Will Torbald

Human creativity translates to imagination, and as I read it, you're saying that what you can think is real, is real. "The mind is the source of cause in the universe". Sorry, but this is not what I asked for. Thanks for trying, but this is not evidence.

From Merriam Webster: If you can clearly inform me of any way that reality isn't material, or that something exists without being material - with evidence, reason, self consistent logic - then I will be glad to hear this argument.

There's good philosophy for that. Good old logic, empiricism, materialism, all the basics. It's not hard when you abandon all "a priori" rationalisms as valid forms of acquiring knowledge about "the real world".

I can leave you on your path, believe me. As long as you are happy and of your choosing it will never woe me. I'm in sorrow for those on my side, for how inept we are that we can't, how do I explain it, that it isn't enough for people. That reality is not enough.

This is absolutely heartbreaking for me to hear. What must be of man wherein reason isn't enough that he seeks comfort in myth. Seeing indoctrination of children is understandable how the machine gets in their brain. Seeing the machine enter a man of reason is carnage.

This isn't evidence.

Specific dirt on the nail questions like this are a waste of time. The world is nowhere near close to an anarchist world to ponder such obscurities.

That's great, but oh, if only people would recognize the absurdity of believing those other dimensions and universes were real.

Have you wondered how it sound if you were talking about Narnia? No, Don, you don't ask "where" Narnia is. Narnia just is, it isn't a dot in a map. It's like asking "where" the universe is. Or like asking where Middle Earth is. Or like asking where Wonderland is. Or like asking where Valhalla is. Or asking where Trikuti is. Or asking where Hogwarts is. It just is somewhere someplace and you shouldn't ask or think about these things. How silly of you to question the majesty of Odin and Dumbledore! The eye of Sauron is looking at you and will judge you. Just sip the tea and celebrate your unbirthday like everyone else.

He's implying the world we live in is the purgatory of Christians. Rather indirectly by now, but that's what I get from his comments.

Cool, no problem. I think it is a good definition of virtue, so I wanted to give my 2c/.

This is much clearer, yes. However, and I know I'm being anally retentive with the language here, but there is a difference between saying "cannot be universalized" and "cannot be universal". Aesthetic preferences can be universal, yes, but to universalize them it would require the use of some form of force or coercion since it is inevitable to have people with different tastes and cultures who will not change their preferences. And even if you were to coerce someone to eat flan, they would still not prefer it if they didn't like it from the beginning. Therefore, the use of the phrase "cannot be universalized" would have to be changed to "cannot be universal" instead because this does allow for aesthetic preferences while at the same time it opposes UPB immoral behavior - that which can't be universal and universalized at the same time. Aesthetic preferences can be universal but they can't be universalized.

Aesthetic preferences by definition can't be universalized, and your definition of virture requires opposing that which can't be universalized - therefore it includes the opposition to aesthetic preferences.

I agree with the intention of this statement, but technical adjustments can be made. In UPB not all behaviors that cannot be universalized are immoral. There are aesthetic behaviors that by definition can't be universalized, but do not infringe on anyone's rights either. I can't universalize my taste for flan, but actively and either directly or indirectly opposing flan won't have any virtuous meaning for anyone. So my adjustment simply is to redefine it as "virtuous behavior always opposes immoral behavior" since UPB already defines which behaviors are immoral.

Presumption is a sin? I find it immensely ironic considering all religions are based on presumptions. You have to presume that your god is the only real god, and all other religions are false. You have to presume an afterlife. You have to presume a conscious supernatural creator. You have to presume the bible is accurate. You have to presume the world is thousands of years old. You have to presume that humans are important in the universe. You have to presume that one small tribe in one remote corner of the world received divine knowledge from a carpenter while the rest of the world, the much more advanced world like the chinese, didn't know any of it. You have to presume the entire human species descends from only two people while at the same time the god that creates them condemns incest while at the same time having incest in the holy book. You have to presume any of it makes sense. Presumption is a sin.

The very same kind of system created by immoral people themselves, Koroviev.

Making predictions is really hard, especially about the future. Predicting the future is very simple when you wait long enough. We dream nonsense 99.9% of the time, but the one day one dream fits by coincidence what happened weeks later we are astonished.

Thanks for that website. I found a video in the eye that illustrates what I was talking about referring to Darwin and the people who wrote him https://www.dnalc.org/view/16982-The-Eye-and-Irreducible-Complexity-Creationism-Debunked.html In it she demonstrates how cherry picked quotes get taken out of context. In this case Darwin was talking in a literary sense when presenting skepticism of his own theory, buy ok the next breath grew goes on to shows examples of how it can happen with natural selection. In new modern findings it's been shown that eyes have evolved separately in different lineages with their own flavor so to speak. The human eye isn't very well made either. By comparison the eyes of mollusks like octopuses are much better. On the subject of fully formed species, it's a facetious and ignorant complaint. Every species is a transitional species between what came before and what it can evolve into in the future. There's no such thing as a standard rabbit from which we could say there are protorabbits or superrabbits. These are just symptoms of the clutch of our mind to define things by categories in very rigid boxes. But nature is not like that, it's very fluid and ambiguous.

There's nothing intellectually rigorous about surgery or even medicine. It's just very hard to do, but it doesn't require the use of philosophical thinking. The brain is very good at compartmentalizing information and giving each topic its own set of rules, which in the case of the religious, it lives in its own island where the reason used for worldly skills isn't used. You just gotta make believe and the mansion in the sky is yours (and no one in your inner circle will ostracize you).

Darwin was indeed cautious of his ideas at first. He wrote extensively on how to discredit is ideas, as any good scientist should, but he also proposed ways of how complex structures like eyes could have evolved. However, the idea of "irreducible complexity", a term of no scientific value as it only means "I can't believe a god didn't do it" has been debunked by finer new advances in molecular biology in recent decades. Molecules are complex, but they are not impossibly complex, and new intermediate forms of complex proteins have been found in bacteria when before no one knew how they formed. The idea of gradual and incremental change over time does indeed serve as the basis for all complexity in life. Some mutations are more dramatic than others, yes, but most are very subtle. There is a series of lectures by Richard Dawkins (yes, that Dawkins) that he did solely to explain natural selection and gradual change. It's on YouTube by the name of "Growing Up in the Universe". In it he shows the gradual evolution of complex structures like eyes, which were thought to be too complex in Darwin's time, but new discoveries show how it went about with gradual change over time. The skeptics case of "irreducible complexity" no longer has any heft to it if it ever had it at all, as it proposes no scientific alternative or predictions of how the supposed impossible structure could have formed. In the last quote you made I must say he is talking nonsense. I don't know who this man is, nor when he wrote that book, but now in modern times and in modern science the talk of "no physiological or geological evidence" is downright false. It's exactly what I meant by good people listening to misinformation given by agenda driven liars.

You're still not getting it. Natural selection is neither slow nor fast, as those are relativistic terms. What's slow like a year for us to pass is only a blink in geological time. When Darwin said that evolution is a slow process he was speaking in the slowness compared to what we feel is slow, not what is slow for the Universe or the Earth. For a fish to evolve into a land walking animal it would take millions of years and that is "slow", but for a lizard to change its diet from insects to plants and become a new herbivore species is "fast" even if it took 300 years to occur. So when you say that natural selection is an almost religious explain it all scheme you are still misusing and misrepresenting the term "natural selection". I already explained that by "natural" we mean all the forces and stresses in nature, and your explanation of the history of the Earth is also part of that "natural" process of "selection" of species and genes that survive to reproduce. You are making a case for it while trying to debunk it.

This only serves to reinforce my argument. That people who make these kinds of claims do not know what they are talking about. You are describing natural selection and at the same time saying that natural selection doesn't work. There is artificial selection, or what we do with cats, dogs, farm animals, birds, and so on - selective breeding for desired traits - and everything that isn't touched by humans thus "natural selection". It is all the forces of nature that conspire so to speak to drive evolution. The environment, the geology, the atmosphere and oxygen available, catastrophes and extinction events, population drift, random genetic mutation, all of it. Everything that is a naturally occurring phenomena that affects living creatures is participating in natural selection. So when you say "natual doesn't explain it all" I ask, then what isn't natural to explain it? Is it aliens? Is it a divine hand? Because everything described is natural.

[citation needed] The religious debate is better had with the other people engaging with you already on it, but I find the scientific talk more interesting. I often find that people who talk about Darwin in the same breath with the words "proven to be incorrect" have almost certainly never read "On the Origin of Species" or any of his writings, nor any of the modern Neo-Darwinian theories involving modern genetics. Usually religious and spiritually inclined people like you hear about evolution from people who deny it and make the most outlandish and misinformed strawman arguments against it. No other branch of science gets so many childish and petty contrarians as evolutionary biology - not saying you are one, but those denialists go on to misinform people of good will about the real theories and the way it really works. So far as it has stood for 150 years, Darwinian evolution by natural selection has been confirmed and reconfirmed enough times to make anyone's head spin for another 150 years. There has been no evidence against it, even when it is clear what kind of evidence would disprove it. On the contrary, every single branch of science from chemistry, geology, physics, and now genomics confirms all the required parameters for evolution to occur. It's not that "some of it" has been wrong. All of it has been right. If you have some as of yet unknown piece of evidence to discredit evolution, even "in some ways" as you say it, I'm all ears and eyes on it.

X is using force to end an aggression which was started by G. If you deem the initiation of force as that which is immoral, then the cessation of force can't be immoral since it is its opposite.

They don't. They're insects with very primitive neural systems. They just follow chemical signals and work independently of each other even if they appear to work as a team. They're pretty much automaton robots made of goop and keratin.