Historical Verification of the Torah - Part 2 - Rabbi Dr. David Gottlieb

okay we're gonna start today with a review of what we did yesterday and to see if any questions have come up in the minds of those who were here yesterday and then we'll push on we are looking for adequate reason to believe that sine 90 is a real historical event not just a myth and we started by discussing what counts as adequate reason how much do you need to have in the way of evidence to say that you have adequate reason to believe and we noted that a very common thought is that adequate reason means proof and proof means absolute infallibility something that couldn't possibly be wrong nails down with absolute certainty and I recommend it that that's not the right standard one shouldn't look for proof not only with respect to Sinai or with respect to anything searching for proof is the wrong Criterion's wrong goal and that was for two reasons number one you can't prove anything if there's anything that contemporary philosophy agrees upon and there's very little the vast majority of contemporary philosophers agree that there's no such thing as a real proof even in math and in logic what we present as proofs could be questionable their disagreements about axioms and logic in philosophy mathematics and certainly in any other area of life looking for a proof is hopeless secondly when you live your practical life and you decide how to live you never have proofs that's not how you make decisions you make decisions by gathering evidence discussing with people and making a judgment as to which option has the best support and since Sinai as a matter of great practical importance revelation at Sinai really took place then the Jewish tradition has a real foundation and if a revelation I didn't take place then it doesn't have a real foundation in the house it's like you have to give back that how you live your life so we're going to be consistent about our criteria for making decisions we should not be asking for a proof we should be asking for adequate reason an adequate reason means if you consider all the available evidence and this option is supported better than the others and this is the one that should be selected that was point number one yesterday is everybody on the page everybody together with that okay now in a practical application that means when in this series when I'm presenting evidence ideas information or in any discussion with anyone and it occurs to you well let's see he's presented all these reasons but he could still be wrong he could still be wrong it's possible that he's wrong when that thought occurs to you the right thing you do say sure he could be wrong of course you could be wrong anything's possible even leprechauns are possible but the fact that he could be wrong counts for zero do I have any positive reason to think that in fact he is wrong that would be worse worth considering that has to be taken into consideration and has to be replied to but the mere fact that he could be wrong doesn't count because it's always anything anyone could be wrong about anything when the urge hits you to say but maybe remember maybe just means it's possible and my answer will always be of course maybe but you have any positive reason to think it's more than maybe but real and if you don't then it's not gonna help so that's the criteria we're looking for adequate reason which means best support given all the available evidence secondly we started to talk at the evidence that we could present for Sinai as a real historical event imported out that almost everything you know or anyone knows is on other people's say-so all of the events of history took place before you were born you know because somebody recorded and said so and what goes on in distant places and the esoteric faculty science all of them you know because you read it somebody said so and you took it no one gets through life checking out everything himself that's a fantasy of course there's a lot of information not all of it is reliable some of it is honestly mistaken and some of it is deliberate lies we have to be pretty good at navigating this sea of information picking out what's worthy of being accepted and what is it of course even if I'm very good at picking out what's worthy of being accepted there will be mistakes some things that are worthy of being accepted turn out to be wrong also but one hopes to avoid the vast majority mistakes cause if I'm going to rely on information from other people I'm not going to avoid the vast majority of mistakes my life will be a shambles so I better be pretty good at it how do I learn this skill of identifying the information that's worthy of being accepted I learned it from experience we have lots of sources of information we get millions of pieces of information and we keep score sometimes we get a piece of information and we know ourselves that's not correct so we say okay one failure for that source and we keep score if I know other people that experience has taught me are very reliable and they tell me they had caught a source in a mistake and I can chalk that up as another mistake so if you have two sources ad and in my experience I'm keeping score a is right in the information that it gives out that we could check and I can check it my friends can check that's right 92% of the time that's a pretty good score you trying to trust that source on other pieces of information that I can't check but it's only right 60% of the time like some sources that are sometimes loose with their criteria then I will not trust it all depends upon how reliable that source is in one's experience again reliability doesn't mean it's infallible nothing's available but it's worthy of being accepted because the vast majority of the time it turns out to be correct and this divides up subject by subject when CNN reports the sports scores I expect it to be close to 100% correct when it reports its political opinions there I'm going to be much more skeptical now one step further in general terms it's not only sources like CNN or the Encyclopedia Britannica or a local guru aren't equal it's also types of sources not particular sources but types of sources and he'll Australia that with the idea of two people who say they witnessed a murder now this murder according to their testimony took place but only the four of them were there I murderer the murderer and the two witnesses they say they saw it it took place in such a way that there's no physical evidence whatsoever so as far as we're concerned all we have is their say-so how do we respond to that people say they were eyewitnesses to a murder do we say no physical evidence we don't listen to you we want a video we want the dead body so we can do an autopsy without that we don't listen we don't say that that's not what we do is not smart to do that either somebody says you saw somebody stealing somebody for your house if you still knows what it is say no videos I don't listen to you know you don't do listen very well you bounce an investigation because it's saying so is evidence but you ask yourself who are these witnesses what kind of people are some people are known to be reliable and the reports that they give and some people are known to be unreliable some types of people age for example the witnesses are 11 years old I think we're going to be skeptical 11 year olds often say things that aren't reliable we know that from our experience so if they're 11 years old if they say Peter killed Paul we're not likely to put Paul and Peter in jail because 2 11 year old said so and if they have addictions or other psychological disturbances or they have some benefit to gain to putting Peter in jail so will be skeptical and we won't put Peter in jail but if they're holding up and they have no psychological disturbances and they're intelligent enough perhaps some level of education and they don't have anything to gain then we know from experience that people like that people like that when they give testimony and later on we can find out whether it was true or false almost always it's true that being the case we're gonna trust these people even though we can't test them on other occasions but we know they're in a category of people and the category of people is reliable so we'll trust them because they belong to the category and we'll put Peter in jail and again I want to stress we're talking about their giving testimony for which we have no other evidence no one is going to say well you're only eyewitnesses and no other evidence we dismiss that just eyewitnesses don't count they do count when the eyewitnesses are real I forget so far this is all did yesterday okay now the question is who are the witnesses or what is the source of information that delivers Sinai the type of source of information is this nation's have traditions traditions about their own past sometimes maybe this is weird sometimes the tradition describes something that happened to the nation in the past where what it describes as an experience something happened to the nation as a whole every man woman and child in the nation experienced it so for example the tradition says there was a war if it describes being defeated in the war in ancient times especially that meant everybody knew about it because the treatment victorious army invaded and burned down the houses it raped the women in looted the coffers and set up taxes as I'm for a future time everybody knew about it because each person in the group experienced it directly sometimes are the victories that way sometimes it isn't migration or a pestilence were a disease ravaged the entire country like the black death in Europe we're in ten years thirty percent of all Europe died everyone in Europe knew about that directly didn't hear about it for somebody else everybody knew about it or a technological invention which spread throughout the group everybody saw them witness then when you have a national tradition like that question is how reliable are traditions like that each tradition is a source of information it's the category of such traditions that I'm considering I call these entities national experiential traditions that means a national tradition that describes the National experience and I want to know how reliable traditions like that are now notice I'm not talking about Jews or Judaism or Sinai or Hebrew or revelations I'm talking about Egyptian traditions and Assyrian traditions and Roman traditions and Greek traditions and Nigerian traditions and Chinese traditions and Eskimo traditions I'm talking about world whites cultures I'm talking about throughout history that we have recorded talking about the reliability of this particular type of tradition of course there are many traditions that are not correct many traditions record things that didn't happen question is whether there are any national experiential traditions their record things that we know didn't happen and I tell you on the basis of my historical research there isn't a single example of a national experiencial tradition that we know is false not what some we can't check not everything in historically can you check but of all the ones that we can check traditions about wars traditions about migration traditions about inventions and so forth and so on all the ones that we could check turn out to be true that means this category of information national spiritual traditions worldwide mankind wide is a category that so far as we know people don't miss make mistakes did you make lots of kinds of mistakes and lots of kinds of situations but not every kind of mistake in every situation and this is the sort of mistake that we have no record of any group ever making well revelation at Sinai was delivered by such a tradition our tradition has had the revelation at Sinai as amazed a mainstream as a universal belief thousands of years and if you look into the Torah itself it says that every man woman or child heard God speak if you have the image of Moses going up on a mountain coming down and telling that what God said that image is true for a lot of material but for the tempered aspirant Sinai it's not true they all heard God speak so the tradition is a tradition of our nation and it's efficient about our ancestors and it's a tradition about our ancestors having an experience and the kind of experience you would expect people to remember that means it fits into the category of national spiritual traditions and therefore the experience of all mankind with traditions like that gives me positive evidence that our tradition is correct if you ask but where is external confirmation for it where are other nations that have records of it I say let's go back to Peter killing Paul the point of this is to trust testimony where you don't have any other evidence that's the point of the exercise that the testimony itself is evidence if the testimony comes from a source that you have every reason to believe is accurate every reason to believe is certainly fulfilled when every case of this type you've tested has turned out to be correct there aren't any there isn't a single carries it so it seems to me that we have an ashen experience of tradition it's something everyone experienced so people will remember and therefore we have every reason to believe that it is correct could it be wrong with all of the evidence of no one we know ever making a mistake could it be wrong the answer of course is yes it could be wrong it could be wrong it's possible that it's wrong we don't live our lives on possibilities we live our lives on probabilities by some probabilities if all the experience of mankind as these traditions are correct the probability is that this one is correct that's we did yesterday are we together tremendous now I want to explain to you an attack which this expedition always engenders there's a standard attack and I hope to show you that I can go back through the way I presented it and show you that I've already planted the seeds against the attack but it's worth spelling out because the attack always comes up what are you telling me that by you're telling me you've got this tradition and it couldn't be wrong I can think of a dozen ways in which traditions like that could go wrong first of all let's suppose that people believe that their priests have supernatural powers and let's suppose one day that the priests feed the people mescaline and they're in a psychedelic state and dancing around the fire and there's you know but drums beating the background and the priests chant there was a revolution there was a revolution the boss coming out and say oh well look at that there was a revolution or the king wants to change history so he kills all the history teachers and he puts his soldiers in his history teachers and he teaches the kids a brand new history when these kids grow up then these kids think that that's real history or less fanciful what the academics will tell you there's something called myth formation myth formation anthropologists talk about this historians talk about this so see I'll just talk about this I don't know if formation work you have a group of people and something happens now that something might be surprising to them unanticipated by them unexplainable by them let's say it's tsunami never seen anything like this before and they're hurting they like heard something like this before to see rice it's up 200 feet and smashes into the shore it makes an impression of course they killed the children told the grandchildren story gets repeated now so he gets repeated over time second generation the regenerate fourth-generation to tell the story with extreme accuracy they repeat every detail the same way every time no people's minds drift and they perhaps extrapolate a little bit and maybe add some embellishments this story imagines going on for hundreds of years the story can evolve and change considerably indeed according to these people it's easy to imagine that the story changes from the story of a natural event it's a sort of a supernatural event and additions get it why did the water strike the shore because we have a lousy society because we did something to anger the gods three generations later and when it smashed into the shore it said evil evil evil to convince us that we were evil and then three generations after that it came with words information you can imagine the story changing and growing and developing this way once you understand that myth formation is a process it takes place and I agree it takes place everyone agrees it does take place so you can easily imagine it taking place in a case like this why do you think that your tradition couldn't be wrong here's the attack clear okay now he used a few words and expressing the attack that ought to give it away what words that are you know he pick up couldn't he's asking why couldn't it be wrong I use another word how about imagine can't you imagine that it went wrong my answer is of course it could be wrong and of course it's easy to imagine that it's wrong you can imagine all sorts of things the Red Queen imagine five I'm at impossible things before breakfast every day and Alice in Wonderland the fact that it could be wrong the fact that it you can imagine that it's wrong just means that it's possibly wrong I gave that away to have any traction against us the critic has to show not that it's possible wrong but that it's probably wrong how is he going to how's he going to upgrade his comment from possible to probable he says I have a scenario scenario gradual development of story and I claim that that scenario accounts for your tradition it didn't happen there was no revelation I claimed that the scenario accounts for your tradition and I claim that that accounting is probable not just possible but probable I think we have a right to ask him why do you say it's probable what evidence do you have that it's probable get just say that it's probable you need some evidence to show that it's probable more than just possible the very least that he needs is to show that his scenario works sometimes sometimes let's say in the whole history of mankind it worked four times if he could show us four examples where his scenario of myth formation gradually produced a false story which is believed by the whole nation then we could say look it happened to the Indonesians and it happened to the Greece and happened to the Polynesians and it happen until essentially I mean that's another nation and since it happened those four times it's probable that happened in your case also so let's ask can he do that can he give us any examples where his scenario has actually produced a false entity no he can uh he cannot give us any such examples why not because as I told you there are no known false any teeth at all there are no known false entities so if there aren't any known false entities it follows that you can't find me a case where his scenario produced a false any t he hasn't got any false any teams to work with so the critic is between a rock and a hard place the critic if he's always going to say is that it's possible then we're going to dismiss them and say sure it's possible so what and if he says it's probable we're gonna ask for evidence the evidence has to be places where his scenario works and it's never worked so far as we know it's never worked to do this so purusa false any tea miss formation works to produce all sorts of other false beliefs but not false energies if that's the case then he has no no way to claim that what suggesting is probable and if not he has no traction against us are we together yeah question is who they we're talking about a national experience No okay so I'll tell you I'll tell you what the story is it's a relevant question sure they have the numbers to actually have the numbers in the in their books there of course it's the story occurred several times in different places with different numbers the largest number is 5000 really really national you're talking about in the area of ancient 2000 years ago in Jerusalem and in Israel in which the population was millions of people in the local population was tens of thousands of people you're talking about a small minority of the people and none of them are mentioned by name none of it that's the loaves and fishes and what kind of what I don't know if they're the numbers there there's a number for the observations and a number for the resurrection that people saw about 500 people saw it makes a difference the is certainly not a national claim and there is no nation who has the national claim it's a tiny minority the local population why is that important I'm coming to the last point that I made yesterday directly relevant to what you say someone will ask this category national experiencial sedition and you show that they all are reliable in this way who said that's an interesting character maybe just made it up so it'll work I don't think that's a serious critique okay isn't science in the business of making up criteria that'll work making up concepts that work I think that's what science does all the time but leave that aside the Ray I arrived at this categories I suggestion in a book called the kuzuri and the suggestions made as follows imagine making up such a story you come to a group of people and say boy have I got news for you let me tell you what happened to your ancestors 300 years ago all of your ancestors were together and PQR happened what are the people in the audience going to say I'm gonna say what is that with the hairy ancestors how come nobody knows about you're talking about something cataclysmic talking about a revelation from God or a quake that wiped out 90% of the population or something no one knows about it but you this is not the sort of thing that people forget that's why they call the audience challenge now I said this yesterday it's very important to get clear on this the audience challenge is just to identify what kind of story we're talking about audience child is not the grounds for believing the story isn't identifying what kind of story we're talking about grants are believing it is an empirical survey let's go through that in detail the story I'm talking about that's going to be reliable is a story which if you tried to convince someone about it you'd fail because we think you failed it's a natural assumption that you would fail because he'll ask you how come we don't know about that's my intuition I said yesterday suppose somebody doesn't share that intuition you think that yes you think they'd be worried about the bank I don't think so I think you could sell it to them anyway so then it's intuition against intuition I don't see any way to prove that my intuition is better than theirs just on the basis of what the force of my intuition I don't see any reason to any way to distinguish between the two intuitions that's why I did the empirical survey let's see in history whether these things go wrong the real reason for accepting it is that we have no examples of any tease that have failed that's the real reason but he asked me why did I pick any tease because they have this intuitive characteristic that would be hard to sell it I think everybody agrees would be hard to sell it there would be a barrier there how come we don't remember well the question is whether the audience can get over the barrier yeah we don't remember but still he's very persuasive so let's ignore that everybody realizes that this about you there the question is how strong is the barrier I say the barriers absolutely no one will jump over the barrier so videos that absolutely I think that audiences can't jump over the barrier so now the question is to test how strong is the barrier empirical survey shows that the barrier is really absolutely no one so far we know as far as you know has ever jumped over this barrier so the kind of story we're talking about the story where when you tell it to the people say how come we don't know about it because you're talking about our whole ancestry now let's imagine someone making up this story the Christian story 80 years later somebody comes to a group of people and says 80 years ago our mentor went out into uh into a park and walked on the water gave up those officious or something else really who was there three thousand people five thousand people who were they no names don't know the person he already is supposed to say oh if that really happened I would surely know about that why would he it's 2% of the population why would he know about it they happened to 2% of the population there's no reason to think that he would know about it indeed fella named Dustin Smith who wrote a classic called religious of man who himself as a Christian but he wrote well about Judaism I was shocked when I read that I said if he can get to reason right he probably got Buddhism and Hinduism and Islam right also I did other research but it's a good book he says if all Christianity had to go on was the miracles performed by the founder Christianity it would have certainly died out that's not how he gauges his credibility because he says there were dozens of miracle workers at that time and they all did miracles and everybody knew about them and they just died out it isn't miracles that turned the trick he's writing that about his religion and its history so it's not the religion it's not the miracles they did it people were known to have reputations of doing miracles that most of people took it with a grain of salt or a teaspoonful of salt or a shovel full of salt and they they managed to remain remain unaffected by so it's crucial that it's a national story because if it's about the nation then the audience has to say why didn't I hear about it if it's 2% of the population then maybe the chain of information just didn't get to me but if it's if it's national then it's got to be the weed come down that's the barrier and then you have the difference of intuitions can you jump over the barrier you can't jump over the barrier and historical survey shows that you can the cannot jump over the barrier that's what we did yesterday that's not so Bri something we're all together yeah so in the case where God came down spoke to them before you days later there are increasing another Idol didn't dare you forget about the situation that happened and very good question what about worshiping an idol of the Golden Calf a mere forty days later that's a bomb of a question the answer the question is it wasn't tonight and the explicit versus red literally show you that it wasn't that Idol now I have a whole share on that it's recorded you can listen to it but the verses themselves say that it wasn't tonight I just tell you one verse 5 there after he makes the calf the golden calf he says to the people tomorrow we're going to celebrate and he says it'll be a celebration to the Jewish God he used the name Hewitt and a Hagin above in a hate the proper Hebrew name of God if he's announcing that they're gonna celebrate to the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob and the god of Moses that's not an idol there are many other elements in the in the literal reading but that I think it seems to me is already damning for that idea that it was an idol if he said he was celebrates the Jewish God you can't be an i what it is you can listen to that you can listen to my it's my shirt online and you can get it in detail and any right it's holy wasn't that had it been national I don't worship other than with you but for the verses just don't say that yeah you know I don't trust people at all I use my experience to determine when they're reliable when they are I don't believe just walk to work because I don't think we have any any reason to think that really happened again you use the word trustworthy as if it were a matter of treating them as morally competent or not I'm not interested in morality and that nursin with the good people are bad people I just want to know what track record do they have like I trust them when they say they believed in magic I trust them about that you're asking me whether I trusted the magic is real no I don't trust that but but then they weren't competent to judge that so okay so now now now maybe we're getting to a question that that's its directive what I'm saying as I said at the outset as I said yesterday but the goal here is to show that the event at Sinai is a real historical event not just a made-up myth not something that didn't happen now you can ask what happened what exactly happened and how how much of the description with a competent to give testimony to and how much were they not that's an interesting question I have to go through exactly how to describe that and ask how much of it was just describing what they experienced and how much of it was drawing conclusions from what they experienced if they say that they they were spoken to why the creator of the universe I can't trust them for that here tough so good how would they know it's a creator of the universe how did they identify that'd be very difficult to understand that but if they say the whole mountain was on fire and ground was shaking under our feet and it was smoke and cloud of the sound of the shofar they're describing their direct experience and that I can trust them for because as I said we don't have a single example of an any tea that we know is false so if this is an any tea all human experience indicates that traditions of this kind are true in the book of Exodus chapter is 19 to 20 that's a very interesting question not in all the years I'm teaching this no one has asked that question before I will add in something that I usually add in as a footnote and that is this argument applies to the plagues in Egypt it applies to the crossing the Red Sea it applies to the manner that they ate every day it applies to the pillar of cloud and pillar of fire so it means there's a long standing process all public all public in the same way that would make it into not just a single event but it's an interesting point I've never haven't put that image before it's worthwhile putting it yeah I would say 911 could be it's just a little bit of a of a slip but I I'm inclined to credit it after all we're talking about a national sprint I'm talking about the American nation most of them saw it on television so you know if you count television you know I would say Tiananmen Square was not a national event because what happened there when the Chinese army murdered the students is not what the Chinese people were shown on television but they were shown in television with phony pictures of the students charged either you know defenseless students charging guns and you know so I I'm that may be a borderline in that respect but considering what we know about national reporting the United States although the rest of it yes it could be a kind of national experience thank you now there isn't it there is an objection that I want to briefly at least raise for you and indicate how I will respond to it and that is all there any tease that I'm using as my background are any tease about natural events I'm now claiming credibility for an entity that describes a miracle there's a cap fear there is a an expression which was back to Carl Sagan of whom I am NOT a fan who said extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and wow that's very vague and very hard to pin down there is a sort of intuition there besides an email now for somebody who misunderstood it where because the claim is extraordinary we think we have background evidence against it so you need positive evidence to counteract that evidence I think that's reasonable how can we claim support from any tease that described natural events or in any team that describes a miracle in order to answer that I think we need to explore how hostile is it reasonable to be to miracles what is reasonable hostility to miracles first of all what is a miracle how do you define it and then how reasonable is it how hostile is it to be is it reasonable to be against miracles I think that people have an exaggerated picture of how how hostile one should be or could be to miracles let me just start you're taking taking you down the road a miracle is an event that what breaks the laws of nature let's say okay so now you're sitting and you're considering what is exha miracle it wasn't a miracle is you're gonna say let's see does X violate the laws of nature which laws of nature which ones well you're living in your time so I suppose it means the laws of nature that your science your experience has delivered to you you're checking that event against your picture of laws of nature now let's imagine someone who preaches absolute hostility no miracles for me not even after the third beer no miracles period okay now somebody says he saw Q this is wait let's check Q here my laws of nature uh uh uh this one rules it out so I couldn't have happened how will they ever learn that his picture the laws of nature isn't correct how will we ever make progress in science doesn't it happen when laws are they just say one thing something else happens it doesn't fit we say okay so maybe the laws are wrong a person who was absolutely hostile to miracles has painted himself into a corner where he can't make scientific progress that's probably not a good position to be in so then a person has to rethink how hostile can I afford to be when somebody claims something happened that violates the laws of nature that I have in front of me the ones that my time my culture my society my age thinks are the real laws of nature so then it can't be an absolute hostility so what kind of I still any canape well this thing is going to be usually very unusual very unusual and the course of our experience it seems to follow patterns and this is going to break the patterns so we want to have some good evidence that the patterns have been broken but we're not going to rule it out in principle David Hume who went down this path only something he went down this path there was a whole parody of him in the 19th century saying that if I follow your suggestions that unusual events can't be accepted then most of European history can't be accepted Napoleon grew up became an emperor of france while by himself fought the whole of europe to a standstill what's a probability that 0 so therefore i shouldn't expect any reports because it's very unusual according to that kind of strict adherence against things which are unnatural most of history would go we'd go down down the drain so the question is how much testimony do I need to change my picture of how the world works to change my picture of what the laws of nature are here I have a few examples a couple are fanciful and a couple are real the ancient Chinese kept star charts very detailed star charts and in fact they observed a couple of Nova explosions because one night they come out and say hey where that dot is brighter than usual she once later disappears so they made a record of it now imagine a visit from Greece in Greece the law was this teaching was the philosophy was the science was the heavens never change period they never changed periods if Oscar said heavens aren't made like the earth they're made up you've heard the name quintessence we test this means the fifth essence everything in earth is made of combinations of four elements the heavens are made of some fifth thing which never changes now he goes to China any business the people and talking to them staying for some months investigating their culture and he finds these star choices what is this piece of paper what that's all over it that's a picture of the stars really then I'll do that in Greece really night looks at Saturn hi Kylie dots stars very detail very interesting one night he's looking at the star chart most of the sky and he's a dot on the chart which isn't in the sky she calls his Chinese friend he says haha you see you guys aren't so carefully mistake can you put it that this ghosts are there so the Chinese fella looks at he says hey that can't be that's that we never made that's not always this let's turn it over we'll have the date of the chart on the back oh oh this chart was made 22 years ago there used to be a star there and there isn't now what's a Gris gonna say what are you been drinking or sniffing or injecting stars don't change nothing in the skies changed nothing this guy's can change so Plato taught so Aristotle taught so Socrates thought it can't happen could the Greek come to doubt his Greek science could he not say look these guys make these charts we don't do that we're not interested they stare at the sky and they talk about this guy's a whole caste the people who are chosen to do this at government expense maybe they're right maybe they're right and notice this isn't repeatable you can't repeat Nova explosions at will he's just trusting their testimony that something happened which is gonna cause them to chase this whole picture of how the heavens work I think that's quite credible and quite credible because they're trustworthy because he knows they're careful people that's enough to change your picture of how the world works that means that we're not rationally committed against miracles question is how good is a testimony well cyanide comes from a source of testimony it has never been known to make a mistake it has a perfect record I think that's as good as Chinese star charts okay have a wonderful weekend you