> I would add however, that you can reach out and touch an atom with a certain definition of touch And unfortunately for your argument, the bit you elided here

> I would add however, that you can reach out and touch an atom with a certain definition of touch And unfortunately for your argument, the bit you elided here is the critical bit. If we understand "touch" meaning to interact with something "physically" rather than "chemically" or indirectly (light, sound), then "touch" refers essentially to electromagnetic force and the Pauli exclusion principle. Since the latter can only be defined in terms of yet more "matter", in fact we have no way to observe matter in any way but electromagnetism in its various forms, viz. "light" in a wide sense, chemical interaction, and via magnetic repulsion on macroscopic or microscopic scales. Given this, I would say it's largely correct to understand atomic theory as useful abstraction; indeed, an abstraction which dates back hundreds of years which has been refined and found still useful. That said, something being an abstraction doesn't make it not real! Indeed I'm not entirely sure I know what else "real" is supposed to be.