 Happy you could be here for the second session of our conference on Mormon thought and engineering vision. I'm sure others will be coming in as the day goes by but we're very pleased to get started now. I'm Richard Bushman, the Howard W. Hunter chair of Mormon Studies in the School of Religion at Claremont Graduate University and happy to be one of the sponsors of today's conference. Like many of the discoveries in engineering and science, this conference is a partial product of serendipity. Claudia and I were giving talks at a fireside. I think it was in the Pasadena stake and afterwards we were chatting in the cultural hall and a young man came up to me and engaged me in conversation about Mormon thought and posed two questions. One of them was the statement that we often compare science and religion. It's one of the big issues of our time in our culture, but we rarely compare engineering and religion. He said if you think of it, science is based on chance. Evolution is thought to occur by chance. Our configuration of the world that we see is a matter of probabilities in a great variety of many possibilities. Well, engineering, on the other hand, is based on design. It's making things that will be useful for human purposes and that seems to be closer to the role of God. That was his first thought. Second was what if you traced the trajectory of engineering accomplishments and achievements over the last 200 years and then starting from that point projected the next 200 years, what will we be able to do? What will be our capacities at that point in time? And for a Latter-day Saint, this obviously raises theological questions. When will our humanly acquired skills begin to approximate or approach what could even be thought of as God-like skills and abilities? Well, the man with the question was Scott Howe, an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and I was immediately intrigued with what he had to say and asked him, would you be interested in organizing a conference on that subject? And he immediately rose to the task. His wife was standing beside him and she agreed, so I knew it was okay. And he assembled the committee and it turned out that there were people all over the country, Latter-day Saints, engineers whose own work and whose own knowledge was leading them into similar kinds of speculations about where theology and engineering converge. Fortunately, we had available to us supporting funds from an independent foundation, the Mormon Scholars Foundation, which is able to finance the conference. And we also received support from the LDS Council and especially the Skinner Foundation, which was able to provide more of the funds to make this conference possible. So it's a great pleasure to welcome all those who are participating and tell them that we're looking forward to what they have to say and we all truly hope we'll understand at least half of what was told us today.