Ahhh, yes, it seems obvious now. I had serial COM ports stuck in my head so I couldn't shake COMmunication loose. Thanks for the help.

It is an abbreviation for comment box, it's where you make a comment.

Yes. It's not in the dictionary (Merriam-Webster), and Google 's first few links didn't help. Should I keep trying? You won't help me?

Are you serious?

I don't think this OP is novel or controversial, although it is presented in an accessible way by Dr. Bonnette and made even more accessible by his willingness to engage in the comboxes.

What are comboxes? Merriam-Webster doesn't have it and Google gives me links that don't make sense in this context.

And my reply this comment is posted there as well.

I don't have that nightmare, I don't know who does, for example in Evolution as Fact and Theory by Stephen Jay Gould he is clearly not having any such nightmare either.

That was 25 years ago, the views expressed were mainstream and ordinary among scientists even then: (scientific) “fact” does not mean "absolute certainty."

Explanation of the actual scientific materialist view can be found in my new post at the above link you provided.
http://disq.us/p/22rijzv

I can see that you have built a virtual epistemological wall around your materialism, cushioned with an ultimate safety valve claim that all such knowledge is most certainly provisional at best.

There was a time when, although I had religious commitments, I could not see how to defeat materialism myself. Yet, over time I began to discover certain "leaks in the dike" -- one by one -- where it just did not quite work.

I mentioned a couple of them to you earlier. But I just remembered the one I put up as my very first article on Strange Notions -- one that shows an epistemological trap that scientific materialism springs on itself, and one no one on this site has ever directly refuted.

It is based on the fact that natural science assumes that it is studying the real world around us, and yet its necessary epistemological inference is that we have no direct way of ever knowing that world. It strikes at the heart of the principle of empirical verification. But best you read it for yourself:
https://strangenotions.com/naturalisms-epistemological-nightmare/

If you follow the reasoning carefully, you will see that materialism contradicts its own starting point, epistemological realism -- and that this contradiction is a direct product of your philosophy of materialism. Worse yet, it turns out that the only way out of this contradiction is to abandon the philosophy of materialism.

I hope you find this article illuminating. This and other inherent self-contradictions in materialism force me to approach philosophy with a mental attitude open to the reality of non-material entities.

immaterial ... you simply rule it out of existence.

I can't rule out Russell's teapot or immaterial. Ruling out unevidenced speculations would require me to prove the universal negative, and that I am unable to do, being a mere man.

You trust reason in all your scientific investigations

Trust, like faith, is irrelevant to materialism. All is provisional, except I am absolutely certain I exist in some form, and therefore I am absolutely certain there is an existence as opposed to absolutely nothing at all.

you insist that good science give reasons for every claim,

Reasons in the descriptive sense, that can be modeled and verified observationally without violating existing provisionally accepted models, unless great evidence can be produced to show existing models are in error in some way.

you punt -- just saying we have to accept the fact that it is a brute fact with no explanation.

The ultimate why explanations simply are not available to we mere mortals, at least for now, I suspect forever, but perhaps in the distant future intelligence will advance sufficiently to actually answer the ultimate why explanation questions. At this point humanity is so hopelessly primitive in that regard that there is virtually zero prospect of such answers coming to be published in my lifetime.

To me, all this does not sound like a very scientific approach to reality.

Science presently finds no evidence for or necessity of immaterial that I am aware of.

And you still are ignoring the arguments I offer in the SN article on the immortality of the soul

Not so much ignoring as pacing my responses. You have been gracious enough to spend some significant time to engage with me on subjects I find interesting and on which we strongly disagree. I prefer to read the links you provide, consider them, do some relevant searches, and post more measured responses that keep the rational content high and the potential incivility at an absolute minimum.