Don't tell me there's no proof for evolution

If you're sitting in a comfortable chair to write or perform music (I assume you aren't conducting), it doesn't make you a materialist. If the music puts you into a spiritualistic state, a euphoria, it's not explained by an outside director.

Naturalism is a philosophical position that all phenomena can be explained in terms of natural causes and law. It's the foundation of all of science and your place and space in the world.

The philosophy of materialism holds that the only thing that can be truly proven to exist is matter, and is considered a form of physicalism. It's in the plank of atheism as science provides more proof of a basic spontaneous particle, but it doesn't mean you don't believe in the outside forces of nature. That's the influence of environment -- where you mentally place yourself in time and space each day. That can be a good place or a bad place. Keep up with the music and all the arts, keep good friends (you can try to be friends with relatives, but that's a difficult one), eat well, drink moderately (even if you occassionally goof up)

A gleam of common sense.

This is true. However, whereas evolution attempts to explain very complex things (ie, biological lifeforms) from the ground up, in terms of simpler things and processes and the passage of large spans of time, the "God" theory attempts to explain them by positing something even more complex (ie, an eternally existent creator God), whose existence it doesn't even attempt to explain. This merely adds another needless layer of complexity to the problem, without offering any empirical evidence to support it.

Who created god? MAN

Why the CEO God, of course -- our God is only the President. Of course, who created the CEO God? God, this is perplexing -- it's multiplicity, not singularity or duality that's the problem.

If you really do want to learn then you should ignore (even locally literally, as I have done) spendius and his poisonous thinking.

I'm a bit confused. By your definition, I would place myself as a naturalist (damn, it sounds a lot less impressive and hardcore-atheistic than "materialist"). Still I am struggling to see the definition between the two.

Democritus definded materialism over 2,000 years ago. There's only atoms and void. Hobbes resurrected the idea over 200 years ago. It's easy to follow after that.

A naturalist is anything you fancy it is. If it exists, a bail-out of the banks for example, or a chocolate topped ice-cream cornet, it's natural.

Well, we could get into material meaning matter or even material meaning fabric or all the other meanings -- it can become just a game of semantics of everything we can sense as real. Materialism hasn't caught on because it's just another example of Hobson's choice. Nature shows us throughout the ages that it is a chaotic Universe which doesn't reveal any planned designing. One can be a naturalist without going as far as nihilism, accepting reality as the progress of time and we each get a small piece of it in which to live our lives as fulfilling as we make them.

Well put. That's a nice way of looking at it.

Well--we had better do something about that. Chaos, however natural, will never be voted for.

Even the ashes has to have a rising phoenix doesn't it? Otherwise it's just permanent ashes.

spendi, Here's a clue; we don't "vote" on nature.

Thats rich, I see spendi in the forest, desperately searching for a clue.

Chance is a fine thing. Keep clutching at it effemm. Your fantasies are your affair and I quite understand you tailoring them to your needs.

You vote on your carefully conditioned Christian principles which have been designed to set nature's chaos aside in the service of public utility. Admittedly not always as perfectly as we desire.

Had you issued from the womb in the forests of Borneo you would have voted for the guy with the most shrunken skulls in his hut.

Your position as an evolutionist is very similar to that of a respectable lady who goes to a fancy-dress ball as a hooker but anyone enquiring of her fee at the ball gets his face slapped.

It is very funny seeing you as a concientious scientist in the same bed as ci.

There you go again, trying to sound like Bulwer Lytton.

. Some more shithole convoluted irrelevant Victorian crap. Try to deal with facts, you certainly arent Erasmus Darwin composing his Zoonomia.

. That makes absolutely no sense (even more than your usual fecal pellet offerings)

Same old bloke with big feet explaining he takes a large shoe size. Again. Not worth the fingerwork. It's a bit like powdering your nose in the vanity mirror.

It was an allusion to the well known tabula rasa idea and Locke's notion that the mind "in its first state is a white paper, void of all characters". It is then furnished with ideas derived from the senses (sensationalism) which reflection then works upon through the agency of the intellect. Freud took the early sense impressions as defining the character. He might well have said that you got a lot of your own way as an infant.


Paradise Lost Book VIII.

Hence Original Sin. The animal urges which the infant has from nature. The baptism is a symbol of the culture the infant is born into which washes those away and replaces them with civilised values. And such importance is given to the matter that the parents are supplemented by godparents. Godparents are not at a fancy dress ball pretending to be godparents. They are a back-stop.



Not only am I not ED I am not a whole host of other people either. He was besotted with Ms Martineau who was all up for the animal urges which is why she was a keen Darwinian.

Do you think the lady Darwinians we have met on these threads are in it for the same reason or are they also at a fancy dress ball?

Try not to use expressions like "Try to deal with facts" as if they signify that I don't and you do. There are orders of facts. There is what time the train arrives type of fact and there is Minister of Transport type of facts. You should try to avoid confusing the two and insulting your readers by attempting the cheap trick of trotting out carefully selected lower order facts, of which there are an infinite number, to make them think you know anything about the higher order ones which might be reduced to One as with Milton.

Spendi is in the forest which he cannot see because he's up the one tree he's been concentrating on -- it's the one without any branches.

If we were on Mars, we'd be voting for the greenest Martian.

This is easy...
K
O

I guess that explains why spendi regurgitates things he has read all the time.

Without intellect there is no way to reflect so Spendi is left with only the ideas he gets from his senses.

My guess is he would show up there without a space suit because he believes he can.