Historical Verification of the Torah - Part 1 - Jewish Philosophy

[Music] okay we we have six sessions together today tomorrow and then sunday through wednesday next week um given my background since i'm a philosopher logician what concerns me is whether being a believing jew is something that we have good reason for not everybody's concerned with that people some people are looking for a way of life that serves their general hopes creates a quality of living that they find valuable some people are concerned to be able to defend justify give reasons for what they believe that's my line of work so i would like to share with you at least what could be done in six days why it's reasonable to be a believing jew i want to start with revelation at sinai because without sinai there is no judaism as you all know judaism is among other things the religion of commandments there are no commandments unless there's a commander and unless he expressed himself about what he wants us to do communicate it with us without that there are no commandments and i think is well known judaism is unique in all the religions of the world that starts with a national revelation the story of jewish history the story that the jewish religion tells about itself features very prominently a national revelation every other religion starts with a story that so and so is special in some way this recalls the old hasidic parable gravy died and he had two sons and each son said that he should be the new leader of the group and there was some competition for a while until one day one of the sons presented himself to the group and said i know that i'm the right choice because our father of blessed memory came to me last night in a dream and told me that i'm the right one to which one of the senior members said if your father had wanted to prove that you are the right choice he shouldn't have come to you in a dream he should have come to us in a dream that would prove it and the same story can be told about any religion that starts with a story that so and so is special so and so is the prophet or so and so is the son of god or so and so can meditate anyone on the planet if you want buddhism or as long as the story told about an individual the public has to decide whether to believe him or not it's a story that everyone hears it directly so then no one is called upon to make up his mind whether it's plausible or not that's why judaism is unique in the story that it tells the question is do we have reason to accept that story as true yes we have a unique position in our belief system in our story but what we'd like to know is whether there's adequate reason to believe that the story is true now long and frustrating experience has taught me that if i launch into the reasons and we don't agree beforehand what counts as adequate reason we end up talking across purposes i present reasons and you say they're not good enough and i try to argue that they are good enough i think we need to start with a brief discussion what counts as a good enough reason to make up your mind to something's true if we can agree on what counts as a good enough reason then when they present the reasons presumably we have a good chance of agreeing whether it is a good enough reason or it isn't good enough reason so let's start there what counts as a good enough reason here's a dialogue which i think takes place quite commonly and i think we need to meditate on a says i know b says how do you know and a says well because of pqr and b says pqr that's your reason think even if pqr is correct you still might be wrong you haven't nailed it you haven't proven it and he says golly i guess you're right my reason is pqr but it doesn't nail it for sure this isn't really a proof and b says then you don't know to know something you have to prove it and if you can't prove it you don't know it i think that's a common sort of conversation that people have i think it's very intuitive and i think it's very wrong it's very wrong proof is not the right goal proof is not the right standard it's too strict demanding proof is too strict we're looking for adequate reason to explain adequate reason to mean proof is not a good explanation of accurate reasons i want to show you why i think that's true first of all because strictly speaking you can't prove anything let's see can you prove who your parents are you believe they're your parents because they told you and you believed them how quaint couldn't it be that you're adopted and they didn't tell you that does happen small minority of cases but it does happen so you say but look i look just like my parents you know why that is because when they went to the orphanage 22 years ago they took their baby pictures with them and they looked for a baby that looked like their baby pictures and that's why you look like that so you say i did a dna test well of course i know you did not and number two let's suppose you did a dna test how would you know for sure that your parents or maybe i should say those people didn't pay off the lab to lie to you about about the results how do you know that how could you pin that down for sure i don't think there's anything you could do to pin down for sure infallibly with a proof that they are your parents still i'm not suggesting you should doubt it i'm not suggesting that you should cut your relations with them or treat them like everybody else i think proof is the wrong standard proof is asking for too much some philosophers with their imaginations illustrated this in extreme examples descartes who started this whole ball rolling 350 years ago asked do you know that you're not dreaming at this very moment right now how would you know for sure how could you prove that you're not dreaming at this very moment pinch yourself you could put yourself in a dream maybe you're hoping it's true you'll wake up someplace else i don't know or bertrand russell picking up the theme 120 years ago asked can you prove that the universe is more than five minutes old five minutes old maybe you've heard discussions about 5775 and said 13.7 billion but five minutes what would you do to prove it's five minutes old you say i remember yesterday maybe you came into existence five minutes ago with those i guess we should say pseudo memories convoluted in your brain but there wasn't the yesterday what could you do prove it for sure these are the foundations of which we live that we have conscious experience we know that we're not dreaming that the world is more than five minutes old and none of it is open to proof now you'll say but what about logic and mathematics well you asked the right person my field was philosophy of mathematics there are arguments about axioms different groups don't accept the same axioms in mathematics there are arguments about logic different groups don't accept various principles of logic there are arguments across the board and even if you'll pick a principle which today everybody agrees on you don't know whether tomorrow there'll be an argument about it you can't predict the future if you're looking for proof it's too strong a demand what you need to look for is something we can improve which will be a good enough reason are we together so far should i answer your question good now how do we do it in practical life in practical life we gather evidence we experience we read talk to other people and discuss and debate and then we go with the choice that has the most support we gather evidence and we go with the choice that has the most support that's how we make all of our decisions really important ones and less important ones you are choosing or have chosen recently a profession do you know for sure that you're going to be successful in that profession certainly not you don't even know whether 10 years from now that profession will exist because the changing of the economy changing the technology so quick professions disappear when i was teaching at hopkins in the 70s they were creating a curriculum for the multi-career lifetime because the majority of the students will not have one career over a lifetime so to prepare them for that dislocation where their career that they have is going to disappear they'll be retraining for something else put some something into the curriculum that would train them for that you're going to get married well i don't have to tell you about the diverse statistics of course everybody says sure there are people who get divorced not me i'm not going to get divorced the trouble is all the people who got divorced also said that they're not going to get divorced and they end up getting the worst anyhow you're not going to know for sure that doesn't mean you shoot blind you get to know the person and you interact with a person and you have experiences together and you talk and you share and then you make the best judgment that you can that's how we live life so i suggest that the right way to go about it is look at the evidence experience talk to people compare your view with other people's views and follow what has the most support with the evidence that you have available that to me is the right way to do it and that counts as adequate reason are we together so far yes okay this is very very important let me tell you why now i'm going to play the prophet we're together for six days inevitably when i lay out reasons and evidence someone will say but couldn't it still be wrong maybe it's e.t no or something else so let me tell you at the outset if you ask me couldn't it still be wrong the answer is always yes yes it could be wrong if you say maybe it's et my answer is yes maybe it is maybes are cheap maybe it's just a matter of possibility i give you all the possibilities if you ask isn't it possible that q the answer is yes it's possible that you but we don't live our life on possibilities we live our lives on probabilities to make it probable there has to be some positive evidence that it's correct not merely possible so if you feel the itch to say but maybe you can predict what my answer will be it's okay to say it but you can predict my answer but maybe it was an uh unknown volcanic eruption yeah maybe maybe but is there any positive reason to think it was if not then you haven't got a good reason to reject what i'm saying i'm going to present positive evidence if you want to to counter what i'm doing you need to present positive evidence on the other side and then we can weigh up through evidence on both sides that i think is the correct way to proceed we gather so far terrific okay now let's take a look at sinai i'm going to start with a number of preliminaries i hope they're all so obvious that they're boring because if they're obvious and boring then that means the foundation is very strong very easy to agree to almost everything people know they know because of what other people say your knowledge base about everything that happened before you were born is because somebody said so and the population of china the boiling point of lead and the fact that the solar system now has eight planets instead of nine planets because pluto was demoted to a dwarf planet you read about that and that's where your information comes from no one can live the life saying i don't believe it until i check it out there are some people who say that but if they think about it it's not reasonable i don't believe it's a lie check it out check it out how did you get here by airplane did you check the safety of the airplane surely not do you check the hygiene of the foods that you eat surely not you're relying on what other people say other people's testimony all the time of course not everything other people say is true sometimes they make honest mistakes and sometimes they prevaricate which is just a fancy way of saying lie so in order to run your life where you're absorbing information from the information sphere you need to be selective you need to have some way to decide what information to accept and what information not to accept what information is worthy of being trusted and what if the race is not of course you won't be infallible no one's infallible it may be worthy of being trusted or turned out to be wrong also even encyclopedia britannica makes mistakes from time to time but to do it blindly means it's suicide you need to have some way to decide whether a piece of information is reasonable to accept or not we do that by experience we all get information from a variety of sources all the time and we know for ourselves that sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't work out and we keep score how often does this source give me genuine information and how often does that give me genuine information and in which subjects and we learn that some are very trustworthy and some are trustworthy only in some subjects and some in other subjects take for example cnn if they report the sports scores or the dow jones industrials or the word for word speech that obama made i think they're probably trustworthy if they give you a an opinion piece on the middle east you better be very skeptical there is even even factual reporting in the middle east you could be quite skeptical photographs don't show what they say this show they aren't taking where they say they're taken so you learn from experience what sources are reasonable and what sources are not a number of years ago cnn reported when ariel sharon was in the hospital here in jerusalem on the fifth floor it was saturday night and some ultra-orthodox jews stood on the street opposite his window raised their eyes to his window and chanted prayers for his for his recovery well between you and me they were blessing the new moon that's what they were doing they were there because their wives gave birth which happens every shabbos and and once a month on saturday night we bless the new moon they had no clue he was in that building there was no sign outside the building ariel sharon was being treated here they were looking up sure they were looking up to the moon the poor cnn fellow didn't know anything about blessing the new moon he didn't bother to ask them of course why would you ask them so you just reported this well um when i read that i say okay so then in a case like that cnn can make a mistake now if you if you look up the history books you can you can read about the first online encyclopedia which is put up by microsoft called encarta okay i'm old enough to remember that because i have lots of white white hairs and carter had as a language section where the name of every language you press on it and you get a native speaker saying something in the native language fine so i press on the hebrew button and this is what i get misha which means he who works on shabbos will eat on shabbos does that sound right to you that doesn't sound right to me actually the original quote is misha tarak shabbat shabbat he works on friday will eat on shabbos that's the real quote how did they get the quote they went to tel aviv they stuck a microphone under somebody's nose and said say something jewish he thinks what did i remember from second grade uh something like this and got it wrong so when i press the swahili button should i trust it maybe not because i know that they're sloppy about gathering information like this so in general in life we have to decide what information to accept we do it on the basis of success now i take it that's obvious one step removed where we're not talking about a particular source we're talking about a type of source two witnesses tell us they were at sea with peter and paul just the four of them on the boat and peter pre-meditatedly pushed paul off the boat and the sharks ate full thoroughly down to the belt buckle they ate everything they say peter killed paul that's what they say there's no evidence everything's gone there were no videos there's no evidence what do we do do we say well you guys are just talking you know we don't have any evidence and let peter go free no that isn't what we do what we do is we investigate the witnesses how old are they how well educated are they do they have any psychological problems disabilities instabilities um are they addicted to any substances this might be a subclass of the first one do they have anything to gain from getting peter in trouble if all the answers to those questions are the right answers they're 22 years old they have master's degrees they have a reasonable intelligence which isn't presumed by having master's degrees and they have no psychological disabilities no addictions and they are they're disinterested they have no nothing to get to gain for peter going to jail then peter will go to jail because eyewitness testimony is evident if they're 11 years old or they have various psychological deficits or they're going to inherit um peter's business if he goes to jail because the clause in the contract because he goes to jail they get the business then we're going to be skeptical what are we doing we're not taking these two witnesses and asking how often have they gotten it right in the past when they testified to murder and how often did they get it wrong in the past when they testify to murder and make a score and talk about their reliability that's impossible how many people testify twice in a lifetime to murder doesn't happen kid builds statistics like that but you can say what kind of people are they what other people are related to their credibility age is important intelligence is important education is important psychological freedom from psychological disabilities is important lack of interest is important because in experience a person is too young or a person is got psychological disabilities or a person um is is uh has a low intelligence then they don't tell the truth they often don't tell the truth our experience teaches us that we can't trust people of that type so here we're not talking about the ones who are speaking we're talking about the type and either the type has credibility or the type doesn't have credibility and if the type has credibility then we are going to trust them now i'm going to stress a feature which is obvious but it's important for the application i don't want to make remember we're talking about peter killing paul where there's no other access to evidence no one else was there and there's no way for us to reconstruct the event if somebody says but there's no other evidence that's right exactly all i have is the evidence of the witnesses still if they're the right kind of people we're going to trust them we're going to put peter in jail yeah i'm just wondering wouldn't it be just as bad to falsely prosecute somebody for doing so as the actual act itself i mean if you're just basing off a type when would there be generalizations that don't necessarily fit the particular individual i'm not following you nothing you're trusting someone based on what type of person they are that's right so that's generalizing on what kind of person they are that might they as an individual might not like just because you're assuming they're not the right kind person doesn't necessarily mean so wouldn't it be a i mean isn't that just a that might be generalizing and making if you're going to persecute him for killing paul in this scenario okay so now what happens if it's a false assumption is basically what i'm asking okay so now um i'm going to call in my credentials as a prophet you're the use you said it might be a mistake right answer sure anything could be it might be a mistake but i have to go on the odds now we talk about convicting a person beyond a reasonable doubt and i say we keep statistics of this sort of thing in the number of times we're able to check post facto testimony like this 999 times out of a thousand it turns out to be correct then it's not reasonable to say this one is going to be the one in a thousand that's an unreason it's not a reasonable doubt so could it be wrong sure could be wrong there are wrong convictions but the fact that there are wrong convictions doesn't mean we should stop the court process and let everybody go free of the number of convictions that have proven to be wrong they are 0.001 percent of the convictions that we that we verify afterwards so it's a very very small percentage that's one of the reasons we make the standard of evidence so high but that would be proof as opposed to just no proof the way i'm i'm using the word proof and i think it's used in in discussion and debate it means there's no chance of being wrong zero chance of being wrong that's why the person who demands a proof and you give your reasons all he has to do is exercise his imagination and find a possibility and then he's defeated you because there's a possibility that you're wrong you didn't give a proof and i don't want to be i don't have that responsibility i think that's unreasonable responsibility 100 probability now of course how much probability you need will depend upon what you're going to do we know o.j simpson was acquitted in the criminal trial and he was judged guilty in the civil trial because in the civil trial all you need is a majority of evidence 50 plus epsilon and he was clearly guilty and they had i don't know what you would estimate 60 70 but a 30 deficit is a reasonable doubt and a reasonable doubt you can't put a person in jail so we have different standards depending on what we want to do about it but the pro the standards are always probability and it depends upon the outcome okay so now let's move to sinai suppose i have a kind of information and every time that we've tested this kind of information this turned out to be true sometimes we can't test sometimes it's hard to check but every time we've been able to check this kind of information has turned out to be true and suppose sinai is delivered by that kind of information then it seems to be we have very good reason to believe that sinai is true now all i have to do is describe to you what kind of information i'm talking about here's the first slightly complicated thing i have to tell you by the way i start every subsequent session by review of what i did in the previous session 23 hours have gone by have time to think about it can raise questions about it and then after tomorrow you'll have four days to to think about and then we'll pick it up again on sunday so there's an overlap each time so if you don't quite get something now think about it and then we can talk about it at the beginning of the next session also we have a tradition about sinai it's a national tradition for thousands of years the entire nation accepted that tradition and that tradition says that sinai was a national experience at a certain point in time all of our ancestors not some other nation that's really important so our all of our ancestors heard god speak so it's a national tradition about a national experience and it's a kind of experience that people are not not not likely to forget some experiences happen and we just let them go because they're not so important but if you hear god speak and he commands you a torah to live by that's not the sort of thing that people are going to forget these three conditions a national tradition about a national experience which people are not likely to forget i call that a national experiential tradition net and i tell you that in surveying any teas throughout the world there is not a single net of any nation anywhere that is known to be false not what not what that means all the greeks are all the ancient egyptians or all the chinese all the nigerians all the people in los angeles which is another country all the people have a tradition that they all accept and the tradition about the past their past the past of their group and the tradition says in the past the whole group had an experience and it's a landmark experience it's an experience that will change the life of the nation there isn't a single known tradition like that that is false some have our heart are hard to test are impossible with this others are capable of being tested everyone that we've been able to test turns out to be true now since the experience at sinai is delivered by such a tradition the tradition that our nation had for thousands of years and it's a tradition about something that happened to everyone if you have a picture that moses went up a mountain and told us what god told him that's true in part he did that a lot but there was also the revelation of the ten so-called commandments or pronouncements and that everybody heard the text is absolutely explicit about that in at least six places it says we all heard god speaking from the from the mountain so that means that we have this national spiritual tradition and it's a national experience of tradition is a kind of information that kind of information has never been known to fail when you look at the myths that other nations believe in many nations believe many false things but i have done considerable historical survey and i have had hundreds of emails showering me with counterexamples and in every case the writer has had to admit that it's not a genuine counter example so i'm quite confident about this though you may know something i'm not aware of that there aren't any known any ts known to be false that means if someone wants to say that our tradition is false he's grasping at a straw this is the kind of information which we never have seen to fail and he wants to say but this is the one place where it failed you know you could say what you like but that's appealing to a mere possibility not appealing to something for which we have any evidence and therefore i think it's defeated by the experience of all mankind that they don't make this kind of mistake that's the core of the argument i will present it again in greater length some hands were up there yes what about national traditions of places like north korea soviet russia communist china traditions where [Music] i don't know the great infallible kim jong-un is you know a demigod and kim jong-il is still technically alive somewhere is that's also a national tradition that's something believed by a bunch of people that don't hear otherwise okay let's go through the criteria is it a national tradition i think we could grant that does the national tradition describe a national experience a national experience does the national tradition say that this monster flew over the country on a sunday afternoon and everybody saw him in the whole country they say that that would be a national experience but they don't say that they say it's a god there's no experience of that there's no way you can detect that there's no way that you can observe that you say it so you believe it that's free because it's not a national experience there are lots of national traditions about myths lots of national experience traditions about things which can't be checked because they can't be experienced in the iliad you have the great war between the greeks and the and the trojans achilles the leader of the greeks goes up a mountain and has a conference with palestinian one of the greek gods and he comes out and says pasadena told us to do xyz next chapter is a big battle and the text says the goddess pazzathini comes down in her chariot and fights among the greeks right there in the battlefield only says the author only she goes by so fast all you see is the dust he's clever the author he made sure to write it in such a way that the fighters don't see her because then you'd have a public a public appearance no she's on the field but you can't see her because the dust hides her good that's how it's done it's always done by making the belief about something which is private or individual or small scale and then it doesn't fit my criterion now you may ask why did i make my criteria the way i did i will explain that but i'm giving you the bottom line the bottom line is that's the criterion i'm using this is the kind of information which has always been shown to be accurate when we can show anything sometimes pieces of history can't be verified or falsified at all but when they can be this always turns out to be true so to say that this one is the one that's false is grafting across yeah can you give another example of an met sure uh the peloponnesian wars and the wars of ancient rome the accounts were uh come down to us from these these kinds of sources uh the invention of various types of technology we know that the greeks invented steam power they just used it for toys they didn't think of using for industry but that we know that they invented steam power these are these are things which are which are entities and which are accepted by historians as as as valid if you ask how can we possibly check an ndt one thing you can do is check whether the sources on it are consistent another thing you could do is check whether other nations bordering have a similar have a similar story they have a story of a war well they will photo war with somebody does the other nation also have a story of the war you can check it archaeologically if the story says that they used bows and arrows and you know the bozoners didn't exist at that time then you know something's wrong with the story there are ways to check these nets and in every case where we've been able to check in net has turned out to be true that means it has a 100 percent accuracy rate yeah as i said the holocaust it could be another net note national experience national tradition i'm not really sure what the t stands for but national experiential tradition yeah it certainly is our belief that belief of the jewish people is a national experiential tradition about the holocaust that's correct and of course all costs did happen right we're not in doubt about that are we no okay uh the other question was you mentioned that it says six times exclusively that we all saw god speak where where are these six times in the in the torah the torah one in exodus after the after and and and uh five in the beginning of the secret secretary book of deuteronomy if you like i can show them to you yeah is there hysterical i mean historical side of the torah or is only the validity that exists within this established by the torah okay now first of all i want to make sure that i understand what you mean and then secondly think back to the ship example um remember i'm not using the tradition to verify the tradition that's not what i'm doing that would really be bad i'm supposed to be a logician you can't assume what you're trying to prove that's called begging the question i'm talking about human traditions everywhere the babylonians the assyrians the greeks the romans the chinese the nigerians all over the world i'm looking at their entities and i want to know whether ever anywhere in the world has an ndt been demonstrated to be to be false i'm not using the tradition to support the tradition all i get from our tradition is a story okay so we have this story what's the reliability of the story my answer is check whether people in the world get these stories wrong if they never get these stories wrong as far as we know then i can trust our story as well it's not using the tradition to back up the tradition that's not what i'm doing now you ask whether there's other other evidence this is a crucial point when you start looking for other evidence and you don't find it and you think that maybe there's a problem you're relying on an assumption which you really ought to put on the table and the assumption is if it really happened that i should find evidence when you put that assumption on the table you'll find that often it's very hard to justify why should i find it and why should i find it where i'm looking for it let's take for example the exodus shattered an empire do the egyptians have any record of it let's say they didn't i think they do but let's say they didn't did any ancient nation describe its failures the answer is no they never described their failures so we would expect the egyptians not to record it what about the assyrians did they record it did any nation ever describe the battles and successes and failures of two other nations no they didn't do that the purpose of history in those times was to glorify the leaders in power we have for example sanchez memoirs sanchez was a great conqueror so far his members read like this i surrounded the city i beseeched the city i broke down the walls i defeated the army i alluded the city city after city after city come to jerusalem so i surrounded the city i locked up the king of judah like a bird in a cage end of entry then he goes on to the next city surrounded the city broke down the walls defeated the army and looted the city what happened well in jerusalem he failed he was defeated he doesn't write that he writes the good part they surrounded it locked up the king of judah not got a cage and then when he lost the battle so then he just leaves that out and goes on to the next thing so you ask where are other accounts of the fact that the egyptian empire crumbled in front of us and we and we and we left you don't have any accounts of such events anywhere in any pie type of ancient history so this is that hidden assumption that they put on the table if it were true i should find this this information look and see whether this sort of information exists anywhere if it doesn't then there's no surprise that you don't find it yeah surely things like natural disasters or things explained by the templates would be not seen as a failure rather as a natural occurrence so why wouldn't momentous events like this have been recorded in history first of all plagues and sort of rainfall and so on and so on were typically not recorded number one but number two if you have a fellow who presents himself as a prophet and he predicts each one in ancient times as it would be today as well somebody can predict them he gets credibility and then it isn't seen just as in that and so come one on top of the other in a single year now as a matter of fact um there is a quote from an egyptian priest in the second century bce that's a thousand years after the events and he says the jews were slaves in egypt and he says we kicked them out because they were lepers so he had he admits that we were slaves there and he admits that was in exodus he just puts a spin on it that they kicked us out so when i read that i thought okay he's entitled to his spin he's representing the egyptian point of view then i thought to myself wait a minute that's not really so much of a spin because what happened what happened was that night the firstborn was starting to die and the egyptians did come to the jewish people and they did kick them out the torah tells us they kicked them out they didn't want to leave so quickly they pushed them out and they said leave because colonel mason were all going to die so a thousand years later you have a priest who's telling the story pretty much the way it happened okay he said leprosy and it wasn't leprosy but aside from that that's that's a record a thousand years later but he's not an official historian he wasn't the king who had the hieroglyphics put up in in stone we'll be there forever that we were bested and we lost the battles to someone so that didn't happen so that being the case the fact that that it isn't there is not surprising to us when you're asking for ancient evidence always think why do i think the evidence should be there for me to find it where i'm looking if you can't if you can't give a reason for that then when you don't find it it's not significant this is where they say absence of evidence is not evidence of absence clever hey you know you think about that over a cup of coffee absence of evidence is not evidence of absence that's not always true but it's but it's often true yeah um they're a lot more modern um what makes you believe that we can extrapolate the truth of the enemies way back to like twelve whatever exit has happened um you don't mean you don't mean the net the net is the tradition that tradition exists up until let's say 300 years ago that tradition existed for thousands of years the tradition existed for thousands of years what you're talking about is the experience described in the tradition so now the question is whether traditions of this type reflect real experiences that people had or they don't reflect reflect real experiences that people had so as far back as we can trace national experience of traditions to times when people were very superstitious and believed in all sorts of monsters and all sorts of impossibilities this sort of mistake was never made if you want to say that as far back as we can go this mistake was never made but i think further back it was made i would like to see evidence i'd like to see evidence of some kind of discontinuity in the in the way in which cultures developed i don't think that you can just assume that we use you use the evidence that you have and all the evidence we have cultures don't make this kind of mistake all over the world okay now one last thing to say i'm going to finish for today someone will ask okay you cooked up this criterion you cooked up this idea any teas and you checked them but you made it up what made you think of that particular type of tradition why is that an important category maybe it's just made up for the sake of the argument the reason i chose it is because of a book called the kuzuri written by reputed lady a thousand years ago he gave me the inspiration for it i called the kuzuri principle you look it up on the net you can see hundreds of pages on the kuzuri principle and he asked the following question imagine that you're trying to make up a full story and sell it to people you want to tell them something happened they don't know about it because it didn't happen but you're making it up and you want to persuade them that it happened sometimes it'll be easy i make up a full story but what happened in midland china 750 years ago i can easily get people to believe that if i'm persuasive i'm tall handsome go to football you know the kinds of things that give people credibility but if i try to tell you a story about your ancestors what happened to your ancestors it's going to be harder because you're going to say listen you're telling me what happened what happened to our ancestors then how come i don't know about it what happened to the information you're talking about my great-great-great-grandfather and all of our great-great-great-grandfathers so what happened everybody just forgot about it but we don't know what happened in china that's quite understandable so i have to decide to trust you or not but if you're going to tell me now i don't know somebody from san francisco suppose somebody tried to say that 175 years ago there was an earthquake in san francisco which leveled every house in the city and the whole city had to be rebuilt no one living in san francisco today is going to buy that story this is going to say i'm living here all the people that are around me are living here many have been living here for generations no one ever heard of that if that really happened we don't know about it it'll be part of the history of the city we teach it in our schools we have books about it it's just not credible so it all depends upon the kind of story you're making up now review said imagine coming to a group of people and saying 200 years ago 300 years ago 400 years ago all of your ancestors heard god speak all heard it simultaneously and he gave them a torah and gave them a set of commandments and it didn't happen they've never heard of this are they going to buy that i think they're going to just be incredulous that sort of thing is the thing you forget over the evening soccer scores you know you don't lose track of it when you're making your morning coffee if that really happened we should know about it therefore you're not going to be able to convince people that it happened that's what the kuzuri says well when i read that in the 20th century and now dripping over into the 21st century i've come across people who say who said so i think you could make it up i think you could convince people feed them a little mescaline you know and dance around the fire and uh maybe if he's a priest and they think he has supernatural abilities i don't know i think you can make make people believe it now what am i going to say i don't think so he and he does think so so that's a stalemate that's why i made the empirical survey about these traditions my argument is not based on the intuition that people won't accept it that's an intuition i think it's reasonable i think it's pretty solid but somebody else doesn't share it what i'm going to say my intuition is better than your intuition that's not an argument it might be true but it's not an argument so i did an empirical survey to see whether this type of story which intuitively you can't convince people of whether in fact in the human experience this type of story is reliable or not i find that in this that human experience this type of story is reliable that's the evidence that this type of story is true and even though it's still possible that it's a mistake that's only a possibility and as i said it's beginning in the middle and towards the end i'm giving away possibilities they're free i think all the evidence that we have is evidence that it's true and that being the case we have adequate evidence to believe that it's a real historical event okay that's the summary the pracey and tomorrow i'll do a complete review of it and then we'll discuss it as much as you like and then next week we'll carry on with with further applications [Music] you