The Logical Atheist

When it comes to seeing objects, we can think about it two ways.  1. We perceive what are called sense-data, that is, perceptions, and then infer things "out there" from mental images "in here." 2. We perceive objects "out there," full stop. No. 1 runs afoul of Occam's Razor as well as the way we experience seeing things. No one in their everyday life thinks they perceive perceptions. They know they perceive things. Children begin to do this almost immediately. That later on we learn that perception (like everything else) has a specific nature involving light, eyes, brains, etc. changes nothing whatsoever. Why would anyone expect a process to have no nature? That would make no sense. Only an impossible god would see without a way to see. No. 1 also introduces serious problems, which have long been pointed out. If all we perceive directly is something inside our heads, how do we know that this stuff corresponds to anything "out there"? Or how ...

Surely, [Bertrand] Russell could scarcely have denied that the world which he believed in as a philosopher [i.e., a world of sense-data rather than material objects] was hardly the world which he lived in as a human being. Thus imagine Russell shaking hands with a friend, or haranguing a mass meeting in condemnation of the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. Doubtless in such circumstances he might have stuck to his philosophical conviction that any statements he might make concerning the people and things in the immediate situation confronting him were reducible by definitions-in-use to statements only about sense data and not about people and things at all. Yet no less doubtless would it appear that even Russell could hardly have been so committed to his own philosophy as to assume in his attitudes and behavior, even if not in his thoughts, that the people and things that he was having to do with were but so many groupings and series of sense data. --Henry B. Veatch, Aristotle: A C...

From George H. Smith's Atheism: The Case Against God , in which he presents an invented dialogue between a Christian who resorts to skepticism to rebut rational arguments against the existence of the supernatural and an atheist antiskeptic. That's right; in Smith's view the Christian is the skeptic, in the philosophical sense of believing that reason is unable to yield knowledge about reality. By attacking reason the skeptic imagines he can clear the way for revelation and other nonrational justifications for his beliefs. He goes so far as to reject the reliability of the senses, which are at the base of our knowledge. Of course, he cannot attack the senses without at least implicitly relying on sensory evidence. Here is an excerpt: Skeptic : "But don't you agree that all we ever have direct awareness of is immediate sense data?" Antiskeptic:  "No. What we have direct awareness of is reality, and we are given this awareness through perception. Perception ...

When atheists and theists argue, sooner or later someone will pull the old brain-in-the-vat trick. Typically, the atheist will criticize the theist for offering unfalsifiable arguments for God and use the brain-in-the-vat as an analogy, saying something like, "If we were all brains in vats (or living in Keanu Reeves's  Matrix ), we couldn't possibly know it. So it wouldn't matter." How that refutes the theist, I'm not sure, but it's certainly true that any empirical theory that is said to be consistent with any and all conceivable states of affairs is worth little. It tells us nothing if it rules out nothing. But more can be said on the brain/vat matter. First, in serious discussion no room exists for the arbitrary. An assertion proffered without a smidgen of evidence is inadmissible. As I've said before , "what if ...?" in itself is not an argument. The brain-in-the-vat "challenge" is supposed to introduce doubt about what we have ...