twitters either kind. Saul, Saul Why are you persecuting me? It’s hard for you to kick against the goads. and if you’re a rancher you might know what that means. But if you’re not Goad me on what does it mean? Southern New Living Translation changes the wording for the sake of clarity. “Why are you persecuting me? It is useless for you to fight against my will.” The good news Bible tries to use the metaphor and explain it. “You are hurting yourself by hitting back like an ox kicking against its owners stick. If you’re goading ox, you’re striking it on the side of a leg and the ox can’t go sideways fast enough to stop you. It just gets annoyed. The new international readers version made for children say, “Saul,Saul” the voice said. “Why are you opposing me? It is hard for you to go against what you know is right.” Don’t give a literal translation to kids. If you want to be interested in the Bible or people for whom English is a second language or someone who didn’t have the opportunity to complete an education. even in this country. Give them a dynamically equivalent translation for detailed study in your study. Because you haven’t done Greek or Hebrew, go for a formally equivalent translation in the broadest cross section of our world. If your church is not made up of all college educated people and some are, that’s great. But many are not. You probably want an optimally equivalent translation that will communicate best, the most often, to the greatest number of people. And that’s what I just said. I tend to do that when I teach. Also. All of them however, are more than adequate to teach you how to be saved, how to come to know God deeply to how to live a life of faithful obedience to him to know his will in countless arenas of life. Somebody asked me, “Are there any translations you should avoid?” I say to my knowledge, only to the Jehovah’s Witnesses new World Translation and the Joseph Smith translation of Mormonism but other than those we sort of have gotten over the worship wars of some years ago, and maybe you guys never went through them-hallelujah. But let’s get over the translation wars. They’re all good enough and many of them are great. It’s time for me to quit. So I have to come back and ask the question that we started with. “Can I trust the process of copying and translating very tentatively and cautiously?” I want to say-Yes!

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– [MUSIC PLAYING] It’s my pleasure to introduce our guest speaker for our series. Dr. Craig Blomberg is a distinguished professor of New Testament at Denver Seminary. He completed his PhD in the New Testament at Aberdeen University in Scotland. He specialized in the parables and the writing of Luke- Acts and along with his teaching duties he ministers around the world. You might be interested to know that though he’s here with us today, later this year, He’s traveling to Ireland, England, South Africa, and Brazil as well as other places as well. He’s pretty busy involved in Bible translation and ministry as well. Dr. Blomberg is the editor and author of more than 20 books including some that we use here in our classes at Southwestern. But our focus today comes particularly from his work on the historical reliability of the scripture. His book- Can we still believe the Bible is what we’re kind of using as our theme for these next couple days. And so students what do you say to a person who comes to a view that says the Bible is so corrupt that that’s not even worthy to be trusted as scripture. How would you answer someone and these are, of course, all over social media questions like this. How would you answer the charge that the church has excluded the books that really should be in the Bible. Our guest has come to help us answer those questions if you would please give a warm SAGU welcome to Dr. Craig Blomberg.

Well, thank you very much. Dr. Bruce, sorry about all those exams and sorry to hear that you’ve some of you have had a book of mine inflicted on you. But I hope you survive. And how cool is it- I was picked up at DFW last night by a couple of your professors and they said, yeah apologetics is still kind of popular around here. And I went, wow, that’s nice. Defending the faith even if you’re the world’s greatest introvert and can’t imagine meeting somebody live and you talk to people online and they come from every walk of life and every belief or lack of belief and they may take the initiative to ridicule those of us who believe in Christianity and who believe the Bible is a reliable authority for us. I would not have imagined when I was in school that the topic, especially of today maybe tomorrow’s topic would be on somebody’s radar screen. But not today. We have called it rather boringly. How accurately was the New Testament copied and translated. When I was going to school if you wanted to avoid all the critical debates with liberal and unbelieving scholarship and take the safest possible topic. It was also the most boring. You went into textual criticism and you learned enough Greek and Hebrew not so much that you agreed to text, but you could read the footnotes. Who does that? And see the places where the manuscripts didn’t all say the same thing and learn how to make an informed judgment of what was probably the most original reading and the number of people interested in that or about as many people as I hear are in Dr. Reynolds Greek and Hebrew classes that I’m going to be meeting with later, he says we’ll be lucky if we have 12. That’s a good apostolic number. And then in 2006, a scholar by the name of Bart Sherman, who was on a pilgrimage running away from his upbringing, his conversion, his time in Christian universities and seminaries- he is still a professor of New Testament at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill wrote a book called misquoting Jesus. He didn’t create the title, the publisher did. And it was a brilliant idea at least for sales. Because everybody wanted to know, how did the church misquote Jesus? Well, the book’s not nearly as exciting as the title. It’s an introduction to the whole question of variance in different ancient manuscripts and how accurately was the text copied. For eight months in 2006, now I know some of you were seven then I think I did the math right. If you’re 19 now going on 20 but those are not best-selling books even with a catchy title. For eight months in 2006, Bart Herman’s “Misquoting Jesus” was on the New York Times top 10 best selling books of any category throughout the country. People’s faith was shaken. Why? because nobody ever talks about this stuff in church. And there’s no reason for that to have happened. I hope it’s not brand new news to anybody here that the first time someone wrote part of the New Testament- it didn’t look like this. Here is the oldest fragment we’ve ever discovered from the early second century of a few lines out of the Gospel of John chapter 18 but very quickly and certainly by the fourth century, we have entire new testaments written in all capital Greek letters pretty easy to decipher if you study even just a little bit of first-year Greek. That’s what the ancient manuscripts looked like. And they’re not all identical. Here is maybe the bombshell quote from Bart Herman’s book paraphrased. Some scholars say there are 200,000 variants, some say 300,000. Some say 400,000. As sophisticated as computer technology has gotten, We still haven’t been able to count them all. Let’s just play it safe and say there are more variance in the manuscripts of the New Testament than there are words in the New Testament. And suddenly everybody on their phones is gone. Omg-what’s going on. Well, I hope there’s a few people who can still do a little mental math. If that brings up horrible memories from high school, I apologize. But let’s say Herman’s biggest number is actually right. We ought to ask some questions about that number like out of how many manuscripts-just the two that you saw pictures of? Hardly. There are almost 5,700 manuscripts ranging from a scrap of a few verses to an entire New Testament in Greek from the pre-Gutenberg pre printing press era over the first 13 and a fraction centuries of church history. And there are about 20,000 additional manuscripts from that period of the New Testament translated into other ancient languages most notably Latin but other popular languages-you study them every day like coptic in Ethiopia. An old slavonic and Georgian. That’s the country, not the state of Georgia. And so forth. Well, now my mental math. If I round that off to about 25,000 divided into 400,000 that’s 16 unique variance per manuscript. That sounds a little more manageable. But still, what kind of differences are they? The vast majority are spelling variations. I don’t know if you believe in inerrancy of scripture. I personally do. But no one has ever said that in inerrancy extends to perfect spelling or grammar. After all,what is spelling or grammar other than the conventions of a society and the power brokers a.k.a. English professors at some point in time Who decides this is the way things should be spelled and if you spelled this way it’s wrong? Go back to British English. They would say just go back to English, since we’re the ones who corrupted and see the way people spell things just a few hundred years ago. That’s not included when we’re talking about errors. And the next most common is simply the use or non-use of little words that translate into “a” or “the” or “and” and don’t make a whit of a difference in the meaning of the text. Now there are some that are more interesting. The United Bible society’s edition of the Greek New Testament, possibly what the 12 people here study in Greek are using has about 1,500 footnotes from Matthew to Revelation and the average modern English translation has about 400 footnotes including versions on your phone if you know where to click and how to find them. And if you rely on a scripture on the phone you should make sure you do know how to find those textual variance. Read them, see what they’re like, most of them are comparatively uninteresting. But there are a couple that are big-12 verses in length. The so-called longer ending of Mark and the story in John 753 to 811 of the woman caught in adultery, but if I am reading anything other than the King James version, which is 500 years too old to know all this, I see in the text itself, the NIV the ESV has language that alerts me to the fact that the oldest and most reliable manuscripts don’t have this information. Here’s a picture of an actual text. You can see the words there in brackets. But those are the only two places where anything like that occurs. There are two dozen or so additional places where an entire verse as the scribes copied the text over the centuries was either added or omitted about half and half and occasionally those go to a verse and a half even two verses most of them are just about a verse in length. A fascinating one comes way near the end of the New Testament in first John chapter five and it’s one that the King James only folks love to throw out as how all modern translations are liberal. I John 5- I’m reading from the NIV but you could find the same thing in any modern translation. It says for there are three that testified the spirit the water and the blood and the three are in agreement. Well, I’m glad. I have no idea what they’re in agreement about. I’m not quite sure who the water and the blood are and how they testify but I’m glad they’re in agreement. But then I read my footnote and it says late manuscripts of the vault gate. That was the standard Latin translation for 1,000 years in early church history has after the word testify this addition- There are three that testify in heaven. The father, the Word and the Holy Spirit. And these three are one. And there are three that testify on earth. And then it goes on as we read earlier. A fascinating story for geeks like me is that the Catholic reformer Erasmus about 20 years older than Martin Luther a precursor to the Protestant Reformation creating the best Greek New Testament possible in his day when all Catholics were reading was Latin left out these extra words from the Latin because he could not find them in any Greek manuscript that he consulted and his Catholic superiors were outraged and said, you have to put those in. And he said you show me one Greek manuscript that has it. And I’ll put it in-bad move. The monsignor came back shortly afterward and provided the manuscript, which showed all the signs of having been tampered with. But Erasmus was true to his word and he put the words back in and the King James translators copied it and translated it, but I didn’t read you my whole footnote my footnote goes on to say after that extra little bit, not found in any Greek manuscript before the 14th century. Holy long period of absence Batman. And the 14th-century manuscript is found in is the one that was tampered with. There’s not one chance in while my dad used to say h.e. double toothpick that those words are original. And the King James only people say see here the liberals people that read the ESV-they’re deleting the Trinity. No, they’re not. They’re translating the original Greek and they’re not putting in what somebody added later in Latin and there are plenty of other passages that teach the Trinity. We don’t need this one. If you want to see another example, you’ve had time to copy down Acts 8:37. Sometimes it’s words that are left out. If I just pick one example here. I’ll pick the second one out. Luke 1:23-Jesus’ powerful words on the cross to the very soldiers who are nailing his hands to the cross beam and he says Father forgive them for you know not what you do. That was too radical for some early Christians. It was too radical for some Christians during a particular controversy where under persecution some fellow believers had denied the faith but mentally said, no, we still believe we’ll just outwardly say we deny it. And then after the persecution subsided they wanted back in the church and some people wanted to welcome them and others said, no, it’s too late. You’re damned forever and this group appealed to live. Luke 23:34-If Jesus can forgive those who are asking for forgiveness for those who are nailing him to the cross, surely he can forgive these people on the other side. We don’t want it. And we don’t want the verse either. But the vast majority of all of the examples even in English bibles just involve a handful of a couple of words. An interesting example in Mark 1:41 does Jesus have compassion for a leper or did he show indignation when he saw the leper’s disease and the damage it had done and the suffering that the man had. You can understand how a scribe would think, oh, that we don’t want Jesus to have emotions at least not those kinds. Compassion- That’s nice. But you know my Jesus is never upset. Yeah, well, let me tell you a story about when he went into the temple. Some of you know it, I think. And so several modern translations have determined that probably Mark originally said Jesus was indignant but based on a more common word in Mark’s gospel that he will use many times when Jesus is faced with disease or suffering scribes change that to compassion. It’s also important to debunk the notion as Herman said again in “Misquoting Jesus” that these kinds of handwritten text, This manuscript that you look at from a collection called the Chester Beatty papyrus in Dublin, Ireland, from about the year 200 give or take a few years. How far removed is that from what Mark wrote in the 60s of the first century and Herman says, “not only do we not have any originals, we don’t have copies of originals. We don’t have copies of copies. We don’t have copies of copies of copies. We don’t have copies of copies of copies of copies. we might have copies of copies of copies of copies of copies- say that fast a few times.

TRANSCRIPT

– [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC – DINAH SHORE, “I CAN’T GIVE YOU ANYTHING BUT LOVE”] One of the most powerful aspects of warfare is that of psychological manipulation. People are often aware of the brutality and violence of war itself, but they ignore psychological warfare. World War II offers a vivid example of psychological warfare in the way it was employed to target the morale and sentiment of numerous soldiers. The most fascinating means of dissemination was in the form of leaflets that were dropped from bomber planes. These messages were intended to curb the motivation and enthusiasm of the soldiers. For example, some leaflets depicted scenes of marital infidelity, a theme that no doubt touches on the insecurity felt by many, many soldiers. The power of the psychological warfare is the inability to defend yourself against its effect. Psychological warfare aims at your insecurities and desires, and then uses these means of achieving objectives. Psychological warfare is defined as, “The systematic process of influencing the will, and directing the actions of people in enemy and enemy-occupied territories according to the needs of a higher strategy.” The use of propaganda against the enemy weaknesses lead to a new concept a psychological warfare known as the Fourth Arm of Warfare, requiring its own element of research, strategy, and action against the enemy. War is often viewed as a mechanical approach to human affairs, based on the development of a powerful and efficient war machine. Psychological warfare attempts to subvert the war machine through the attacks on individuals within the system, undermining political ideologies through personal motivations. Psychological warfare focuses on destabilizing the enemy by taking advantage of their most personal characteristics of human life in a scientific manner. Emotions that are often considered the worst and most vulnerable parts of human nature, such as fear, hate, deceit, pain, humiliation, and loneliness are systematically exploited until the enemy is too demoralized to continue to fight. World War II brought with it the beginning of a new style of war. No longer was war a test of superior weaponry and armed troops. It was suddenly a mental struggle for the minds and spirits of citizens and soldiers alike. Throughout the war, the Axis and Allies engaged in massive use of propaganda aimed at psychological manipulation of each of its subjects. They soon discovered that such forms of persuasion could be just as effective against the enemy. Learning from Hitler’s example, Britain began its mission to revolutionize its propaganda by using it on a scale never before imagined. Britain developed psychological warfare into a science through careful studies of the psychological vulnerabilities of the human mind. Now, military psychology was not a new concept in World War II. In both the first and second World Wars, the British government enlisted the help of thousands of psychologists to perform research, testing, and experimentation to determine the selection, the placement, and the training of its soldiers. But for the first time, the scientific application of psychology was used to weaken the enemy while strengthening its own soldiers. At the time of World War II, there was also a growing recognition of the cultural influences on man and how they determined individual motivations. Many psychologists claim that World War II was most responsible for the emergence of social and cultural psychology as a legitimate area of science. Prior to the war, most aspects of social psychology were simply philosophical. When the psychological warfare campaign began, governments began to actively recruit psychologists to take part in planning and testing. And a new style of systematic field research emerged. While Hitler openly and enthusiastically engaged psychologists in his war effort, the British were less inclined to admit that they, too, were using such illegitimate techniques for their own campaign. Throughout the war, they avoided using the term “psychological warfare” and preferred calling it “political warfare.” As a result, they remained very secretive about the psychologist they did employ and largely relied on the United States to perform much of the psychological research needed for their psy-war campaign. Psychological warfare techniques involved the analysis of long-term psychological strengths and weaknesses of both individuals and societies in order to ascertain their most vulnerable points. On an individual level, this is done with the use of personality psychology and combat psychiatry, with the goal of identifying psychological phenomenon applicable to the development of psychological weapons. So there’s two main questions of research here. Number one, how individual fears can be manipulated. And secondly, how the stresses of war can be systematically increased. Combat psychiatry examines the psychological effects of warfare on the individual. Now, as some of you may know, there are five enemies of individual survival. First, there is pain. Then, cold, hunger and thirst. Fourth, fatigue. And then boredom and loneliness. By exploiting these factors, psychological warfare attempts to focus on suffering rather than death. The typical psychological reaction pattern in battle consists of the following. First of all, you have this apprehensive enthusiasm. Troops are very excited to get into the fight. They’re gung ho. But there’s a little bit of anxiety or apprehension, I should say, about going into the fight. But overall, they’re very eager to get into the battle. Now, as they enter into combat, they experience what we call “resignation.” This consists of a chronically depressed state. As you can imagine, the experiences of combat and battle begin to wear on them. They become depressed, yet they are still able to efficiently execute the war routine. But as battle fatigue and the process of being in combat day in and day out continues, they enter into what we call “anxious apprehension.” And it’s at this place where they are most vulnerable in their psychological state. Anxious apprehension is characterized by feeling overwhelmed with loneliness. Imagine, you’re out there in the field. You’re in combat. You’re far away from your friends. You’re 1,000 miles from your family. And everything that is familiar is nowhere to be found. You’re in a completely different environment, a different country. People are speaking a different language. Many times, this is the first combat experience that maybe you’ve had. As a result of that overwhelmed and feeling of loneliness, often times troops would lose their appetite. We know this to be a classic symptom of major depressive disorder. Following that, often times, or coupled with that, is guilt– guilt associated with killing a fellow human being. Many of US troops were Christians. They were raised on the 10 Commandments. Murder is wrong. And so they were having to come to grips with this idea of killing someone who looked oftentimes just like them. Guilt associated with leaving family back home. Leaving a wife. Leaving their children. Leaving aging parents or leaving the farm where they were so useful to their family. Guilt associated with surviving an attack after many of their friends were killed. We call that “survivor guilt.” Coupled with this overwhelmed feeling of loneliness, appetite loss, guilt, we also have this lessening of group identification. After losing yourself into the conflict and the battle and the combat that you are experiencing, oftentimes troops would begin to wonder and question the purpose of the war effort. Much of the propaganda, especially what you heard as I walked out here, tapped into that questioning. Is it really worth it? Why are we really here? That would oftentimes lead to withdrawal of physical and emotional investment. I mean, after you lose so many friends and so many comrades and so many buddies in combat, you begin to question, why should I really invest so much emotionally into anyone? US psychological warfare consists of the integrated use of all means to destroy the will of the enemy and deprive them of the support of their allies. Psychological warfare was broadly divided into three interdependent classes during World War II. You had strategic, tactical, and what we call consolidation. Strategic propaganda was directed toward the enemy in enemy-occupied countries and had the double task of not only undermining the enemy’s will to resist, but also sustaining the morale of those supporting the Allies over the long term. Tactical or combat propaganda was conducted against enemy forces in the forward areas and sought very strategic, short-term goals. Consolidation propaganda was directed towards civilians in the rear areas, in areas recently occupied by Allied troops, to ensure their continued cooperation. The United States had certain weapons in their PSYOPs. The weapons of psychological warfare were those of the civilian media in film, print, or audio form. During World War II, the armed forces relied primarily on the printed leaflet, newspaper, and news sheet. More than 8 billion leaflets were dropped by aircraft or delivered by artillery shells world wide by the Allied powers. In addition, the Allies used motion pictures, still photographs, and broadcasted radio programs to the home fronts of the enemy. On the tactical level, the US conducted front-line radio propaganda programs and used loudspeakers and megaphones. Nearly every campaign in the Pacific theater witnessed the use of some form of psychological warfare, waged by either a civilian population or a military agency. Now, Japanese psychological warfare was modeled on campaigns conducted by the British during World War I and the Germans during World War II. In fact, the Germans actually established a branch of their propaganda ministry inside of Japan, which resulted in a close psychological warfare collaboration between the two Axis powers. As a result, their propaganda themes were strikingly parallel. Now, the Japanese had a three-prong approach to their PSYOPs. First, they had a strategic propaganda that was directed against the home fronts– political leadership and status of Western powers in Asia. In fact, some researchers believe that the invading of China by the Japanese was a way to jab a stick in the eye of Western powers that were located in that area. Secondly, is operational and tactical propaganda. And these were directed against the military forces of the Western powers. An example of this is the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Now, this was not only a psychological warfare approach or tactic on the part of the Japanese to demoralize the United States. The Japanese believed that we would easily roll over and surrender and give them whatever it is that they were wanting. But it was arguably the biggest mistake that the Japanese ever made in World War II. Because by striking Pearl Harbor, it awakened the sleeping giant within the United States and aroused an anger and a revenge inside the American people that fueled the Pacific campaign that swept across the Pacific Islands and ultimately led to the bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Operational and tactical Japanese psychological warfare also included broadcasts made by Radio Tokyo, especially those of Tokyo Rose and The Zero Hour, which you heard as I came walking out today, as well as the dropping of propaganda leaflets. Radio Tokyo often broadcasted the latest American music. Jazz, big band, bebop, jitterbug. Music by Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, and Bing Crosby could be heard on Axis radio well before Allied broadcast disseminated them. But US sailors were so immune to Tokyo Rose that enemy broadcasts were actually piped through the sound system of Navy ships for the humor and so sailors could catch up on the latest stateside hits. Japanese tactical psy-war against the US troops was judged a complete failure. Author and researcher, Dr. Robert J. Bunker wrote, nowhere has there been such great listenership with so little result. As I close today, I want to talk a little bit about the real victim of psychological warfare. You heard her voice as I came out. Iva Toguri, better known as Tokyo Rose, was born in Los Angeles, California, on July 4, 1916. After graduating from UCLA with dreams of becoming a doctor, she visited Japan to see a sick aunt and was stranded there after the attack on Pearl Harbor. She graduated from college in 1941. Forced to renounce her US citizenship, she refused twice and was left to starve and fend for herself in a foreign country. Toguri eventually found work in radio and was asked to host The Zero Hour, which was a propaganda and entertainment program aimed at US soldiers because of her American accent. She was as American as you and I here today. She read from a script that two British POWs wrote for her. Their sarcasm and satire did more to encourage US troops than it did to destroy their morale. Now after the war, she was returned to the United States and convicted of treason. She served six years in prison. Finally, much later on, President Gerald Ford pardoned Iva Toguri in 1976. And she lived with a terrible stigma of Tokyo Rose until she died at the age of 90 in 2006. [MUSIC PLAYING]

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– [MUSIC PLAYING] All right, welcome. Real quick disclaimer about some of the content today. These were illustrations and slogans that were written in the ’30s and ’40s. And so we’ll be discussing them as they were presented. They are very much just plainly racist, the way some of the other nationalities are drawn in caricatures. So I just wanted you to be aware of that before we start our presentation today. Sp let’s get to Comics at War. The isolationist stance taken by the United States during the early months of World War II was quickly dissolved after two years. After Pearl Harbor the principal concern became financing the war effort, which resulted in the US Treasury creating a defense bond program. To persuade Americans to purchase these bonds, propaganda was unleashed in many forms. Most adults would see this propaganda in the forms of posters and in short films before movies. But for children, comic books became the method of this communication. The comic books embodied the virtues of what it was to fight evil during World War II. In fact, the comic book still embodies the same virtues today. Back in 1977 author Michael Uslan stated the following about the nature of comic books. “From the 1930s through today comic books have expressed the trends, conventions, and concerns of American life. Comics have been a showcase for national views, slang, morals, customs, traditions, racial attitudes, fads, heroes of the day, and everything else that make up our lifestyles.” Comic books as we know them today arrived in the late 1930s. In June 1938 Action Comic Number 1 premiered and released and exposed Superman to the world, the character who encapsulated all that was good about America and humanity. And he became a star of the result of this issue. Other characters soon followed, including the Human Torch, Batman, the Sub-Mariner, Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, The Shield, and of course Captain America. Superman became popular for many reasons. Like many Americans, Superman was an immigrant, albeit from an alien world. You could argue that Superman was the ultimate immigrant being away from his parents and his family. Secondly, Superman espoused the virtues of hard work, justice, and truth. Comic books also became popular for other virtues during the 1930s, which was experiencing the Great Depression. “Even as a form of escape,” Scott Cord claims, “the comic book allowed readers to fantasize about punishing real life wrongdoers. Since the depression was overtaking the concerns of Americans during the 1930s, readers enjoyed seeing superheroes fight against those who exploited the bad times for their own financial benefits. For example, early characters such as the Green Lantern, Superman, and Batman often took on corrupt businessmen who mistreated poor and desperate workers in the late 1930s.” The effort to win the war went hand-in-hand with the comics. The main focus of comics during that period was to sell war bonds. Most if not all comics used their superheroes to prove their patriotism during the war. Covers of comics during this time usually had graphics urging customers to invest in war bonds. Comic books went the extra mile when supporting the propaganda movement. Publishers often transformed superheroes to fit the ideal patriotic character. The covers of these comics always boasted lines supporting buying and selling of war bonds. The aim of this form of propaganda was directly related to these sales. The key to winning the war was for all Americans to pitch in and do their part. And the availability of war bonds was the way in which all could participate. In 1940 and 1941, many comic books had story lines about the events of the wars in Europe and Asia. These stances, of course, were before the United States entered the war and they were quite controversial. At a time when most Americans wanted nothing to do with another war in Europe, the characters in the comic books did. And many of the writers of the comic book heroes were actually Jewess and felt it was their duty to influence the American public of the dangers of what was taking place overseas. Early editions of Batman comics shed light on the fact that Batman never used guns or killed. But in this 1943 comic book, you can see Batman as he is supplying guns to American soldiers and supporting the seventh war loan. DC Comics also use Batman in the crusade to persuade Americans to purchase war bonds. One cover of a Batman comic, number 18 right here, shows Batman and his sidekick Robin blowing up a firecracker in the face of the Axis leaders. The cover reads, “Ensure the 4th of July. Buy war bonds and stamps.” Other comics include Batman as well as Superman. The cover of a DC winter issue, right here, depicts Superman, Batman, and Robin as selling war bonds at a newsstand. The sign above them reads, “Sink the Japanazis with war bonds and stamps.” Other publishers participated in this comic book propaganda, as well. Superheros such as the Green Hornet, the Spy Smasher, Captain Marvel, Catman, and the Black Terror were all used to fight against American enemies. The US government also joined in the creation of their own comic books. In 1943 the United States was in dire need of plane fuel. By this time workers stationed at oil refineries were becoming bogged down in their work. The government’s Petroleum Administration for War designed comic books to inspire the workers. The first comic, Coming on a Wing and a Prayer, was a huge success and forced the PAW to create the Undercover War comic book series. These comics proved to workers how important their job was. Captain America embodied the use of comic books as propaganda during the Second World War. His character was tailor made to support the overall war effort. A now famous superhero, he was created to sell war bonds. Put in creation in 1941 by Timely Comics, but later Marvel Comics, Captain America became the face of World War II comic propaganda. The main character, Steve Rogers, a frail young man, unfit for service is invited to participate in a secret program to become a super soldier. He participates and now he is the peak of human perfection and he aids the United States in the war effort. Captain America sports a costume with the American flag, carries a shield made out of vibranium from Wakanda and it is bullet proof and used as a weapon. Many covers of Captain America comics show the superhero going toe to toe with Nazi soldiers and even Hitler himself. This created widespread support of the war effort and Captain America comics. The covers of Captain America fighting against Hitler stirred US support and increased the war bond. Fighting for the United States at this time was viewed as the utmost heroic deed. Though a fiction story, the creation of Captain America brought forth the idea that all citizens were capable of supporting those abroad. The addition of Timely Comics’ Captain America was essential to the sale of comic books and war bonds. Captain America’s transformation was relatable to the American population. Citizens realized, as regular citizens they too could contribute to the war effort. The purchasing of war bonds was a way that all citizens could help and Captain America was essential to that. This cover right here was published a full nine months before the United States entered the war. And you see captain America punching Hitler in the face. The writers, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, received hate mail for this cover and expressed concern about the goals of Captain America. They were opposed to such story lines. Captain America stood out in his patriotic red, white, and blue uniform and the ideals of American nationalism. Within a year Pearl Harbor had occurred. And Captain America’s views about evil became the norm. When the war began 15 million comic books were being published a month. Two years later 25 million copies were sold a month. Superman and Captain America each sold a million editions a month. And the largest single customer in the United States was the United States Army. The army originally brought comics as a diversion. But soon many of the soldiers became hooked on the story lines, character development, and the virtuous fight against evil and oppression. Throughout the war, comic book superheroes were involved in doing things to help the war effort beyond just fighting. They did things like deliver supplies, stop spies at home, and do whatever they could do to help the soldiers in the war. The depiction of the character’s actions were simplistic and good always triumphed over evil. The characters are always illustrated warrings and how children could help win the war. Superman was also transformed into a patriotic hero willing to do anything to defend his country. Superman appeared in numerous DC Comics over the span of World War II. The cover of a Superman comic, number 58, reads, “Superman says you can slap a Jap with war bonds and stamps.” Another comic throws its support behind the seventh war loan. And it reads, “And it isn’t Superman who’s doing this. It’s the American people.” However, Superman never fought the war. You would think that he could have ended the war by himself. And the authors of Superman were aware of this and did not want that. So instead they created this comic book story right here where Clark Kent so anxious to pass his physical uses his X-ray vision and reads the eye chart in the neighboring room. And he flunks his physical, is declared 4-F, and is forced to do what he can along the home front. Captain America was the major exception. With his sidekick, 12-year-old Bucky Barnes, they took a firsthand role in fighting the forces of evil. What made Captain America comics different for the time period was they were violent, in fact, shockingly violent for the time period. Characters were shot between the eyes, left beaten and bloodied, and tortured. Another aspect of Captain America that endeared him to many Americans was he always fought by the rules and his antagonists always cheated and lost. Soon other comics followed. Individual stories of bravery and courage ended with the American soldier overcoming fear and saving the day. Meant at first to inspire those at home, the characters would also inspire those actually doing the fighting. Many of the writers of these comic books were part of the Office of War information. And these organizations were supposedly interested in giving accurate information about what was happening overseas. Even the advertisements in the comic books were war related. In addition to those superheroes, ordinary people, women and children, and character’s had their own comics. Boy Commandos was a group of 12-year-olds out to save the world. Wonder Woman did her part fitting in with the stereotypes of the day, though she served as a nurse in World War II, not like some of the comic book covers recorded today. In addition comics portraying real people, like Eleanor Roosevelt, were made showing her contributions to the war. As the war wound down, so did many of the characters. Superman and Lois got hitched and had super babies. Batman went back to fighting the master villains of Gotham. And in 1956 Captain America was canceled. Many soldiers who had read comics overseas found them to be a comfort on their return. Maybe it was escapism, maybe it was habit, but either way they were a solace to many of the soldiers who would later introduce the comics to their children. By 1947 comic books sold 60 million issues a month. By the early 1950s the so-called “Golden Age of Comics,” character’s had transitions to mundane activities. With no evil left to fight, comics like Archie, Veronica, Jughead, and Richie Rich became the mainstream from the middle of the ’50s through the middle of the 1960s. Comic books in World War II played a significant role in the education of a young populace before, during, and after the war. From Captain America punching Hitler in the face before Pearl Harbor to encouraging the war effort on the home front through the actions of advertisements, these pieces of art educated a country at war. The most surprising influence comics had was those who actually participated in the combat. The books were seen as something to take their mind off what was to come and what had taken place. They were cheap, easy to carry, and the comic itself did not require a college education to read. It was part entertainment, part instruction manual, and part psychologist for the soldier. While the comic books did display propaganda, it was also commercialism at its finest. Comic books were big money and they heralded the youth culture to come into the 1950s. The comic book actually became part of the war itself. And it showed what children and young men could do to help the war effort through the character’s actions and through the advertisements in the comic itself. Children used the comic book to keep up to date with what was happening through most of the war. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC PLAYING]

TRANSCRIPT

-[MUSIC PLAYING] We’re going to talk to you today about what I term the non-Nordic ideal– non-Germans in Nazi armies. During the massive D-Day invasion in 1944, American troops captured a large number of German soldiers in the beach defenses, as you might expect. However, the Americans noticed something special about a handful of the German prisoners taken on Utah Beach. They weren’t really Germans at all. But before I tell you who they were, I think we need to lay some ground work on the entire German military. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party that took over Germany in 1933 placed great importance on racial matters. As most people know, they promoted German racial superiority as part of the ideal Nordic sub-race. Different races, including the other sub-races of Europeans were inferior physically, mentally, and morally with the Jewish people being at or near the bottom of the list on all three counts. The Nordic individual, as you can see a good representation of them here, was tall, with light colored eyes, preferably blue but gray or green would do, a long head, and a strong nose. According to certain racial theories of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this Nordic segment of the European race was proud, honest, individualistic, and innovative. Sometimes the Nazis also refer to the Nordic sub-race as Arians. You may have heard this term before in association with the Nazis. Although really, Arians as a group actually had little connection with Germans in history. The Nazis expected their females to be every bit as hardy and as ardent in their Nazi political beliefs as the males. Notice the Nazi buddy barrel up there, the girl on the right. She’s apparently connecting– or collecting money for the cause. German families were encouraged to have a lot of little Nazis. Beyond that, to promote Aryan racial purity the government developed a program called Lebensborn that rewarded unmarried German women who had the proper racial characteristics for having children with German officers. The babies would then be raised in Nazi families and subsidized by the government. Other racially pure babies that would have been aborted by their mothers were taken and raised through the Lebensborn program. Some qualifying babies in occupied countries like Poland– that is, countries that the Germans had conquered– they were even kidnapped by the Nazis and placed in Lebensborn homes. So how did Hitler himself stack up as a Nordic type? I’d say he might have been given a C on a normal grade scale of A to F. He had startling blue eyes all right and he was certainly proud and individualistic and innovative, but he was barely medium height and his hair was brown– not at all blond. Now let’s look at a few of the Nordic specimens the Nazis pubs publicized to show the kind of man they were looking for. This young man was on a recruiting poster for the German army, and a major German newspaper described him as being, quote, the ideal German soldier. This SS major had the facial features and coloring that the Nazis idolized. Now from those two guys, the surprising thing is that one of them is actually a Jew. The man on the right, his name is Private Werner Goldberg. He was pictured on recruiting posters until they discovered what his family background was. Then he was kicked out of the Army, and the posters were taken down. Sometimes, even when the truth was known, racial inferiors were tolerated by the Nazis. Field Marshal Milch, pictured here, was half Jewish, but he continued to serve in the German military throughout the war. A considerable number of German officers, some of high rank, were part Jewish. For one reason or another, great ability or sometimes just past ties with Hitler or other Nazi leaders, these men were allowed to stay in spite of the Jewish family background. The German military was stretched so thin across all of Europe that by 1942, they had to open the doors to non-Germans. First, they recruited men from nations that were racially like the Germans, especially other Nordic countries, those in the northern part of Europe. The Norwegians, for example. They weren’t Germans, but they would make excellent ski troops. Now how did the Nazis convince men from countries that they had conquered to fight in the German military? One answer can be seen in the recruiting poster in the middle, and also the one on the left. Can you make out the term Bolshevism? In other words, communism. Hatred for communism was so strong among many of the people in Europe that they preferred even the Nazis to Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. It wasn’t unheard of among other nations to enlist foreign troops in their armies. For example, as you can see here, the Free French military forces under General Charles de Gaulle had tens of thousands of Africans in their units. The British army had troops from a number of other countries all around the globe, countries that were part of the British empire. These soldiers are Gurkhas, that you see here, from the Himalaya nation of Nepal, but they are part of the British army. And while they weren’t exactly foreign troops, the United States used many Japanese-Americans, who were just a tiny minority group in the United States. Most of these men were concentrated in what’s called the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Now this unit did not fight against the Japanese in the war. They were used in Europe against the Germans. In fact, this unit, the 442nd, received more decorations for bravery than virtually any other American combat unit in the war. No one could match the Germans though in using troops of other nationalities. The Waffen-SS was a special elite branch of the German armed forces, separate from the regular army, that accepted volunteers from a great many nationalities. The regular German army conscripted foreigners as well. As time went on, Germany needed more and more men, and their racial standards were lowered. So men from southern Europe and Eastern Europe and even eventually Africa and Asia found their way into Hitler’s military. And I want to read what Otto Skorzeny, a colonel in the SS said here as he listed the different nationalities that were part of the SS forces in the war. “Albanians, Bosnians, Britons, Bulgarians, Cossacks, Croats, Danes, Dutch, Estonians, Finns, Flemings, French, Georgians, Greeks, Hungarians, Italians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Norwegians, Romanians, Russians, Serbs, Slovakians, Swedes, Swiss, Ukrainian, and Walloons, as well Armenians, Byelorussians, Hindus, Tartars, Turkomen, and Uzbeks served under their own flag in the Waffen-SS. Almost all of these peoples were represented in my unit.” So many Soviet soldiers, that is Russian soldiers, hated their own dictator, Stalin, and the communist government of the Soviet Union that hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops that were captured by the Germans volunteered to fight alongside them against the Soviet Union. Captured Russian general Vlasov, and he is pictured here, was placed in command of many of these troops in the war against the Soviet Union. When the Allied forces invaded Normandy in German occupied France on D-Day June 6, 1944, they faced German troops, of course, but also they faced a few Indian soldiers in the German army, pictured here with Field Marshal Erwin Rommel the German commander in France at the time. In addition, they had to fight Polish troops in the German army, Russian troops, and as you can see here, various others, including even some from the Far East. The next slide was to have the numbers of troops from foreign countries that served in the German military. Â鶹´«Ã½ 2 million of them from other nations in Eastern Europe served in the German military during the war and tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, from areas really near what we prayed for today in the Caucasus Mountain region, we prayed for Armenia. Probably 100,000 Armenians served in the German army, thousands and thousands of other Europeans, quite a few from Central Asia. It was a large number, and it helped the Germans very much. Now I suppose I’d better explain why those German prisoners or who those German prisoners were that I mentioned to you at the very beginning of this presentation, the ones that were captured on D-Day but weren’t Germans at all. I think perhaps the strangest odyssey of any troops in the war involved this group of people, a handful of Korean soldiers drafted at first into the Japanese army in 1938, who then were captured by the Soviet Army in border fighting with Japan in 1939. And the Soviets drafted those guys into their own army and sent them to fight the invading Germans in 1941. Those Koreans were captured by the Germans and eventually forced into the German army and eventually sent to France, where they ended up fighting against the Americans on D-Day and being captured yet again. Sometimes it was just hard to tell who was on the other side of the battlefield from you. Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]

TRANSCRIPT

Problem gets worse. This is the second problem. When we realize that to build an animal, a new form of animal life. We not only need new genes and protein, but we need networks of genes that are interacting. They form a kind of a circuitry. They’re called gene regulatory networks and when scientists map out the functional relationships between genes and their gene products called proteins, they get patterns like this that look like integrated circuits. And what’s going on is something like this-you have a gene that codes for building a protein, and that protein then will bind to another part of the DNA and cause another gene either to be expressed or to be so suppressed or turned on or turned off. And then the ones that are expressed will then bind someplace else and turn on another gene. And you have this beautifully choreographed system in which information that’s being used to build different proteins is turned on and turned off at just the right time as cells are going through division and making new animals. So this is brilliant choreography taking place and the scientists who study these networks call them gene regulatory networks. And what they’ve learned about them is very interesting is that the gene regulatory networks cannot be altered without shutting down animal development. If you change them even a little bit you get a dead animal.

And that raises a big problem because if you want to build a new form of animal life. We now know that you need a gene regulatory network. So you’ve got gene regulatory network one that’s coordinating all the expression of all the genetic information to build the animal. But you want to build a new animal. So you need to have gene regulatory network too. But we know that gene regulatory networks don’t change without destroying animal development. So you start to mutate that gene regulatory network animal development shuts down. No more evolution and you never get to gene regulatory network to an animal to get the problem and the leading scientists have worked on this one. Eric Davidson at Caltech simply describes this is a grave problem for neo-darwinism and he actually says that neo-darwinism is a catastrophic error in thinking, because it can’t solve this problem. So this is just simply has been left unsolved. Now skip over another problem that’s very interesting. But in my book. It’s about the need for very specific kinds of mutations. It turns out if you want to get a mutation to build a new animal has to happen early in the development of the animal cause only those kind of mutations will cause major change. But those are the very mutations that we know also invariably kill animals in development. So it’s a kind of catch-22. The kind of mutations we need we don’t get the ones that act early and produce beneficial change. The kind we get we don’t need. Those are the minor mutations that might be heritable but don’t change very much. So that’s another problem. But here’s an even deeper one. And this is what’s called genetic or antoh genetic information. We all know about the information in the DNA molecule, but it turns out. That’s not the only information that’s needed to build a form of animal life. There are other layers of information in organisms and cells that are needed to build an animal form. But according to neo-darwinism the information necessary to build a new animal is all contained in the DNA and the mutations that accrue in it. But if you need other levels of information then genetic mutations alone aren’t going to be sufficient. Here’s a boy looking at this DNA builds for builds proteins. But proteins are only parts of cells. And you also have to make an animal, you have lots of new types of cells that are needed and new types of tissues formed of those new types of cells and new organs formed those new tissues and organs and tissues. Yeah the tissues and cell types. So the DNA makes the proteins. The proteins have to be organized into distinctive cell types, the cell types have to be organized into distinct tissues. The tissues and organs and organs and tissues into body plans. But DNA only is responsible for the lowest level in that hierarchy for the building of the new proteins. So where’s that other information. Well, we don’t know entirely. We know some of the other sources of that information. But the key point is that we know information beyond DNA is necessary and yet neo-darwinism says you build organisms by mutating DNA alone. We know and we now know that’s just simply not sufficient. It’s not an adequate explanation. So in other words, if body plan building building new animals requires information beyond DNA then you could mutate DNA and definitely not worry about the odds. And you’re still in the best of cases, only build information for making proteins. Not all animals. So you got another really deep and profound problem. Now all of these problems have kind of added up and they’re sifting and sifting through the literature. And so what’s happening quite contrary to what you hear when you really listen to Bill Nye the Science Guy or you read of an article in the New York Times or you hear the media or you take a biology class in a mainstream university. Scientists are no longer satisfied with the Darwinian explanation for the origin of major forms of life. Evolutionary scientists are no longer satisfied. And one way you know that is that they are formulating and positing new theories and new mechanisms hoping to complement the mechanism of mutation and natural selection. And in my book Darwin’s down. I look at these new proposals and many of them are really interesting and they add to our knowledge or biological knowledge and they provide some insights that are not present in a neo-darwinian framework. But they too. It turns out, are insufficient to explain this fundamental mystery of the origin of information. Many of these new theories let me illustrate with one there’s a brilliant new theory called natural genetic engineering and it’s based on the observation that many of the mutations that occur in living organisms are not random at all. They seem to be under a kind of preprogrammed adaptive capacity. So if an organism gets an environmental stress of some kind. It activates the turn it causes the organism or the cells to turn on the production of certain kinds of proteins to help that organism respond to their environmental stress. So this preprogramed adaptive capacity is it’s one of the scientist James Shapiro who’s most well known for this theory says it’s under algorithmic control. It’s fascinating the description he has of these non random evolutionary mechanisms. Non-mitt random mutational processes. But even Shapiro doesn’t explain where that preprogramming comes from. And so he gives a really interesting enriching look at how biology actually works. It’s non Darwinian. But the fundamental question of the origin of the information is still left unsolved. In his new theory. And I’ve shown in my book that each of these new theories is subject to that same problem. And so many of us have been thinking about these issues in biology have been thinking, well, maybe we’re looking for the wrong kind of answer as we look for an evolutionary materialistic explanation for the origin of information. Maybe there’s this preprograming actually suggests a programmer and this is the idea. We call the theory of intelligent design or just intelligent design. And I first encountered it in the mid 1980s here in Dallas. In fact, at a conference that was held in Dallas in 1985. And I met at that conference a scientist named Charles Thaxton who had just written a book called The mystery of life’s origins. He wasn’t concerned about the origin of new forms of life from preexisting forms. That’s biological evolution. He was concerned about an even deeper question. Sometimes called the theory of chemical evolution. How do you get the first life from the simple chemicals in the so-called prebiotic soup and those theories of evolution were also being confronted with an information problem. You can’t build even a single cell without the DNA and the information in DNA necessary to build the proteins to keep us alive. And so professor facts was suggesting well, maybe what we’re looking at with this problem the origin of information isn’t evidence of an undirected chemical or biological process. Maybe it’s evidence of a mind of an intelligence because intuitively, we think any information is a mind product. It’s something that we know from experience always comes from an intelligent agent or what he called an intelligent cause. Well, I was in my last year in Dallas when I first met Dr. Thaxton and we spent a lot of time talking about these ideas and a year later, I went off to Cambridge to do my graduate work. And I ended up deciding to do a thesis on the origin of life problem. And I left for England intrigued with Dr. Jackson’s ideas, but not entirely convinced. And I I was asking myself a question could this design hypothesis or the idea of an intelligent cause is the explanation for the information in life. Could that be formulated as a rigorous scientific argument. Was there a way to try to go beyond an intuitive connection to a scientific case. And ironically, the person who helped me most in thinking that through is another Charles. Named Charles Darwin because Darwin showed that there were different kinds of scientific methods and when you’re investigating events in the remote past you use a different kind of scientific method than you do when you’re say trying to get things to repeat themselves under control laboratory conditions like a chemistry a chemist or a physicist would do in the laboratory. And the method that he used has a name. It’s called inference to the best explanation or sometimes the method of multiple competing hypotheses and that raises a really important question. If what scientists are doing is they’re trying to infer that cause, which would best explain some event in the remote past. The question is what makes something a best explanation. How do we know which explanation is the best. And it turned out that the historical scientists of the 19th century kind of worked out some practical criteria for answering that question. Let me illustrate. If you go to I went to college in eastern Washington. And if you go out into what’s called the police country where they grow the wheat there are still these little patches of white powdery stuff sprinkled around that you can stumble upon. And if you happen to stumble upon one of these patches of white powdery stuff, and you didn’t happen to be around on May 18, 1980, you would have to use the historical method of reasoning you’d say, well, what caused this white powdery stuff to get here. And you. Well, what you do is you generate a number of competing hypotheses. Maybe it was an earthquake maybe it was a flood maybe it was a storm maybe it was a volcanic eruption. Of those four hypotheses, which is best. I’m hearing volcanic eruption is that OK. That’s right. Why Well, because we know that volcanic eruptions produce white powdery stuff. In fact, 1. Did on May 18, 1980 that was the famous mount st. Helens eruption. But we have not seen floods or earthquakes or storms do that. They produce other kinds of disruptions. But not white powdery stuff. OK, so what’s the principle here, the principle is that our present observation of cause and effect should guide our reasoning about what best explains what happened in the remote past. And I encountered this principle in the work of Charles Lyell the famous 19th century geologist and he had this long Victorian subtitle whose book the principles of geology went like this being an attempt to explain the former changes the Earth’s surface by reference. I was about to fall asleep and then I came across this phrase by reference how do we explain things by reference to causes. Now in operation we look around us and see the cause and effect structure of the world. We look for the causes that are now in operation. And we use those causes to explain similar effects in the remote past and suddenly I realized that applies to this whole question of the origin of information because what is the cause of the origin of information. What is the presently acting cause the cause now in operation for the origin of information. What do we know about where information comes from today. From a mind right. Right Bill Gates our local hero in Seattle says DNA is like a computer program only much more complex than any we’ve ever devised. Where does that program come from. In Microsoft Word wind and erosion random number generators no it comes from programmers. Whenever we see information and we trace it back to its source we always come to a mind, not a material process. Whether we’re talking about a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book or information embedded in a radio signal or even the information that so-called genetic algorithms developed. These are simulations of how the evolutionary process would work that computer programmers design and they do it to try to simulate the mutation selection process. But they also give the computer the criteria to guide its search and they tell it what sequence they want it to end up on. So whereas the information really coming from the programmer. OK So whenever we see information it always comes back to an intelligence source. And I came across this principle in the writings of an early information scientists who had applied information theory to molecular biology and he said that the creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity. It’s a presently acting cause it’s a cause now in operation. It’s the only cause of which we know that generates information. So when we find information at the foundation of life in the DNA molecule. And we recognize that new innovation in the history of life. And in events like the Cambrian Explosion would require big infusions of information. I argue that what we’re looking at is evidence of intelligent design. New information requires intelligence. We see evidence of new information infused into the biosphere at different times that I argue in my two books signature in the cell in Darwin’s Doubt is evidence of intelligent design acting in the history of life. Now in closing you might be wondering, what do the critics say about this argument. Seems like almost common sensical right. What’s commonsensical in this sense is based on our uniform and repeated experience the basis of all scientific reasoning. So that’s good. It’s commonsensical that makes it also scientific. So what do the critics say. Well, I wondered about this myself for a while in my book first came out in the summer of 2013. There were a number of really facile off point crid reviews that were critical, but they weren’t criticizing the argument I actually made. And finally, I got a review that took the argument head on. It was in the preeminent American scientific journal Science. And it was written by a leading evolutionary biologist for whom I have a great deal of respect. Charles Marshall. He’s also a Cambridge paleontologist and he wrote in science the following. He said Meyer’s case depends upon the claim that the origin of new animal body plans building new animals requires vast amounts of new novel genetic information. And I thought yes. Finally someone is saying what I is critiquing what I’m actually saying. That was my argument. And they said, in fact, our present understanding of morphogenesis that just means body plan building indicates that the new animals were not made by new genes, but emerged largely through the rewiring of the gene regulatory networks. Now let me translate because that’s all scientific terminology but I think once you understand what he’s saying you’ll realize you don’t need a PhD in biology to assess whether he’s right or not. He’s saying that we don’t need new information to build new forms of animal life. All we need is for the evolutionary process to rewire those gene regulatory networks. I was talking about the circuits that determine how the different genetic information is expressed at different times. Right but wait a minute gene regulatory networks are made of genes. Genes are sections of DNA that contain what genetic information. And that genetic information determines the expression of other genes for building the parts of animals. So Marshall’s critique presupposes unexplained sources of genetic information the genetic information in the gene regulatory networks the genetic information that acts in those in the information in those regulatory networks that acts on other genetic information in other sections of the DNA. And he says, you need to rewire the regulatory networks. Well, that would require multiple changes coordinated changes in code, which would be another source of information. So in order to answer my information challenge he presupposes three significant sources of unexplained genetic information. And so if that’s the best that the critics of intelligent design can do to answer our argument and I’m inclined to think that Marshall is one of the best on the other side, then I think the theory of intelligent design is on very secure footing indeed. And that’s my lecture. Thank you very much.