What we must accept if we accept evolution

That would still be materialism I would think--an organization of matter is materialistic."Mentality"--apart from our private experience of it--makes no sense.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying. Some of the terms you are using I'm not familiar with. I'm not sure what you mean by
"property dualism."

I don't need to think it. What is an illusion is the aura of incorporeality: everything is physical. If we evolved, everything is physical.

But the scenario you have described is not the theory of evolution.The theory of evolution is not about minds; it's about physcial things and only physical things. I suppose you might say that the evidence for the theory of evolution could be used as evidence for another (fanciful) theory. But then it wouldn't be the theory of evolution.

If God set it in motion, then all bets are off. We could have anything. But there's a problem with this idea. If God set evolution in motion, then God is not a good God. Evolution is cruel, bloody, murderous. Life is set up in such a way that in order to survive, life forms have to feed off other life forms. It would be morally nicer if we ate dirt and rocks, although that does sound like a rather insipid diet. The YEC's offer the Fall as an explanation for Nature, but the Fall and evolution don't mix. Logically, it makes sense to me, but I'm no great logician, so my real view is tentative. I'm speaking here with a tone of certainty for the sake of argument. Emotionally speaking, of course, these ideas are inconceivable and unacceptable.

Yeah, and the way you get rid of it is by ceasing to desire things. And then you go to Nirvana or somewhere where you no longer exist as an individual--like a drop falling into the ocean. If you don't exist as an individual, then as far as I can see you don't really exist. In my view, it would be better to exist (with full individuality) even in pain than not exist--as long as the pain is not unbearable.But this is off-topic.

TOE says that life evolved via natural selection, mutation and a few other phenemona. Natural selection does not mean minds tweaking different life forms. It's a purely automatic process.Your fanciful theory tells us that there might be another explanation for evolution than these natural processes of selection and mutation. But if that is the case, TOE is false. It is not false in one sense; "evolution" has occurred but it's controlled and guided by these minds, and thus the naturalness of natural selection has been falsified. So I would say you cannot believe in TOE and believe that tweaking-mind theory at the same time. You can believe in evolution, but it would be a different type of evolution than that spelled out in TOE.In order to accept TOE, you have to accept NATURAL selection.

Not at all. I could accept germ theory and believe in souls and God. I could accept atomic theory and believe in souls and God.But TOE is different. It's not just any physical explanation of just any physical phenomenon. It explains the origin of humanity. It explains the origin of mind.It tells us that mind came from the physical (there was nothing else for it to come from). If mind comes from the physical, then it's physical too. The physical can only produce the physical.Sidlined and Parsomnium have explained to us about the aura of incorporeality that we have: it's an illusion. Thoughts are really something physical. If they are physical, they have a physical cause. All physical events are automatic events. So thoughts are automatic events. Determinism.I have been determined to believe what I believe. There's a problem with that, of course. If my beliefs are physically caused, then they were not derived logically, and can only be true accidentally."You think that because you are a man," said the woman tartly. She's saying his ideas can be dismissed because they are CAUSED. They are a result of his male hormones or something like that. Therefore, they can only be true by a fluke, since they were not logically derived.All our thoughts are this way.

Just visualize something that you remember well, like a house you used to live in. Do you see it? There it is, the incorporeal house in the incorporeal yard, with the incorporeal sun shining down on it. Then where did they come from? How did thinking evolve? What are thoughts made out of?

Well, of course, "if it came to light," all our ideas would change. TOE would change. You speak as though TOE was saying, "we don't really know how species evolve. We sort of maybe think that it happened naturally." That's not what it says. It says it happened naturally, unequivocally.

Your sense of self, then, appears to be incorporeal. Your self is not your hands, your ears, your nose, etc. It seems to be something in your head, but not something, if you could take the top off your head, somebody could look down into and locate.

I have this book here by Ernst Mayr, entitled "What Evolution Is."This Mayr is not just some bozo; he, according to the blurb, "has been hailed as 'one of the great shining figures of evolutionary biology' and 'the Darwin of the 20th Century.'" He is Professor Emeritus at Harvard.Here's what he says about the evolution of consciousness: "How did human consciousness evolve? This is a question that psychologists love to ask. The answer is actually quite simple: from animal consciousness! . . .it is quite certain that human consciousness did not arise full-fledged with the human species, but is only the most highly evolved end point of a long evolutionary history" (282).We are talking about consciousness here--i.e., mentality. Consciousness evolved. Are you telling me that one fine day the corporeal became incorporeal?

It's not invalid, or at any rate we assume it's not. But if our thought, "5 X 7=35," is caused by automatic electrical physical events, then it was not arrived at logically. It just happened to be true. It would be a process that was non-physical. It would be purely mental. It would not be CAUSED. It would be a purely, ground/consequent determination.

Well, I never heard of him until I just happened to pick his book up. I've read it and while not understanding all the details, I think I picked up the main points.I'll tell you something else that Mayr talks about. He talks about the origin of life itself. Why does he talk about that? That's not part of TOE. He does so because, though the origin of life is not part of TOE technically, the two concepts go together like matching gloves.

You make it all sound so innocuous, Modulus. The theory of evolution is no big deal; it's just this little explanation of how the descendents of a gigantic lizard, after a couple of billion years, could become something that looks like you and me. No great shakes. I don't know why everyone is getting so worked up about it.According to you, the theory of evoluition has nothing to do with this issue of the supernatural origin of man versus the natural origin of man.Why does it have no bearing, say you? Oh, it's because scientific evidence is by its nature natural evidence. If we had any supernatural evidence, it wouldn't be science. I'm not exactly sure what it would be, but at any rate not science.And, of course, science is TENTATIVE. It's so tentative that we can hardly make any statements at all. It's a wonder that anyone can manage to put together a scientific paper, much less a book, it's so damned tentative. Any minute now, some supernatural evidence might be showing up among the fossils. Oh, that's right, it can't show up, can it? Because then it wouldn't be science. It would be this something else that we don't know about.But then there are these people like me, who suggest in our blindness, that TOE gives us an account of the natural origin of humanity, not supernatural. I read all about it in that book by Mayr. Funny little story.Not so, say you. It's just a little theory about how populations change. How do they change? Oh, they go from one-celled bacteria or whatever they are to all these other creatures. And it just so happens that one of these other creatures is this thing called a human being. But, really, TOE has nothing to do with humanity, really. Not a thing. That's just me, with my bias, being a NATURALIST.abe: typos.This message has been edited by robinrohan, 01-25-2006 10:23 AMThis message has been edited by robinrohan, 01-25-2006 10:25 AMThis message has been edited by robinrohan, 01-25-2006 10:26 AM