As long as there is space, there is energy. As long as there is energy there is matter.

These are true statements, and if you understand that by eternal I just mean there will always be matter where you find space, then you will not need 4 pages of off topic posts to get on track.

Virtual particles are real, they are matter, and if you have space you have energy, and you will have virtual particles.

This does not require any cosmological model. It only requires QM and special relativity to explain.

Eternal might have been a poor choice of word, but it shouldn't take 4 pages to understand my meaning.

As long as there is space, there is energy. As long as there is energy there is matter.

These are true statements, and if you understand that by eternal I just mean there will always be matter where you find space, then you will not need 4 pages of off topic posts to get on track.

Virtual particles are real, they are matter, and if you have space you have energy, and you will have virtual particles.

This does not require any cosmological model. It only requires QM and special relativity to explain.

Eternal might have been a poor choice of word, but it shouldn't take 4 pages to understand my meaning.

Yeh what Bushidobillyclub is saying that as long as the universe exists there will be energy and matter.

So is this universe going to last forever? Is it infinite?

I sort of doubt it.

But there may be other universes beyond this one.

Yeah...um...he argued for 4 pages until he came up with that "explanation" for his post. Did you really read all of the four pages and still think that?

A personal opinion.

One thing I've noticed about extreme materialists is that they can be somewhat boring and spiritually stunted. They seem to deny their spiritual side and are immersed in the mental process. (They are very mental and they seem to worship logic and reason; both mental processes.)

They get annoyed with people who have faith in any concept of a higher mind or higher power. They have extremely high opinions of their own knowledge and seem to rely on and value education more than their own feelings or personal experiences.

They don't believe in intuition so they have lost touch with their own. To me they seem less innovative and less creative than more spiritual people. They think psychics are all frauds, (and there are plenty of mental materialists who pretend to be psychic and are indeed frauds.) These characters, are totally convinced that psychics don't exist because they themselves are total frauds.

Materialists blame all the ills of the world on religion and superstition. They find it hard to give love freely because they try to analyze it like everything else.

So whats the materialism disorder? What are some of the characteristics?

Edit:

Ahhh man, for you guys out there actually interested in this stuff, this link is pretty good!

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_vitzthum/materialism.html

Further edit:
Reading a bit on Buechner's Force and Matter. Good stuff!

Further further Edit:
Clearly I am a reductive materialist.

Clearly I am a reductive materialist

Now let's see what others can do with that statement.

The view that only the material world (matter) is truly real, and that all processes and realities observed in the universe can be explained by reducing them down to their most basic scientific components, e.g., atoms, molecules, and everything else thought to make up what we know as "matter." For example, a reductive materialist would view the miraculous and unexpected healing of a supposedly terminal cancer patient as a random coincidence of solely biological and physiological processes in the person's body. While, on the other hand, some might view the healing as stemming from factors contributing to the biological factors, e.g., prayer or meditation.

The view that only the material world (matter) is truly real, and that all processes and realities observed in the universe can be explained by reducing them down to their most basic scientific components, e.g., atoms, molecules, and everything else thought to make up what we know as "matter." For example, a reductive materialist would view the miraculous and unexpected healing of a supposedly terminal cancer patient as a random coincidence of solely biological and physiological processes in the person's body. While, on the other hand, some might view the healing as stemming from factors contributing to the biological factors, e.g., prayer or meditation.

Not really. If there is a change, that change can be attributed to physical causative factors and reduced to material interactions. No need to use the word random, or coincidence to describe the effect.

This is not accurate, really pretty generic. Not the best from PBS.

If evidence of prayer being an effective therapy existed, then a reductive materialist would study the material interactions to understand the effect. That is exact what has been done, and we named the effect the placebo effect.

You really have to understand a great deal more than assuming becuase a given response occurred that the prayer was the cause.

So what ever effect is being analyzed the materialist starts from a position that the cause is natural and can be understood in terms of material interactions.

That is all that really needs to be said. Now if you want to discuss the placebo effect in greater detail that takes understanding things like confirmation bias, regression to the mean, and other factors such as sympathetic response.

. . hey but at least they created all of science and technology for you!

Finally, reductive materialism applauds and identifies itself with the stunning success of the reductive program of 20th century science as a whole. It regards such triumphs of human intelligence as the establishment of the periodic table of elements and of the standard model of elementary particles as surely among humanity's greatest achievements. The periodic table and the standard model are outstanding examples of the relentless effort of scientists in this century to uncover deeper and deeper levels of physical explanation and to reduce their findings to more and more comprehensive and fundamental theories. Equally outstanding has been the effort to unify the four basic forces of nature at greater and greater levels of generalization. Already it has been proven that two of the four forces, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, were unified at energy levels that are theorized to have existed until a billionth of a second after the Big Bang had passed, after which they split. At a still earlier moment, it's theorized that the electroweak force was unified with the strong nuclear force, and at a still more primordial moment before that -- the so-called Planck era, when the universe was still less than 10 to the minus 43rd seconds old and seethed with a thousand million billion billion volts of energy -- the electroweak and strong nuclear forces were still unified with the fourth force, gravity. Modern scientific reductionism has succeeded in showing that the manifold phenomena of physical nature -- light, heat, rocks, flora, fauna, consciousness -- are probably manifestations of a single, foundational, material reality, perhaps ultimately describable in the terms of some future human science. Materialism welcomes this success as further confirmation of its 2500-year-old hypotheses.

PS, the placebo effect does not engage with the pathology of disease only the sympathetic effects of the symptoms. ie, it is not a cure, therapy, or efficacious at all.

What has spiritualism given us?