Rise of atheism: 100,000 Brits seek 'de-baptism'

[appolose]

Final-Fan said:

appolose said:
I'll answer this part first;  I'm not quite sure what you're getting at, but for you last sentence I'll say, yes, we can't test anything with our senses (that is, our interpretation of our sense data) unless we assume they're true.

For your other post (hopefully, without being redundant in light of your other post); What I mean to say is that empiricism is on equal footing as, say, flipping a coin as a method of truth, because both are equally unfounded as can be.

Perhaps my question should have been:  why do you think that "judgments made on sensory data are not necessary and are avoidable"?  I just don't see how that's true at all, at least when you're talking about a judgment as basic as "the universe is at least vaguely similar in actuality to how I perceive it". 

Also, to respond to the part I reinserted into the above quote:
Not a better idea than anything else?  I presume this is connected to the statements you made which are substantially the same as "flipping a coin to decide what is true is just as good and likely to be true as empiricism".  But that's not true at all!  The most obvious thing that comes to mind for me is that flipping a coin will not produce the same answer to the same question consistently, which empiricism will.  This leaves alone the question of how you'd even flip the coin, let alone tell the result, without empiricism.    Again, if you don't trust your senses at all, I don't see how that leaves you with anything more than cogito ergo sum. 

Secondly, I don't think that the possibility you mentioned is a valid counterpoint.  Any sort of input into your mind could IMO be considered to be "sensed" and even if that's not the case, non-sensory input isn't inherently any more likely to be true than sensory input.

You simply don't have to; sure, one can argue that you'll suffer for that (which can't be known), or simply doesn't have to do anything at all.  Further still, one can pick something other than empiricism.

2nd part; empiricism doesn't produce the same answer consistently; you've probably made mistakes in what you thought you've perceived before.  Although you could say that you assume empiricism generally provides correct answers, but you could say the same for the coin (as it probably won't be exactly 50/50).  And yes, you would have to assume, at least, that you could sense the coin, but that's all the empiricism you'd have to assume.  Alternatively, you could assume "Everything I currently think is true" or "Every 5th statement I make is true"  and so forth (and you could add the word "generally" to each of those), and these two have nothing to do with sense data.

For your last part; While I do not think it would qualify as sense, you're right when you say non-sensory input isn't more likely to be true than sensory input; however, my point was to show that there was an alternative, and, as such, the the first option wasn't inevitable.