[Nacho King]

(Original post by PandyAndy)
All the usual garbage about the embryology, mountains etc.

http://www.quickmeme.com/How-Could-M...nown/?upcoming

So are you muslim or athiest?

[PandyAndy]

(Original post by Nacho King)
So are you muslim or athiest?

Atheist.

[bordercollies10]

(Original post by chrisjar)
You're right that this isn't the place to bring this up, so I won't make a detailed reply. But let me just say that your apparent belief in the non-occurrance of random events, whilst unfounded, is not the same as a belief in an infinite cycle of cause and effect.

I'm not going to answer every one of these...arguments. But I'll try a few.



You say there is no empirical evidence that I had a great great great gran because I have no sensory perception of her. This is a logical fallacy. Determining that as I am alive I must have a great grandmother is not the same as stating that as I am alive I must have been created by God/God exists to have created me. There is a lot of evidence to show that you need a great great grandmother to exist. You cannot claim that evidence for a god(s).

The point I was making was that of things (regardless of whether they are living, like us, or inanimate objects) cannot come into existence without a cause (like reproduction), and each of these causes will have a cause ad infinitum until you regress to the very first cause, to which every cause in reality at any given point in time can be traced back to - without some kind of external first cause this would be an infinite regression...

You are right, free will is a rather elaborate illusion. It is the nature of our existence. But extrapolating that as chemicals cannot reason, that we cannot, is rather infantile. Consider this: as computers become ever more advanced, and ever more able to learn and react to their environment, it seems to an uneducated person that they could be said to have some semblance of intelligence. Siri appears intelligent enough to work out what you are saying and respond in a reasoned way. But it is not intelligent, it is a program utilising algorithms and databases. Our brains are organic computers, with neural networks, performing tasks and using data. There is no dualism of mind acting here. We are just a collection of chemicals.

True, computers can only give the illusion of cognition to some users - as computers follow a predefined algorithm as determined by the programmer. Artificial intelligence, to an extent, can respond to stimulus (i.e. keystrokes) and there is the potential for the computer to learn from experience, but whether or not the machine will ever experience a thought or emotion or whether or not its morals will be absolute (given by the programmer) or relative (gained from its culture) is another issue. If a computer can give the impression that it is conscious during a "Turing Test" (named after Alan Turing) then it is considered to be intelligent, but this doesn't prove that the computer is actually conscious. It may be a marvel to observe a mobile phone writing a relevant text to a spouse because you told it to do so, but matching parts of audio files - as captured by the microphone - isn't that much different to recognising keystrokes really...