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

[appolose]

Final-Fan said:

appolose said:
2.  By being 0% trustable, I mean sense data is evidence of any and every possible interpretation.  One cannot get around even the simple and trite possibility of the Matrix, for instance.  In this scenario, everyone has the same sense data experience now, yet they all believe something totally false, and there's no indication otherwise.  Certainly, there are many possibilities, simple or complex, but this one is particularly clear.  What test can one impose, what consistency can one measure, what law can you formulate?  The nature of reailty would be entirely beyond one's grasp, and left to the control of something completely unknown.

A.  It's possible that we're talking past each other a bit.  It's possible to interpret sense data however you want, but what I was arguing was the fact that sense data can contradict a worldview that, for instance, holds that sense data is accurate, and cheese is soft and yellow, and the moon is made of cheese.  If the sense data says that the moon is made of gray and hard rock that is not cheeselike at all, then either the sense data is wrong, or cheese is not soft and yellow, or the moon is not made of it.  So that worldview has been disproven because, given the sense data, it contradicts itself. 

Before you had said that sense data can be used to support any worldview, and that is not in fact the case.  That's what I believe point 2 was originally about. 

B.  As for what it turned into, with the mountain, the reason I hold that sense data being untrustable isn't like having no indication of which way is up is this: 

The sense data is utterly untrustable, given.  But we do HAVE it.  So it's really like there is a direction your senses are telling you is up, but you know it's still too scrambled to give it any merit.  

If we have to pick a direction for up to be, and we know our senses are not at all reliable, but we have absolutely no other indications -- why then, there's no reason NOT to.  It's as if you were going to pick a direction at random, and somebody already picked for you.  How convenient! 

A.  But since we can interpret sense data any way, we could also interpret what we sensed about the moon to support the idea of it being cheese, correct (and I don't think we could even say what color it was, as the color we perceive may not even be from the moon (colorblindness, anyone?)?  And with this ability to interpret sense data any way, so does it follow that sense data could support any world view (e.g., "All that I sense is consistent with what the real world would be" or "All I sense is consistent with what a Matrix world would be")

B  Perhaps I've misunderstood your analogy.  Just to be clear, by "up", you mean reality, by "fog", unprovability, and by "picking a direction", taking a method of truth,  and sense data is not represented, correct (more or less, or is that reading into it too much?)?  If that's the case, yes, you can pick a direction to go (assume a method of truth) and hope it leads you up (gives truth), but there's no indication which way is correct.  You could go left (empiricism), you could go right (non-empiricistic theism*), or someway else (the M4tr1x), or you could just sit there (assume nothing).  If I'm getting you right, you're saying with this there is no reason not to assume someway, which I agree with, but it doesn;t have to be empiricism.

*I use this term to show I don't think empiricism and theism are mutually exclusive, just in case it seems otherwise.