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Philosophical materialists are stuck in their tiny materialistic mental box. They won't look out the window, not because there is nothing out there but because it makes them uncomfortable.

Sigh -- okay, if you insist. One sec while I go look out the metaphysical window...

Okay, I'm back. I saw pink unicorns, what did you see?

This fallacy is called Petitio Principii or "begging the question," which is assuming the thing you are trying to prove. It is the most basic of fallacies.

The Straw Man fallacy is pretty basic too, like the one you just made. Contrary to your misrepresentation of it, his position was actually that anything which interacts with the universe ought to be properly considered part *of* the universe, which is fundamentally different from your misunderstanding of what he's trying to say.

He's arguing from an inclusive view, you attributed to him an exclusive view.

You thought he was trying to prove the non-existence of anything beyond the universe (as *you* define the universe and the concept of "beyond" it). Instead, he was simply saying that whatever exists, he'd rather view it as being part of the all-encompassing "universe" (as *he* views the concept of "universe").

Like all too many battling philosophers, you two are bitching about definition choice, not substance.

Ten yard penalty.

Evolution is almost composed exclusively of elements that are not observable! Shame beavus! Was I mistaken when I gave you credit for thinking?

No, you were mistaken when you presumed that you fully understood his point before you starting throwing the insults.

Evolution, like any science, rests upon observations. Sure, we can't "observe" amphibians splitting off from fish (we weren't there at the time), but we can certainly observe literally millions of pieces of hard, see-and-touch evidence today which may shed light on the event.

His comment, however, was dealing with the very unobservable nature of your admonition to "look out the window" in a metaphysical sense.

If you want to focus on truly observable phenomena and argue that it should count as convincing evidence for a deity, feel free and try to make your case.

But the moment you get frustrated when that's not going as well as you had hoped and you start just shouting at people to "look beyond your materialistic philosophy room and look out the window", *that's* when it's fair game to start teasing you about your invisible friends.

If you want to make an evidence-based argument, make one.

If you want to make a faith-based argument, fine.

But don't try to tell us that one is identical to the other. And don't make the mistake of believing it yourself.

Do you know of things you cannot observe? The question absolutely absurd, hypocritical, and sophomoric. Everyone knows things they cannot observe! If you want a lesson in the theory of knowlege, I charge $105 an hour. It is amazing to me that I so often have to give the high-brow evolutionists lessons in elementary logic.

Okay, *thirty* yard penalty for overweening conceit...

You people are supposed to be the enlightened ones yet you mock us if our vocabulary exceeds 800 words.

No, we mock you when you get pompous.

I can talk like William F. Buckley too, but why would I want to? Try reading the liberal "intellectual" publications sometime, they go *nuts* on that stuff. After the five hundredth sentence like, "a forum that would look for the means and modes of dialogues between critical discourses as various as semiotics, Habermasian critical pragmatics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Foucauldian analysis, deconstruction, structuralism, and Chomskyian linguistics", I'm more than happy to talk like a normal person so as to put as much distance as possible between myself and that sort of robotic buzzspeak.

[beavus wrote:] Explain why I can't with equal legitimacy claim that there is a 2D realm of Mandarin-speaking Elvis's flying upside down on winged donkeys.

You can. Here's another lesson in logic for free: The burden of proof is on the new idea.

Cool, so Dhatar is responsible for creation of the Earth, and if you want us to believe in that young upstart Jehovah, you've got an uphill climb ahead of you.

Tip: Don't get all snotty about claiming the crown of Mr. Logic one moment, then revert suddenly to, "my idea's better because it's older" -- it just makes you look silly.

I have given good reasons to believe why there is a reality outside of our physical universe.

I must have missed them, could you run them past us again?

You can only offer the lame and trampled excuse that if you can't observe it, it doesn't exist.

Straw man alert -- that's not what he said.

Any 7th-grader of average intelligence who hasn't been force-fed darwinism through the elementary grades will be able to discern which position is superior.

If you want to claim the distinction of thinking in tune with a "7th-grader of average intelligence", I'll not try to dissuade you.

Most of evolution's claims are unobservable.

I suspect you're operating on a very restrictive definition of "unobservable" here...

If the unobservable element makes it impossible, then evolution is impossible as well.

Got any examples, or are you going to continue to destroy us with generalities?

You see, beavus, your side tries to explain all the impossibilities of the Big Bang by telling us the laws of physics were different then.

But, we can show how those different laws are a predictable and measurable consequent of quantum physics, and can calculate detailed accounts of what happened at various stages, and test them (within limits) in particle accelerators.

What have you got? "Well, it says here in this book written from Nth-generation oral histories that might have gotten a bit garbled along the way..."

That's not nearly as quantitatively predictive, is it?