(Btw word to the wise, Most Wikipedia articles dealing with Indian philosophy including the ones you cited are crap.) Anyway... Very little is actually known

(Btw word to the wise, Most Wikipedia articles dealing with Indian philosophy including the ones you cited are crap.) Anyway... Very little is actually known about the Charvakas except through quotes by their opponents but we can definitely conclude they were skeptics alright but hardly scientific or even rationalist. They only believed valid knowledge only comes from perception by the five senses so even inference was opposed which makes logic impossible. There is also a recent theory which I’m not sure I buy but sounds interesting that far from being radically anti-religious, the Charvakas were actually the remnant of the most conservative strains of thought. The Vedic religion c. 500 BC mostly involved sacrificial rituals of greater or lesser complexity performed by a man and his wife. The goal of those rituals was worldly power and wealth. They were addressed to Gods who were either personifications of natural phenomena or embodiments of human archetypes. Such metaphysics as there was involved creating a new body for the deceased so he could enjoy life in heaven. (We can still see remnants of this in the Hindu funeral rites or shraddha in which reincarnation is only rather awkwardly bolted on.) This heaven was beyond the everyday world but otherwise exactly the same. One could even physically travel there. Around 500BC or so there was cultural upheaval and many new ideas arose. In the Upanishads, Buddhism, Jainism and other sects that no longer survive, a new paradigm arose that emphasized enlightened knowledge over ritual action, the ascetic monk over the married householder, and liberation from constant reincarnation over one future life in Heaven. Heaven (and the new concept of Hell) were also expanded into multiple worlds inhabited by all kinds of supernatural creatures. If we examine the extent Charvaka fragments, it is mainly these new-fangled ideas that they mock. Furthermore all the known Charvaka authors are Brahmanas some of them well-versed in traditional learning. One of them even quotes the Vedas to support his views. This is because they were actually representatives of the old guard or so the theory goes. Like I said I’m not sure if I buy it but there it is.