And it is also the case, by the way, that, you know, science fiction and fantasy associated with it is extremely popular among atheistic, materialist people like engineers, and the more technically minded.
Skovorodnikoff was a materialist, a Darwinist, and considered every manifestation of abstract morality, or, worse still, piety, not only as contemptible and absurd but as an affront to his person.
Whether Berkeley's arguments for the reality of God and spiritual beings successfully refuted materialism and skepticism remains questionable, for his arguments contained some of the flaws he held against the materialists.
Being a thorough materialist, Democritus held that thought can be explained in the same way that any other phenomenon can, namely, as the movement of atoms.
Since it is not likely to persuade the materialists who affirm the conditional clause in the first of these hypothetical statements, what is at issue here can be put to an empirical test in the following manner.