The Nature of this Conflict (Humans)

by dhw, Wednesday, January 20, 2010, 13:13 (5229 days ago) @ George Jelliss

George thinks there have been some weird responses on this thread. And none weirder than George's!-GEORGE: It is necessary to distinguish between personal beliefs or fancies and human knowledge, of value to us all, that can be established by rigorous methods.-That sounds very convincing, but do you honestly think that your own faith in materialism constitutes "knowledge", let alone knowledge of value to us all? Until science comes up with evidence for your materialistic theories, they are nothing more than personal beliefs.-GEORGE (on the origin of life and consciousness): dhw [...] prefers to think that some sort of spiritual miracle occurred here, rather than a natural process.-No, George, I'm an agnostic, and I don't prefer to think any such thing. Your "simple joining up of the dots between the materialist descriptions of the before and after" as the likeliest solution to the mysteries is one of the faiths I am unable to embrace. In any case, I don't see the alternative to abiogenesis as a "spiritual miracle", but as a conscious mind working scientifically, and your use of "natural" in this context is a cloak for "random".-GEORGE: It is only a severely watered down "religion" that is compatible with science. -Why? Once you accept the concept of a designer, you can fit any image you like to the workings of the world. It makes no difference whether the designer is deistic, Christian, Muslim, Jewish or Olympian ... your theist will still argue that whatever science discovers was created by his God. Do you really believe there are no Deist, Christian, Muslim or Jewish scientists at work today? Or do you think they're all schizophrenics?-*** I've just read the responses by Matt and David. 
MATT: "Materialism is a philosophy; end of story." Yep, that just about sums it up.