ha ha venting and kidding around. Good luck guys!

Ah FDrake, FDrake, FDrake.....

Thank you for convincing me that your really ARE 100% evolved from pond scum.

And what a devolved degenerate I must be for suggesting evolution is not scriptural and inviolate. I am also sorry you found my thread poorly written, I tried hard but guess am just not up to your Rabelaisian Carnivalesque especially the part about "decontexualized rhetorical questions". You are clearly a person of deep soundings. You managed to find non-meanings and non-intentions in my thread that only a completely roboticized birdbrain could find, and I am impressed by that, just as I am impressed by the ability of a slightly different kind of automated nitwit to crawl flylike up the side of the Capitol Building over some cliche he heard. However, I must tell you that being subjected to the oversite of a robot-ding-a-ling who thinks philosophy is a matter of fitting words into an algorithm and rope-walking above an abyss of cliches is not my ideal for philosophical discussion and so I must wish you and your forum adieu and will not be reading any more of it. I am sorry I stumbled on it in the first place, no wonder US philosophy is the pathetic little pet rabbit of science that is it. It is because of science-fawining literal-minded sycophants like you, sir, who should be punching adding machines or somehing, not "monitoring" philosophically-minded people. GOOD NIGHT, GO BACK TO YOUR MENTAL CASKET.

that's "mean", not "man.". For example, Schopenhauer's "will" could be considered God.

Daniel Dennett is a naive materialist, which is an indefensible philosophy.

That's the science, the "how" -- the philosophy is "why". Why does life seem to want to emerge and evolve? Once alive, why does it have a will to live and procreate? Those questions go deeper than the material or historical facts which you mention.

God can man a lot of different things.

Two things have evolved, you know -- bodies and minds. Gong from inorganic to organic is the easy one. Going from organic to self-aware organic is the hard one.

Speaking only philosophically, the Big Bang just deepens the mystery and Kant's antinomy still holds, "That the universe has a beginning in time is impossible; that it has no beginning in time is also impossible."

you missed "given a material universe"

The mystery of existence is why does existence exist? Why does being exist? It defies the law of sufficient reason, of cause and effect. There is no before and no after. No right or wrong, good or evil. The biggest mystery of all is -- you. You didn't come INTO existence, you ARE existence. Without you, whoever you may be, there is no difference between existence and non-existence. The question comes down to who are you?

If the question is, what is thought, the neuron patterns do not answer the question. How do electrical impulses become thoughts? It seems the impulses are reactions not causes, the true cause being the mysterious "will" of Schopenhauer or something like it. Where does this will come from? How does it translate brain patterns into consciousness. Those are the questions.

There is no absolute infinity. Note the equation --

infinite = 1/infinity

Try to cross multiply

There is only "can increase without limit" but the limit is never reached.

Like after-death ghosts

What if before this existence you lived as a spiritual being in a world of purity, peace, beauty. Freedom from suffering. A place in common with other beings of good will living lives dedicated to intellectual pursuits. Then for some unknown reason you were condemned to die and become a human being in this world. Now you find yourself living in an animal-eats-animal world imprisoned in a body wracked with desires you usually can't satisfy among billions of other such bodies, all of whom judge you and all of whom are totally out for themselves. Now you live a life of striving and angst with only occasional if not rare moments of peace and even rarer ones of pleasure, while always on the razor's edge of sickness, or impoverishment, or loss of a loved one, or some other grisly experience. So while in this human "living" state what do you subconsciously yearn for the most? Mortido. The dream of "death", of going home.

Jack, maybe you DO know what life after death is like -- maybe this is it.

Forget NDE. What about waking in the night and seeing actual ghosts?