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May 16th, 2011, 12:58 am
(quote not shown) Perhaps you are misunderstanding the religious person. If the universe is merely a material phenomenon, then deriving oughts from what "is" falls under the naturalistic fallacy, which means there is no universal moral principle to guide behaviour. After all, matter "...
October 17th, 2010, 10:40 am
(quote not shown) As is obvious from the last six or so posts, for an idea to "fly" in a certain forum of listeners the listeners have to be capable of flight, otherwise there is no point in passing on knowledge of the subtle maneuvers of flight. If a creature is wholly content with gazing...
October 17th, 2010, 3:10 am
(quote not shown) Then you are proposing the ole "ghost in the machine"? No need to. When a materialistic perspective in science probes reality with a strictly materialistic intent, something gets lost. It is like not seeing the forest for the trees. When a frog is dissected and probed, so...
October 15th, 2010, 11:09 pm
(quote not shown) The launching of a space flight may have some caused elements and some that are intentional. These are two different spheres of existence that impinge on each other without a necessary connection. Strictly material causal connections are deterministic in type. The effect necessaril...
October 15th, 2010, 7:34 am
(quote not shown) It makes no difference what level of intelligence is present because the basic point is that intended activities that are intelligently planned are of a type different than caused events. Someone choosing to stop eating candy because they have learned that it is not good for them i...
October 15th, 2010, 2:34 am
(quote not shown) I suspect this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what religious beliefs entail based upon a superficial understanding of what they are perceived to be. Ultimately religious beliefs are a vehicle for moving beyond rational self-interest towards a more absolute view of the nature,...
October 13th, 2010, 12:03 am
(quote not shown) Actually it is about "Religion, Theism and Mythology," with religion having top billing, but the fact that you choose to dismiss, ignore, redefine and put down continues to make my point. I have never encountered someone in religion who has tried to enforce (or even force...
October 12th, 2010, 10:27 pm
(quote not shown) You have a view of science as being the only worthwhile pursuit, the sole endeavor that meets your criteria of productivity. Furthermore, you disparage other fields as being a waste of time. Your words: "...when I hear from the Creationists [I suspect you lump together all the...
October 12th, 2010, 12:31 am
(quote not shown) Chesterton wrote: "A stick might fit a hole or a stone a hollow by accident. But a key and a lock are both complex. And if a key fits a lock, you know it is the right key." The alien scientists observed a complex system on the earth and determined that it fit their equall...
October 11th, 2010, 9:31 pm
(quote not shown) The fact that this particular analogy may or may not fail is really irrelevant. The point is that any empirically based system of knowledge is limited by it's own capacity to gather data. Based upon their perspective and limitations the alien race could only construct a theory to e...
October 11th, 2010, 11:39 am
(quote not shown) What happens with you - you select a process out of context, at will, and then you are trying to analyse it using the information, available to you... But if you try looking retrospectively, you would see that the other animals, which in our view have no "intelligence", a...
October 11th, 2010, 3:54 am
(quote not shown) There are the processes of macro-level and there are their components, going on micro-level. Planning and organisation takes place on micro-level, and this planning is not done by a supernatural being but by the education professionals. It would be strange to suggest that, say, sin...
October 10th, 2010, 10:26 am
(quote not shown) Are you trying to imply that the education system is not intentionally designed by intelligent beings? What do all those creatures in departments of education all over the world do, then? You are trying to prove that evolution is not a designed process by showing how it is like a d...
October 10th, 2010, 2:29 am
Whynot wrote:Man, observing the shere complexity of his environment, made a classic assumption...that whatever causes that complexity must be even more complex. This assumption has followed man down thru history as one form of theism or another. Sometimes it is wise to question these assumptions themselves. For instance, we observe, (and you admit), how simple chemical combinations over time, and under specific, (and often, but not always),random conditions, converge and become more complex...naturally. Thus the initial assumption that the observable complexity necessitates an even greater complexity to account for the observation loses steam in direct proportion to the amount of new data gathered to support simple-to-complex cause/effect relations. Complex > complex is not only counter-intuitive but illogical when we consider the processes themselves.
Kindly provide an example of this outside of processes of evolution since that would be begging the question at issue here.