Q&A: Claims and Morals (Rabbi Dovid Gottleib) (Jewish Philosophy)

okay thank you yeah um so I just I I wanted some I'm doing a project for a class right now that's sort of critiquing the national Revelation plan of Judaism and of course you you argue very strongly for that oh a component in your argument I don't think it's actually necessary for the argument to function the proponent is um that when you eliminate the possibilities that naturalistically explains how people could accept the claim you eliminate for instance that people uh one person couldn't present it to many other people because their parents would have heard them give that over would you agree with that or not well sort of um I do say those words but I think it's very important to know what role they play in the argument where they figure in the argument there really two things going on there's an intuition which many people share though not everyone and then intuition makes the subject interesting to investigate but that intuition is not the reason for believing the conclusion it's not the reason believing the conclusion that intuition is not the reason for believing the conclusion so even if I'm talking to someone who doesn't share the intuition I have a reason and that's not it the idea that a person couldn't make up such a claim because their parents would have known about it and they know their parents don't know about it never they wouldn't accept it that's not the reason for believing the claim I say that at least four times in the in the chapter the reason of believing the claim is a historical survey that stories like this we have no record of any full story like this so stories like this just don't go that's a historical fact I think this intuition explains the fact to a great extent you don't share the intuition then you don't then then you don't need share the intuition but the fact is you don't have a single example of a story like this that is known to be false and if you're going to tell me that this one is false then you're telling me this one is different from all the stories of this kind in the whole history of mankind that's something hard to to defend would you look at this claim being different when you say specifically just the amount because there other there are other things that makes simar I mean no claims of for the hundreds of thousands but tribe for no no yeah okay I have to tell you what's in the chapter the claim has nothing to do with national Revelations nothing at all national AR mentioned in the claim the claim is about something else entirely National Revelation happens to be one out of 100 examples of the claims that are involved in the principle principle has nothing to do with Revelation or with Judaism or with religion or with shabas or anything else it's what I call National experiential Traditions that's a tradition that's accepted about by a Nation about its own history and the tradition describes an event which the tradition says happened to the nation at an earlier stage in history and the event that it describes was experienced by everyone in the nation at that time in the history and it was the kind of event that would naturally make a mark on the culture of the nation so that it would be remembered and the claim is no National experiential tradition of that fulfilling that definition has ever been found to be false it could be a war it could be a famine it could be a uh an invention of a new weapon it could be a migration it could be many many different things which have nothing to do with Revelations and laws and and traditions and anything it has nothing to do with that it has to do with only being a national experiential tradition Sinai happens to be also among all the other types also a national experiential tradition if no uh traditions of this type have ever been found to be false that's very good reason to think that when you don't know about that whether it's true or false is true because if this the kind of thing which is random and happen stance you'd expect of all the traditions of this type in the history of the world maybe six would have been discovered to be false like six at least and that being the case is none have been discovered to be false we have vast empirical evidence that traditions of this type aren't false that's how the argument goes religious claims are mutual exclusive so you look at the I'm just going to spell it out s they claim a tribal Revelation which like a woman moves from I I think that's a bird the bird communicates to multiple different tribes so that that claim could not be I mean you could argue with sort of the intermediary understanding of how Idols work that could also be true in this Jewish Paradigm but I think from a bottom of approach that seems to be a mutually exclusive claim this is a different religion that's claiming different natural relation that moves on through old tradition and being that both of them can't be true one of them has to be false correct uh no they could both be false and but I but I I I've investigated such claims and uh I have published the results of the investigation for example they're supposed to be a Native American tribe which has a tradition of a a revelation of God to a whole tribe right so somebody said this to me 20 years ago uh and I sent it around to some of my students the student did some research he said yeah we looked it up here's How The Story Goes tribe A has a tradition tribe a tradition is that the whole of tribe B heard God speak and then they all died no survivors no later generations and the priest the tribe A told them about the revelation of tribe that doesn't count because it's got to be the ancestors of the people who have the tradition that the event describes as as happening to their ancestors and here that's not true true we only have tribe B that believes it it's the wrong tribe sorry so what would that D argument if it actually was the case that there was a multiple tribe Revelation well it depends upon what it means some there's one case where they describe such a thing and it's not clear whether everyone in the tribe heard God speak or the priests heard God speak and told the tribe what they're in Botha and the SI how do you pronounce that way what's that the SI s but the Sue claims I mean my understanding it claims multiple tribes the bird brings multiple tribes together Lakota is one tribe that passes out an oral tradition with the both claim Supernatural occurrences uh being that I'm assuming they can't be true if Judaism is true well first of all I want to see the details and the way I did a lot of detailed study on the Aztec claim for for National revolation turned out to be absolutely with no material behind it but what's wrong with the answer okay I have I published that it's a long detailed thing I first of all I went to Scholars who went to the text and T translations of the text and check the dating has to be dated with a within a common date frame uh where you where you have in continuous intervening history uh one of the conditions that I set out in the chapter is you put it far enough in the past so that no information that period of time exists at the time that you're creating the tradition then you can make it up okay but then then you have to have it dated well they have it the third year of the camel and the 15th year of the donkey and so forth and so on it's an incoherent dating system it doesn't relate to our dating system at all so you can't tell when the date is you can't tell when the DAT is I'm sorry it doesn't qualify all these details have to be checked it's not so simple to looking it up in you know uh on Google and the Jewish State makes it so that what 300 years before say th DC like right yeah so that would be that's an area of History you couldn't account that we have accounted for so that that claim couldn't be insed in every time you think that this in this literature was invented the literature includes events some of the national events which are dated and the names of the people are there and what happened to their children and grandchildren who their grandfathers were and where they lived before that and the migrations are all there the whole history is filled in that history according to the ker principle you're not going to be able to make up if somebody says it happened now we're sitting here in in 24 right somebody says it happened 4,000 years ago in the middle of China you wouldn't know anything about that you don't have any ancestors who have it direct physical line down to the people that you're talking about now how do the information reach you it could have been made up 300 years ago and given to you and they wouldn't have known anything about it and you wouldn't have known anything about it you got to show that there's a single National line and that there's a a dating system in the National line so you can date the event and the date event has to be something where other information is a is is available to that National Group when the tradition is being created there's other information that's available to them that they can that they can identify the date with and so forth and so on all that has that detail has to be filled in to say they have a tradition isn't good enough all these deta and I do this in the book in detail over and over again I do in the appendix I do it over and over again so Ian I've done the work the IC is all there look at the Aztec thing it's on my it's I think it's on my blog I did I did the azc in stages the amount of material made it absolutely insubstantial yeah so well of course you can always take the r you that it's all just fake but there are those who are yes that's true well um since we don't have any detail of what it is they actually did it's hard to say that we have scientific proof that it doesn't work we don't know what it is we haven't tried it so um I think that that's you know something which uh which shouldn't be just swallowed wholesale um and we do have a principle ofan that laws of nature have changed that's used byon to account for various things that it say so we're not committed to the idea that if it worked then then we would say it must be working now and uh all the current science is saying is that we don't see it happening now right they don't they don't they can't testify that the nature's laws of nature operated in the ways that are relevant to this at that time so some some and countries they they claim to Magic so if consider I have no idea I don't know the of Kish well enough to to say what counts as what the Torah prescribes as as Kish that that's a detailed study that I'm not I'm not available to I think that the the attitude that science has explained everything and we know it all and it doesn't doesn't Accord to science that it can't be right is a dreadfully prejudiced ideology bound and unjustifiable position to take where do it where the Prejudice begin well I'll tell you um one thing that's prejudice against is change because when you say science you mean today's science science that you know today if you're going to use science you know today as a Criterion for accepting or rejecting a claim let's say of an observation then you could never learn that your science today was wrong on the basis of someone seeing something which rejects it because you won't accept it imagine somebody took that position 1500 years ago so there'd be no uh relativity there'd be no quantum mechanics there' be no Maxwell unification no no no would would be true because all of that violates the artian view of the universe no sane person thinks that he uses the science that he has a particular time to judge whether to accept a claim or not but you accept a claim by investigating its evidence and testing it and see whether you can find cooperating observations and so forth and so on where you would in any in any open-minded scientific investigation it's necessary to make any you have to connection between patterns you're going there's disjointed relation between the Pres and the past that you can't know anything about who we know about the past doesn't inform what we know about we know about the Pres doesn't what we know about the past you don't really get a cohesive model like we have to assum the universe is the same is about P oh sure but as um Stephen Weinberg wrote in his in his book the first three first three minutes and Stephen Hawking wrote In A Brief History of Time uh where he talked about the cosmological principle which he says we we accept on the basis of humility we're not special nothing can be different about us in principle than any other place in the universe why do you and you can't draw conclusions about the universe unless you make that assumption and then and he has himself ask why do we accept that principle B of humility I don't mind if you make assumptions you can make assumptions and draw conclusions just on page one make a list of all the assumptions you made in order to draw your conclusions and let the reader decide whether he wants the Bible's assumptions or not they're not demonstrated by your work they're the basis on which you use as aiims to derive your work and you made them as assumptions one model Progressive than another you mean it fits leftist agenda I mean like scientific theor for example I mean their contingent on an A on three laws of logic but they work they produce empirical Dem well sometimes they do and sometimes they don't as a matter of fact that the Revolutions of the 20th century and some that are still yet to come on the basis that they didn't deliver the early quantum theory prediction for the uh calculation for the the um energy of of electron was Infinity was that right no but we that changed because but why did it make the prediction in the first place because it wasn't right so that means you had a theory and some of its predictions were wrong they weren't right and Bas on better evidence sure but that means that in the second case when you have the better evidence and maybe even better evidence it'll make a change in the future the nature of rational mind is accept the if you have a sufficient amount of evidence for a particular CL you're going to accept that until you have better evidence well it couldn't be sufficient how much is sufficient then if you have better evidence is possible it doesn't mean that this so-called sufficient evidence renders it true so what means it makes it sufficient science doesn't make proclamations of sure it does otherwise evidence is only evidence of truth that's all it's evidence for it's evidence of what's likely to be correct about reality we accept as truth we don't need likely to be corrected then mean it's likely to be false then you certainly don't accept it sorry what do you mean likely you mean I mean it's likely be correct it's not likely be false on the contr if it's likely to be correct it is likely to be false I mean unlikely to be false there's a possibility that it's false if it's likely to be corrected think what we're saying now if it's likely to be corrected that means it's likely to be corrected okay likely to be correct sorry well you said likely to be corrected did you not so let's try it again likely to be correct yes it doesn't correct mean true uh I mean in terms what we're accepting sure I don't know what that means correct is can I can discover that what I accepted until now wasn't correct can I not yeah you get better evidence good so that means that what I accepted doesn't have to be correct and doesn't have to be true better evidence can show me to give that one up because it isn't true but it once believe given time oh I don't know about let's work on that now I'm glad that you're reducing the claim and taking it back and so for and so on that means we're making some progress huh yeah so now let's let's let's has this question supposed to have competing hypothesis and one of them has the greatest probability of being true is it like approprate to believe that of all the hypothesis that are currently on the table there any other Factor just the fact I'm asking you you're the one who made the pronouncement of we should expect when we should accept something to be true so I'm asking you you you said under these and these conditions the rational mind will believe it to be true so I'm asking you whether these count as those conditions according to your view if if you have M comping hypotheses and one of them most probably true we're going to accept that I didn't say probably true please try to be medc in my words I said it's more probable than the competitors um yeah I think okay so let's good so let's let let's take an example let's take three hypotheses a b and c a has a 1% probability of being true B has a 2% probability of being true and and C has a 3% probability of being true do you believe see wait three out of 100 I mean yeah three out of 100 um well in okay this is why I asked for specifics because you're going to reduce probability where so low yeah might might be the case where we have different ideas but none of them are demonstrable or predictable not to war believe good so then what I said before is not a correct Criterion it's not enough to have comparative superiority of probability unless there's a significant dispar 17% versus 2 is that enough 22% versus two depends on the plan so 22 % versus two will be good enough even though it's 80% probably that it's false no no so it's not enough okay do you understand that you're shifting grounds now philosophy of science is a study it's not something you can Google it's a it's a study and it has it has hundreds of examples of these kinds of criteria and with the counter examples are these criteria take a textbook you can learn this stuff this is this not this is not deep research here uh the the Criterion for accepting hypothesis is undefined there's no there's no accepted definition for when you accept a hypothesis Richard Ry said this at an actal convention I happened to be there because I a professional philosopher I heard him say this and I and although I despise his philosophy in general I thought this remark was very was very profound does every scientific theory that has ever been proposed and accepted had known counter examples that means when you shifted from one Theory to another you were shifting from one Theory with counter examples to another theory with its counter examples and how you make the decision when to choose the second theory with its counter examples versus the first theory of this counter example no one has a definition of when to do that so you're talking about something which is done largely by intuition and Instinct and there a kind of group uh training that gives a large unity in many cases not in every case spring theory is to this day bitterly controversial as one book titled is it not even false not even false because not meaningful and others think it's the truth that's bitterly controversial in a pretty tight scientific field called you know cosmology and and and ultimate physics um so the the Criterion for doing that is something for which there's no precise Criterion whatsoever there may be isolated individual sufficient conditions that would be helpful under this particular narrow sufficient condition then the right thing move to do is this but but typically you don't have it yeah a lot of we have what were the first words something many major okay like twoing examples okay this is a very important question there's a wonderful book called the um the Dynamics of dispute like Andel where he has a couple of chapters on this subject what people don't know though with the classical education you should know things that were practiced uniformly for a thousand years or 2,000 years can later become controversial things that were practiced uniformly uniformly for thousands of years can later become cable for example is based on theat pule it could be yua has a right to disagree they don't have to matter how many generations go by bigger in number and and and only applies when to not Tois every generation has the authority to decide differently so something which was done one way the whole time at that generation when they they become controversal can all of a sudden become controversial and then you see L multiple how could there be an un unchallenged uniform tradition for thousand years because it can become controversial that's one way of desler in I think it's volume four page 55 one second one ther says for example um for fillan to Rashi which aren't RAR Rashi of course as you know because a thousand years before then we found examples of these um the uh that was based on and there's a rule of is as long as you have the word for word formulation of the if that's what you have in your possession then it's a binding if you lose the word for word formulation even though you know what people did if you lose the formulation then it ceases to be a and the word that that that's uses is it becomes a no hug I misunderstood that when I read it I spoke to one of his T he says doesn't say me hug there no h no h means it's things that people do and says if you're a you can challenge it on the basis of suim if you're in you can challenge it Bas of and if you're at post you can challenge the Bas of the decisions becomes challengeable and then it becomes controversial so these are two ways in which things which had an unbroken tradition became controversial at the latest time later time there may be more that I'm that I'm I'm leaving out but but once you have that principle in your hand and the standard complaint of the conservatives that it must have been made up when the you know not before the time when it was controversial just Falls flat going to change us different understand the let's take the first example right the the the the is based on being right so have the authority to derive by is that part of their Authority given to them by the Torah yes it is every generation Sedin has it's already to do that right and they're not required to follow the the POR of previous generations so in what way is he changing the Tor using the same Authority and because of his understanding of the he come to a different conclusion prti practi of course of course many many of the things that we do today are Laten with their abundance which came into existence later oh have yeah yeah yeah because even their Rises can change of course of course that's right yeah to be true and time demonstrated to be false you agree that that doesn't want appr right I think demonstrations are much too strong a term you haven't got a demonstration of who your parents are I think it's okay to believe who your parents are there isn't I guess you'd argue what sufficient regarding maybe but the word demonstration carries mathematical concept I don't know what you mean by demonstration for does that it doesn't mean that the claim is false correct certainly does not claim is true correct how do how do you respond with your belief to that claim usually I suspend belief right so you don't have a positive belief in that thing that's that's right okay so why is it when and I just want to understand when when you look at the other let's say hypothetical situations of national Revelation you would say well has it ever been demonstrated to be false can't find one demonst false lik they be true okay that's a good question I answer that in the book explicitly and I have a long footnote on that but I I'll answer for you as well um the critic is claiming that it is natural normal and expectable that there will be false traditions of various kinds um because the people who make them up make them up for subjective reasons to glorify their ancestors or to explain things to them that are puzzling without having any reason to think that this is a real explanation or they're just too simp listic to be critical about the thoughts that they are making and therefore they make up lots and lots of of traditions which aren't true um there are many many Traditions that aren't true they just aren't National experiential Traditions there are Traditions about what individuals did what where individuals came from Traditions about the uh coming into being of the world that we see none those are National experiential Traditions but the national traditions and we are convinced that many of them are incorrect and the attitude of the critic is your Sinai story isn't any different from them it's just whether it's um wanderings of a of of ois coming back in the in the anad or whether it's the the heroes of ancient China who climbed mountains and battled dragons and so and so on you just made up the story and you made it up like everybody else made it up so I say you have an engine you have an engine that produces Transitions and it often produces transitions that are false and you say the same engine produced my transition well if that's true then you have a good reason to think that mine's false also because it's produced by an engine that produces false Traditions okay so I say you've got the engine producing all Traditions thousands of kinds of the thousands of Kinds I have one half of one a little sliver over here let's take the engine in this particular particular output this particular slot the kinds of traditions that are put out by this particular slot now let's take a look at those and see do you have any of any of the ones that are any ones that are false no then it isn't this engine of making things up subjectively and doing it because you love your ancestors and you can do it because you want to explain things to yourselves that's not where it's coming from we have to ask where is it coming from how come it it making the same mistakes as everything else so I my my argument that there are no no false ones means it's not coming from the same engine that produces all the ones that you know are false and you can then say this is false by association to all of those that's that's what that point is supposed to make the CRI doesn't have to claim it's false he just evidence for that National reation CLA well first of all he has to he has to claim that he has evidence that it's false and he does claim that he doesn't say that he doesn't know about the bur proof on me the critic says I've studied anthropology and I've studied ancient history ancient religions and I know your stuff is no different from men and have every reason to think that it's false so the first thing I'm doing is pointing out to him that given this distinction that I've made he doesn't have reason to think that it's false that's number one and and and now the the step further is you this example I used in the footnote I have a lake in my backyard big lake and um I I claim that uh there are fish in the lake and all the fish in the lake are smaller than four in I don't have a single example not one not one could I possibly have good reason for believing that all the fish in the lake are smaller than 4 inches if I don't have exact even one example of the cloud that I'm making here's how you do it I found Row in the lake okay so there's Row in the lake there's fish and I draged the F the the leg with 4 in with Nets with 4 inch holes very thoroughly I didn't catch any than the fish in the lake are smaller than 4 in without a single example sometimes the failure to find a counter example is good reason to be believe in the cloud doesn't follow every cloud of all a or BS you have to have lots of a which or B's to support it if you have reason to think you have a net that catches the counter examples and it doesn't come up with any well these Traditions are this the Tradition general classic tradition contains many false of traditions because we know how they're made up we know where they come from right here that doesn't come for something like that whatever made this up didn't make up any obvious F failures then it must have a pretty good record of doing things that aren't discover be false well who would do that how would they manage that the answer is because this is something which you can't make up and if you can't make it up it's not going to be believed if it isn't true that's the explanation for why you don't find any false ones but that's the explanation of not finding any false ones AR any other reations no it has nothing to do with national Revelations this was the only National Revelation claim in the whole history of the world the same argument go through in exactly the same way you did is you there's the engine and here's all the data points and then you have the outlier and you say well this if all these you're using the engine to suggest them all these are false this one is not produced by the same engine because it's different Claim by Nature correct or no these ones National ES experiential Traditions all of them this slot turns out National experiential Traditions all of them hundreds of them SW Wars and migrations and technological advancements and and and uh and diseases and so forth and so on all the national exper Traditions come out of this out of this slot and none of those I said none of them are known to be false it's got to be them can't be just one none of them is known to be false so whatever is producing anys that engine proding NS doesn't make mistakes so Jewish claim is different because you can't find a counter example because it's not unfalsifiable it's falsifiable all right there just aren't any falsified cases first of all un falsifiability you have to know is a is a is not a good criteria I wrote a paper on that okay let let's let's let's go through the vocabulary here this is this is really I mean falsifiability is a mistake KL poer was wrong about this and people who followed him were wrong about this and the scientists don't get it though the philosophers get it and Roger Penrose gets it because in his book The the root to reality 1,000 pages in which he encapsulates encapsulates all modern science he gets it right that falsifiability isn't a good criterian because he has a counter example of contemporary science which is very good science and it's unfalsifiable unfalsifiable means it's the kind of hypothesis which no observation could show false falsified means we have on record observations already made that show that it is in fact false that's falsified I'm not talking about unfalsified I'm talking about unfalsified none of the NS that come out of that slot are falsified they could have been falsified many all of them in the set and even the one outside the set have not been Dem false I what what one outside of the set I have a set of neets all of them but I thought sound like there are Traditions about great birds and there are Traditions about men and women who go off to and fly to Islands there are Traditions about sub subaran there people swim underwater there are Traditions about about uh uh the world coming to resistance of the blood of the great cow there are many many Traditions about many many various beliefs about the ancient world right and all of them in their very vast variety many of them are false we have good reason to think they're false we discount them many of them yes many of them but some of them no so how do you how do you respond to that well you know not everything that the New York Times produces I can show is false but I have good reasons to think it's false re because I know their General record the general record is pretty bad so and especially in certain subjects it's pretty bad so I I have I've reason to think that the ones that I haven't yet falsified are also false so by association coming from the same Source knowing the record of the source that's the point of their argument point of their argument they all come from the same source and many of them are known to be false so when you have one maybe I haven't shown yours to be false yet but there's a good reason to think it's false because this Source produces false results some significant number of false results and why does what is the different source of Jewish one comes from well I know what it comes from but uh just a general tradition no it's I'm this I know why so so hard to get across the what comes out the sliver is all national experiential Traditions Portuguese and ancient Chinese and Southeast islands and and and Australia and everywhere in that sorry the the story of the Sinai Revelation is one of those it is a national experential tradition just as much as the ancient Greek traditions and the ancient Roman Traditions a few of which are National experiential traditions and by which which by the way historians trust as being real history I have that in the book I have the quote in the book where they say Traditions like that we trust as being real history so what so again what makes the Jewish one Escape that it doesn't it's part of that the clim for the Jewish Revelation is exactly the claim for every other National experiential tradition they're all of one group they're identical they get all the same argumentation but you said the engine makes all of them false like probability right that's CRI is saying H oh boy the critic is starting with let's say the childhood of Achilles or the experiences of uh of the uh the um the uh the prophets of uh of atheni on on Mount Olympus experiences of individual people or small groups of people or sag Galahad of the forest when he fought and killed the the the the um the the um the monster right which nobody saw he just told them about these are the stories which are made up and many of them are false and and the and the engine is glorifying your ancestors or verifying the religions that you have or explaining things that you yourself that you can't explain or whatever it is these are the psychological explanations for why people make up myths like this many of the stories are full both of them made up for those reasons some of them are recorded historical events but some are not many of them are made up that's for a certain General class of of myths 98% of myths fall into that class there's another tiny sliver 2% of all of all Mists which are a category of national experiential Traditions as I said before this is a very narrow class you got to have a whole nation that accepts it not a subass and not a group within a group a bunch of groups the whole nation accepts it as a tradition about their own history not about somebody else's history I went through the um um the the Great Book of book of myths uh I summarized it in my book uh and they actually have two cases in Greek in Greece there's a there's a a myth about what happened to the whole IR of cre and there's a myth in in England about what happened to a large geographically significant sized group of people in France but that's an English myth about France and a Greek myth about Creeds but you didn't have anywhere was a Nation about its own ancestry so and then the the the description has to be that the ancestry experienced an event where everyone experienced it not 16 people experienced it then came and told everybody else no everybody experienced it um and it's got to be the kind of event that would make a difference and that includes uh the black death in Europe and it includes significant defeat in war not always Victory because Victory could take place when your army is 200 mil away and conquers them but defeat means they invade you and they burn your houses and they rape your women and they uh take control and they tax you and so for and so on everybody in the defeated Nations know they they were defeated these are National experiential traditions and they happen all over the world lots of the Traditions aren't aren't neets they're different types of traditions but some of them are neets I'm talking about the sliver of world Traditions that are NE type Traditions that's a very small subclass the vast majority aren't about the whole ancestry everyone ex experiencing the event and the event being so spectacular that it would be remembered that's a very small subass and I say that although in the general group of traditions including the individuals and people turning the birds and bird the people and so forth and so on which aren't National experiential traditions in the general group there are lots of ones that we take for granted are false and then it would be natural to say if another one's claim to fame is it's part of this group that it's the only claim of Fame as part of the general group that's not a big claim to fame and we could easily ignore it and say that we have certainly no reason to think that it's true but when you restrict it to the National experiential Traditions all over the world in all Millennia so for so on some religious and some not religious and you find that for this subgroup no mistakes are made that is not coming from the same Source because the source that you're using and the source you're using to discredit the individuals is source that makes mistakes and in this case it doesn't make any mistakes well then it's not that source so at this point you have a phenomenon which is different from all the others and and here you have a kind of tradition which has never been known to make a mistake that's a good reason to think that the TR in it are true TR reation jewi tradition itself has known to be made a mistake no I don't know I said it I I use the plurals now every every in every sentence in the last three minutes I use the plurals and you reduced it to one again you mean the sliver of the greater myth have never been known to make a mistake the national experiential tradition of the of the Greeks fighting the Romans and losing the war and being slaughtered and chased back that's one of them nothing to Jews nothing to do with Revelation nothing to do with Moses or chabas or anything else has to do with Greek history right migration uh we all came from such and such a place and this was our route and we came here and we settled here we had difficult this when we got here it's over the sword we invented the bow and arrow at a certain time and the bow and arrow spread throughout the country and everybody was shooting bows and arrows these are all national experiential traditions and no such tradition has ever been shown to be false so whatever is cre in this these these Traditions doesn't seem to make mistakes you're going to say that although we have none on record that's been shown to be false this one's false well then my claim is this you know the question what are you claiming that it could be false or it's probable that it's false if you claim that it could be false I give that to you I give all possibilities away you can have them but you don't make decisions on the basis of possibilities what you got to show is that it's probable that it's false and to show that it's probable that it's false you ought to have as I said 20 minutes ago at least six examples at least six of the hundreds of such Traditions you have at least six that you know are false if you don't have at least six then to say it's probable that it's false is I think unsupported yeah how do we um let's say m describe being a giant that or maral says the default position in mid Rush is that is not literal that's the default position and you can only know whether it's it's meant literally or Not by the maor so would the J I haven't looked that one up and you haven't looked it up either take a look at the see it might be about it of course I hope you're not going to take an operary position since it's we don't know it to be physically possible therefore it's got to be false that's dumb you'll excuse me you know coming from we're we're coming from we're not bound by the fact that our current science says that it's you like the one about the ages of people that so ran say was only one person in that generation in the beginning of Genesis right but even it was General right oh we know that can't be really you don't know why people age as a matter of fact look it up on Wikipedia which you trust more than the Bible you'll find out that there are 10 or different 15 different theories about why people age and none of them is verified if you don't know why people age and you don't know what the conditions were then and you know it's got to be false excuse me about not the I know what you're talking about I'm giving you an example of the kind of attitude that you meet all the time how can a person live to 900 you don't know he can't live to 900 you don't know that you don't know what makes people age and you don't know what the conditions were yeah when you say I guess how I think about it just I don't have to know that they can't live to 900 I just never seen that's never been the case as far as I'm aware so I'm not going to accept that to be true I think that's very close-minded of you if we said there are people alive today who are 900 years old then you can say I'm sorry I'm such a thing would be reported Guinness would found out about it and uh hasn't reported isn't true today but he's telling you it was true 5,000 years ago why would you use your experience of what's going on today to predict what was going on 5,000 years ago I guess assumptions of the fact that's that science is that the world is uniform but I I just think that's some far more reasonable candidate than the supernatural one okay that's your opinion but that's not a reason that's not a reason that should convince anybody else I think that it's far more reasonable okay reasons why I think that Reas you do well I would have opined that the person was listening you would have uh the freedom to disagree with those reasons as well so okay so the NT or NE is this works was being that we' never had one that's been proving to FSE in the sliver but if in the sliver and there are National Revelation claims of supernal occurrences and we don't know them to be false and that the religious claims are mutual exclusive so how do you think of that because they both can't be no I I think that's right and I I took a a number of them seriously and I've published the answers to to the ones that people have sent me and it sometimes like in the Aztec case it to cost considerable research and I and I did it and it's published so you can you can look it up it's on your blog and ful illustrates what about like the Lakota for instance with the cow and the entire tribe or the if I'm not mistaken uh there's no date oh right because okay so another factor is you have to have a history of dates I say explicitly in the chapter that if it's put further in from the past and of course you don't give any date then it's could be any time P right once upon a time it happened when I'm not telling you so then that's not going to be a candidate um with with morals um should one only take morals from the CL or can one also use morals from that Cy morals that's a very very tricky question because our sources say who created us with the ability to know toen ra on our own beginning of the the stud of says explicitly that person knows the difference between to and ra and he says that if your if your reason tells you that something is right to do and you do it you'll get a and if your reason tells you something's wrong to do and you violate it and you do the wrong thing you'll get an own so that means that your intellectual understanding of right and wrong is enough to be of you and you get to so you can't simply say that I you turn you know just accept what the the deliverances are of the tradition furthermore when you look at rishonim especially but even garas you'll find that when you have that stated by explicit P they use moral reasoning to determine how to understand the P um you know how NE is is learned right and they should split that only works if the two live Ox originally were worth equal and it doesn't say that in the and you might have said was running the world if this is a thousand this is 100 he talked I'm doing what he told me to do I'm doing his following his rules and that's the right thing to do but it's wrong Rashi reads the P of what happens if may God don't go over to fight he reads it as if they don't go over to fight then they get their portion inside of inside of er Israel so says that's not fair you didn't fight why should you get abortion and therefore he rejects Rashi the and Tes it otherwise so you have to it's a very tricky question when you say the Torah like shim where the struggle to have any kind of explanation for that at all the fact that when you borrowed it you asked the B for a cup of water and he gave you a cup of water and you put it from all from from all sh right so sometimes the the tradition is so strong it says we don't understand it maybe we can't understand it but many many times the Torah um Builds on the fact that you're going to have a certain a certain uh moral understanding and part of this comes from the fact that has described the [Music] if you didn't have those Concepts and you couldn't use them if everything that came in the Shi was automatically right you could never you could never read that P that is telling you something that you're supposed to be able to see right so the the the simple minded says how do you know what God means by good well if I don't know what he means by good how can he tell me to investigate and see it I must understand understand it otherwise he's not talking to me and he told me so uh there the the the Torah Builds on a natural moral Instinct and it informs that instinct and sometimes it says things which are contr that instinct and then you learn to modify this where he says that where you can't come to the conclusion without using the Torah sources on the subject what about stealing someone's livelihood moving into the town which has room for one and the guy's there and you move in you set up shop and you undercut his prices and you try out of business so and so on that's right certainly and it's it's a logical Rule and it's a a rule of set and everything else but there's one exception that's tell the Torah you can move in and you can set up competition and you can drive the guy out because you're a better teacher of tal Torah and that's fine the Tor didn't tell you that you wouldn't believe that you would say 5 was late alive you ah but Tom is more important than protecting the person allow you okay the Torah has to tell me that so certainly you don't want to draw any conclusion on the basis of your of your own world understanding without taking the torah's input I'm just pointing out that the torah's input sometimes relies on that uh that H it's a very subtle interplay of um of uh of of Reliance and I think different shown him uh function different ways Tois in general is boldly independent uh how many times does say something say either there's even one place I'll tell you not have to quit because I have to teach upstairs the gor says that because he made a kaber on his own he says um since midan hired bam to curse us and Mo just went along for the ride and it said we have made a war against Vian so we would make a war against Mo said no in Cas of Mo I don't want you to make a war right that's what the gor says says it never happened what theor says never happened and here a very simple proof that the P not fighting with no comes before the war of Mion thank you very much so couldn't have been a reaction to it no what thear means is like this if the P hadn't come before if mosha had only had the example of ban then Moshe would have didn't really in the real world but would have made a k Homer and then this puz would have been the answer to man or manevitz you know the gar quotes telling mosha it's a wrong says it didn't happen is very bold and they're not less from and they're not protoc conservative they're not they know that the Torah relies on logic and his words rely on logic and one of the most difficult things for me because I'm a D in words sometimes in kazal you have to be a d every word precisely and sometimes you have to look at look them over number of times says says so didn't really mean it so this this balance of relying on your own intellect and understanding versus sort of knuckling under to what the says and just taking at face value read the gro on the on the M the river the animals and everything else it's awesome aome some places if you say that they'll throw you out but don't say it about that's all okay this