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As a darwinist, you must affirm naturalism, materialism, and atheism. That seems self-evident. If otherwise, please so advise me how you reconcile any other.

Now, holding a materialist, physicalist worldview, you assert that your pursuit of scientific methodology as the guiding principle. Yet, to be adfixed to scientific methodology you must rely on philosophy. For example, scientific method relies on logic and numbers to attempt to prove truth, yet science cannot prove logic or numbers (both philosophical, abstract, univeral entities). One cannot use scientific method to prove ethical truths, aesthetic truths or science itself. Materialists physicalists (those denying there is anything other that matter) cannot prove logic, reason, rational thought, or any abstract universal entity, yet they claim to be the arbitor of those very entities while denying at the otological base their very existence, or be dishonest. If you can prove that logic is made of matter, let us know. If you can prove reason and rational thought by scientific method, please let us know. If not, and true physicalist, you must deny their existence or be dishonest and claim their existence. Please choose one, for the two positions are mutually exclusive of the other.

I know you are a bright person, and you do use logic, reason, and rational thought in your scientific studies, you simply cannot justify or warrant the fact that these abstract entities exist in this time, space, matter continuum. But you use logic and reason because you borrow those entities from a theological universe, which you deny. You cannot explain consciousness, sentience, or any other abstraction from the physicalist, naturalist worldview, much less dispose of hubris to claim epistemic superiority. Claiming that a spatio-temporal universe is all that exists disposes of anything which is not spatio-temporal, and therefore logic, reason, and rational thought cannot exist. To explain the naturalist ontology requires a sui generis emergent properties which can only be described as metaphysical. To move to claim epiphenomenalism is to move into the realm of metaphysical entities. Some physicalist lay claim to this as an ontology is to simply misapply and evade the epistemology, and simply use it as a description,...then move on, as if it will be glossed over without a demand by those who hold this to be a theological universe is dismissive and dishonest. First Principles need to be addressed by the naturalist, physicalist, atheist, darwinist or that atheist may eschew irreducible teleology and agent causation in the first relatum of the causal relation is in the category of substance and not event. As physicalist Jaegwon Kim said, "Causal powers and reality go hand in glove. To render mental events causally impotent is as good as banishing them from our ontology".