Question:
I want to know what atheists think of this argument because i imagine the best answers from them?
Stupid Smart Man
2013-08-12 11:28:36 UTC
But if you aren't an atheist then please also answer because i really like answers.

I heard somewhere that we cannot be certain of anything because we can only see the world with our own perception and to try and proven that our perception percepts things as they really are is impossible because we would just be seeing the 'supposedly' evidence by our 'supposedly' faulty perceptions.
21 answers:
Mr. Smartypants
2013-08-12 11:45:50 UTC
Plato had the analogy of prisoners chained inside a cave. They can't see out of the cave, all they can see is shadows projected on the wall of the cave of things outside, so they have to base their understanding of things outside on those shadows. This is how we humans are, we perceive imperfectly, and we can never really be sure of anything.



The word for the idea that nothing can be known absolutely for sure is -skepticism-. I think skepticism is very important in our understanding and knowledge of the world. Skepticism is an important feature of science, it's built into science. But some religions harshly discourage skepticism, religions that are all about belief. You have to be sure, or at least pretend you're sure, of the required beliefs of the religion.



But I figure if God designed us the way we are, he gave us some pretty serious intellectual gifts, the ability to hypothesize and test our hypotheses, and skepticism is an important part of that. Accepting uncritically what you are told you are supposed to believe is not the way to find truth. Its better to admit you can't really know for sure than to just assume you have the truth.
?
2013-08-14 11:37:09 UTC
"I heard somewhere that we cannot be certain of anything because we can only see the world with our own perception'



WRONG.



Your whole statement is based on misconceptions by theists to justify their own inability to question their belief systems... It's no different than a Christian saying that every atheist is a satan worshiper or that we're just all angry little boys and girls that "Hate God".



Humans can only perceive 1/00000th what is out there. Bees can see different spectrums of light than we can without aid. The thing is that we MADE AIDS to see what the bees can see and we document cause/effect and compile data regarding changes over time that show that something might exist that we can't yet perceive.



Dark matter, for example, is being documented but not all that long ago it was just a "Question" asked as "Why is most of the universe missing?" Either everything we know about the universe is wrong or there's something we weren't able to yet document.



Filling in the gaps with "God" only inhibits the ability for humans to study these unanswered questions and eventually find an answer.



If theists had their way, we'd still believe that depression was caused by the Noonday Demon and that all illness was caused by Vapors, Curses, Witches, and Demons.



Typhoid Mary was a woman that could not accept the Germ Theory of Disease, and she refused to stop working as a cook so she accidentally murdered a dozen people in her ignorance.



We STARTED with our perceptions... Then we learned to write and think of things with far harder answers than "The mountain shakes because we pissed off Vulcan."
?
2013-08-12 11:39:27 UTC
Heh, that gets you into the whole 'what is reality' argument. René Descartes thought that you couldn't rely on anything you saw, because it was possible everything was an illusion made by some evil demon, so he went back to basics; "I think, therefore I am." He argued that since he could think he had to be real, and though I forget the specifics he used that idea as the baseline to prove god and the material world.



Sir Francis Bacon is credited with the establishment of inductive reasoning, where you infer connections about a whole from parts (All the Crows I have seen are black, therefore the next Crow I see will be black). Bacon acknowledged that inductive reasoning relied upon human perceptions, which may be inherently faulted, so he came up with The Four Idols as obsticales to overcome if one expected to make a true objective observation about the universe.





Sure, we could all be imagined constructs in god's mind, or immobile heat sources hooked up to the matrix, or an advanced version of The Sims in some kid alien's laptop, but as long as the laws of the universe don't start to go funky I'm just fine assuming that we are in the prime reality and our observations are more or less in congress with what actually happens.
relaxification
2013-08-13 07:05:46 UTC
This is basically Hume's problem of induction.



In formal logic you have deductive and inductive reasoning. Deduction involves linking premises with conclusions. If the premises are true (and clearly defined) and the rules of deductive logic are followed then the result is a true conclusion. But we don't use deductive reasoning for most of our day to day activities. We have to resort to inductive reasoning.



Inductive reasoning uses premises to support a proposed conclusion. But because in the real world the scope is too great (and essentially unknown) to know for certain that each premise is true, sometimes incorrect conclusions can appear to be well supported.



For example, I can say, based upon induction, that the sun will rise tomorrow morning just like it always does. Do I truly know this? Or is it just a pretty safe bet considering it's risen every morning since I started paying attention. Or anyone did. And I have a decent understanding of what's going on with our rotation and orbit, etc. But there could be some perfectly natural cosmic phenomenon that, while rare, happens from time to time, and when it does stars just blink out of existence. I'm not saying that this is the case - I just can't say that it isn't. And so I can't say, for sure, that the sun will rise tomorrow. We actually make one huge assumption every waking moment of our lives, and that is that the laws of nature, as they appear to us, anyway, are uniform. We expect gravity to work tomorrow like it did yesterday. We expect that things don't just pop out of existence. We rely on the fact that the strong and weak forces continue to behave in just the right way so as not to make matter impossible. We have to assume this because we have no choice.



What's worse? The problem of induction calls into question every scientific claim ever made. The very system we use when we do scientific things, the scientific method, can only be tested using inductive methodology. So not only do we not know if we know things, we don't know how we don't know what we don't know.



I wouldn't worry about it too much.
El Nerdo Loco
2013-08-12 11:37:49 UTC
If we want to be 100% accurate, an approximation of reality is as close as we can get. Solipsists have what is called the, "Brain in a vat" scenario where you could just be a mind being fed sensory perceptions by a computer instead of sensing reality as it really is. And there is nothing we can ever show to disprove that since we can only take in evidence through our senses.



But just like with gods, we have no evidence to think that is the case. We can only trust that our senses are accurate and we do have good reasons to think they mostly are. They tend to confirm each other. If you see fire, you can know that you will be burned if you put your hand in it. Or if someone jumps into it, the last image you will have of them alive will be of them failing and screaming. We also can have what we sense confirmed by others witnessing the same event.
jtrusnik
2013-08-12 11:48:15 UTC
Would it not be a contradiction to say "We can't be certain of anything?" After all, how could you be certain of that?



Perception does not distort our understanding: it creates a physical, causal link between the world and our brains. To call perception "faulty" is to assume that our organs--which are nothing but physical devices that operate in completely predictable, material ways--are out to trick us. That's like saying we can't see *because* we have eyes.
James
2013-08-12 11:34:00 UTC
That's a Stolen Concepts Fallacy, because the statement in itself is asserting certainty, the very thing which it is trying to contradict.



I think a better way to put it is that axiomatically, we have to accept the certainty of what we perceive simply because we know nothing else and if we don't accept it, then we can kiss science, philosophy, art, and every other great human achievement good bye.



The real question is this: where does this come from? Could unguided, natural processes create rationality? This is the big philosophical dilemma.
Fitz
2013-08-12 11:32:07 UTC
This is a philosophical debate. The only sure fire thing you can say is that you exist, the world around you is only as you perceive it (so the argument goes). However, to doubt your own existence (rather than the world's) proves you exist because there has to be an "I" that is doing the doubting.



In the words of Rene Descartes, "Cogito Ergo Sum" (I think therefore I am).



Unfortunately, that can only be applied to the self, not the world you perceive.
?
2013-08-12 15:32:09 UTC
First, perception doesn't "percept" things. The verb form is "perceive."



It is indeed true that our senses--our capacities for perception--constitute a filter between our minds and reality. Our minds deal indirectly, with a model of reality as we perceive it, and that is a potential source of error.



Practically, however, there's a limit to the amount of doubt that does any good. Our minds work on models of reality--but that's how our minds work, and attempting to make them work otherwise is, itself, a rejection of reality. And thanks to the evolutionary benefits of having senses that give us less inaccurate perceptions, our senses are much better than they might be. Of course, they could be even better: If mice were a more important portion of our diet, as is the case with hawks, we might have eyes that detect the ultraviolet markings of mouse trails--as is the case with hawks. For our uses, however, they're pretty good.



For what it's worth, here are some notable observations on this topic.





The world we perceive as individuals is essentially of our own making, governed by our own experience. Similarly, the world we perceive as a species is governed by the nature of the sensory channels we possess. Any dog owner knows that there is a world of olfactory experience to which the canine but not the human is privy. Butterflies are able to see ultraviolet light; we are not. The world inside our heads—whether we are a Homo sapiens, a dog, or a butterfly—is formed, therefore, by the qualitative nature of the information flow from the outside world to the inside world, and the inside world’s ability to process the information. There is a difference between the real world, “out there,” and the one perceived in the mind, “in here.”

-- Richard Leakey, "The Origin of Humankind"





I had noticed for a long time that in practice it is sometimes necessary to follow opinions which we know to be very uncertain, just as though they were indubitable, as I stated before; but inasmuch as I desired to devote myself wholly to the search for truth, I thought that I should take a course precisely contrary, and reject as absolutely false anything of which I could have the least doubt, in order to see whether anything would be left after this procedure which could be called wholly certain. Thus, as our senses deceive us at times, I was ready to suppose that nothing was at all the way our senses represented them to be. As there are men who make mistakes in reasoning even on the simplest topics in geometry, I judged that I was as liable to error as any other, and rejected as false all the reasoning which I had previously accepted as valid demonstration. Finally, as the same percepts which we have when awake may come to us when asleep without their being true, I decided to suppose that nothing that had ever entered my mind was more real than the illusion of my dreams. But I soon noticed that while I then wished to think everything false, it was necessarily true that I who thought so was something. Since this truth, I think, therefore I am, was so firm and assured that all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were unable to shake it, I judged that I could safely accept it as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking.

-- René Descartes, "Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Field of Science"; translated by Laurence J. Lafleur





"Why do you doubt your senses?"



"Because," said Scrooge, "a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato."



-- Charles Dickens, "A Christmas Carol"
2013-08-12 12:26:41 UTC
""I heard somewhere that we cannot be certain of anything because we can only see the world with our own perception""



what else have we got? and why do you think what we see is Invalid?



what you "heard" Makes Little to no sense at all..
2013-08-12 11:33:53 UTC
The reality we can perceive all points to the evolution of species, a 13 billion year old universe, and no flood ever happening.

Now, it's impossible to perceive a different reality, so anything that we're missing or don't know is just speculation.
Greg
2013-08-12 11:31:31 UTC
Sure.



Fair enough.



You can never be 100% certain of anything. You can attach a whole lot of 9's to 99.99% though.... and come pretty darn close.



I see no reason to assume perception is necessarily faulty though..... if it was.... how do we survive?
Maurog IV
2013-08-12 11:31:34 UTC
Yes, the first thing we have to accept is the axiom that senses perceive reality.

Note that this is an axiom, you can include it or exclude it.



The problem is, if you reject it, you cannot be sure of anything. You cannot have an argument with people on common ground, you cannot even be sure people exist. So it's very silly not to include the axiom, in my opinion.
Galactus
2013-08-12 11:31:31 UTC
Yes, this is true. However, it's crazy to live your life as if everything is uncertain. While it must always be kept in mind that things may not be as they appear, there are ways to determine what is more likely to be true than others. It isn't foolproof, but it works for our day-to-day purposes.
Cantrell
2013-08-12 11:33:07 UTC
it goes even further than that there is science that proves on the Molecular levels where the simple act of observing the experiment alters it, look up Albert Einsteins spooky action at a distance
2013-08-12 11:29:51 UTC
And what is the solution to this problem?



I'm still stuck within this reality whether its "Fake" or not.



So are we gonna work with what we actually have? or sit on our *** and whine about how maybe it isn't real?
Ricardo
2013-08-12 13:42:43 UTC
The assumption is that there is something other than what we perceive. That has to be proven first, but if you "prove" that then it is perceived and thus not applicable to your question.
?
2013-08-12 11:35:16 UTC
the universe is a whole, and we're part of it. the universe made our minds as well as our consciousness.



we're able to question, reason, and use logic (which also depends on the qualities of the universe), therefore we can develop patterns and have ideas depending not, on our sensory system.
?
2013-08-12 11:30:40 UTC
It's best to start each day with a cup of Folgers.

Then assume that you exist.
2013-08-12 11:31:25 UTC
You have circular reasoning. Where's the solution in what you wrote?
Jasmarie Jackson
2013-08-12 11:35:09 UTC
Im christian...atheist need to see god to believe but faithis believing the unseen.If they still dont believe we cant force them too all we have to do is encourage them and witness them...if they dont believe in god then how come where alive...the earth couldve been ended or died or anything but if i.gave encouragement youll welcome :))


This content was originally posted on Y! Answers, a Q&A website that shut down in 2021.
Loading...