Get Over It: We Experience Objective Reality

I often hear theists on atheist call-in programs insist that their subjective experiences of God are meaningful and beyond scrutiny because all of us -- theists and atheists alike -- are prisoners in our own private subjective worlds. In other words, how can atheists reject the theist's claims when they are in the same subjectivist boat? 

One quick response is that if this is true, how can we be communicating, that is, understanding each other? That requires a common frame of reference. (More on that below).

Another is that this is the pathway to radical skepticism and solipsism: not only can I not really know anything about The Real World; I can't even know that anyone or anything exists but my own mind! That's a dead end no matter what you are seeking. It hardly proves the existence of God because it proves nothing whatsoever. In fact, it has a contradiction at its foundation. In the very act of asserting that we cannot know reality, the theist makes substantial knowledge claims about it. I cry foul.

What's more troubling from my point of view is that many atheists (to judge by the YouTube and podcast spheres) join with the theists, agreeing that we indeed are all trapped in our own private subjective worlds with no significant ability to break through to objective reality. But oddly, despite this concession, the atheists will try to communicate with people (again, how?) and demand evidence for the existence of God. That makes so sense. The concept evidence has zero meaning given the subjectivist's premises. You have your private world; I have mine; and never the twain shall meet.

(By the way, talk-show atheists, solipsism is nothing like the brain-in-the-vat scenario. They always conflate these. Solipsism is the belief or suspicion that one's mind is all that exists objectively. In contrast, the brain-in-the-vat scenario would require an entire objective world to exist, including a mad scientist who feeds the brain "sense data," his highly advanced laboratory, his exhaustive knowledge of how brains work, etc., etc., etc.)

Metaphysical and epistemological subjectivity cannot get off the ground because it presumes that our mental operations (thinking and narrating) are essentially private and inaccessible to others. They do seem to be -- at first -- but that's only because we don't remember when we were little kids. Philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gilbert Ryle have shown that contrary to popular impression, mental operations begin as public not private activities and that part of growing up is learning to change them into private activities.

Think about kids. They do everything publicly, beginning with laughing and crying, communicating what they experience in the only way they know. Then, as they acquire language, they think and narrate out loud, saying whatever comes to mind. (It's something parents learned to cope with.) As they learn to read, they read out loud. During their socialization they are taught to keep their thoughts to themselves and to read to themselves when doing those things out loud is inappropriate. Ryle pointed out that people didn't learn to read to themselves until the Middle Ages. (Can you imagine what libraries were like before that?)

This yanks the rug out from under the subjective-world advocates. We start off speaking, thinking, and reading publicly. In an important way, we live "out there" before we live "in here." Language, so crucial to thought, is a social institution. You could not acquire a language if you were never in a position to have your mistakes corrected by others. The same goes for thinking about what we see, hear, and the connections we make. We compare notes with other people and expect to benefit thereby. Wittgenstein showed that this is true of all rule-following, which is unsurprising since to speak a language is to follow rules, most of which few people could articulate. It's a case, as Ryle taught, of "knowing how" rather than "knowing that." A rational social animal necessarily is a rule-following animal. (Be assured that this has nothing to do with authoritarianism or passivity.)

So where does that leave subjectivity? Subjectivists are simply wrong to think that lonely subjectivity follows inexorably from that fact that to see we must use our eyes, to hear we must use our ears, etc. Why would that follow? Why assume that our senses, which after all are subject to the laws of physics, don't perceive the actual world? That sounds like an article of faith. Where's the evidence, dear "skeptics"? Again, to say that our senses don't don't perceive the world-as-it-is is to implicitly claim objective knowledge about that world -- otherwise how would anyone know that things-in-themselves differ from things-as-perceived?

This is not to deny that we make judgments about what we see and hear or that our background knowledge can influence those judgments. Ayn Rand defined reason as the faculty that "identifies and integrates the evidence of the senses." The senses do not in themselves deliver complete infallible knowledge; but they are the starting point of knowledge. That in no way condemns us to solitary confinement in a prison of subjective experience. We are generally capable of figuring out (or having it pointed out to us by others) when we have misjudged something (say, mistook a distant life-size high-resolution picture of a dog for a real dog) and making appropriate corrections -- we do this sort of thing all the time! If we were unable in principle to recognize objective stuff, the notions error and correction would be meaningless. They obviously are not. We certainly argue about things as though they are not meaningless.

In 66 years human beings went from flying 120 feet in 12 seconds at Kitty Hawk to walking on the moon. Does that say nothing about the human cognitive faculty with the respect to reality? And what about the modest everyday efficacy we all experience in our lives?

So, atheists, please -- stop making this concession to the theists. If they want to drive themselves to dead-end radical skepticism, let them. You need not hitch a ride.