Important to Me: Kuzari Principle, or Proof From Mass Revelation

Great Debates
1

Alrighty, this is one of the more unique arguments for religion I’ve seen. It’s called The Kuzari Principle and Orthodox Jews I talk to LOVE it. Really, many proclaim that this is it for them, the big thing nobody can disprove because it’s just that logical and shows Orthodox Judaism to be the only religion that could – nay, must – be completely true. The guy who has most developed it, apologist Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb (ph.D from Brandeis in mathematical logic and former Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins, don’chya know?), even took time to respond to three critiques of it which can be read online – here, here, and in a back-and-forth with blogging skeptic Larry Tanner (Tanner’s arguments and his back-and-forth with Gottlieb can be found here and like blogs generally should be read from bottom-post-to-top).

I don’t see what’s so convincing about it in the first place (after all, aren’t there lots of people out there making crazy claims of massive groups of people witnessing crazy stuff, e.g. the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima? Who cares if one is crazier than the rest? Don’t we have to take other things – like magic, witches, a global flood, and an off-dating of when the Bible was written – in order to buy into Orthodox Judaism?). But my friends don’t seem very convinced by my logic on this one (as opposed to other arguments). What is the most convincing way to debunk the Kuzari Principle to people who are willing to hear you out but think it sounds like a super-logical theory?

2

Just skimming the article, but it sounds kinda silly. So thousands of people allegedly witnessed a miracle. If we teleported all those thousands of people to today, and they all told the same story, then yes, that would be noteworthy. But just because someone writes down that there were a thousand witnesses doesn’t make it true. Does the Bible mention the testimony of every individual there? Suppose a reporter walked up to the crowd and interviewed just one person, and that person told their made-up version of the story and assured that if the reporter asked any one of the others they’d confirm it. Who’s gonna know?

In fact, I could imagine a scenario where the multiple people all embellish the story to each other with subconscious suggestion. As an example, imagine you and your friend witness an accident. Later on your friend is describing the story to a reporter and insists that one of the drivers was wearing a blue hat. If he hadn’t mentioned the hat, you would never have remembered it, but by the mere mention of the hat, you suddenly “remember” it, and then it becomes part of your side of the story too, even if the hat never actually existed. This happens all the time with “implanted” childhood memories, where your parents will tell you of something you did as a kid that you may not remember, but after hearing the story you’ll suddenly “remember” it. Memories are not like video recordings; each time you remember something, you’re really just making up a fictional story that resembles what little you really remember.

It’s even worse since thousands of years ago, people as a whole were more superstitious, so you could make a supernatural claim, and your audience would be more likely to believe you, and reinforce your story, even if it’s exaggerated or completely made up. You may not do it intentionally to deceive, it’s just something that our brains naturally do.

3

Millions of people believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya.

4

It seems like a circular argument: “If Event X happened, lots of people would believe it happened. Lots of people believe Event X happened, so it must have happened.” This doesn’t strike me as particularly convincing.

It also relies on the assumption that the Jewish people are somehow exceptional with regard to their standards of evidence. That is, if Jewish people generally believe something to be true, this principle applies because they have high standards, but if some other group (e.g. Catholic believers) believe something (e.g. the miracle of the Sun at Fatima) to be true, this principle doesn’t apply because their standards are low.

5

FWIW, I’m Orthodox, and I’m not a fan.
ETA: A brief outline of issues with the theory by a major Orthodox blogger can be found here.

6

If someone found an hieroglyphic inscription outlining the plagues of Egypt, THEN I would be impressed.

No one has yet? Right? I was planning on giving up my life of debauchery, but I think I need a few more days.

7

I am one of those Orthodox Jews who agrees with the Kuzari proof.

I will outline a few of the faults of the arguments against the Kuzari proof mentioned here.

  1. “Argument from the lack of corroborating evidence.” This is where someone says he distrusts the Kuzari evidence since we don’t have an additional, extra-textual, account of the sinai miracles. This is flawed since he is not responding to the kuzari evidence. He is merely claiming that other evidence is lacking, to which kuzari enthusiasts don’t disagree. We are merely claiming that the EVIDENCE WE DO HAVE CANNOT BE IGNORED.

  2. “Argument from the fact that many people have false beliefs.” This is when someone points out that since there are many false beliefs such as people believing that “Obama was born in Kenya” it implies that the Kuzari evidence can also be false. This is a complete non-sequitor. Kuzari enthusiast don’t claim that people can’t be wrong. We claim that a national HISTORY, which was believed to have been seen by millions of a nations ancestry, has never shown itself to be false. Since this historical belief has never shown itself to be false, we have no reason to assume that such a belief is fallible.

  3. “Argument from the fact that hallucinations are common or that memories are fallible.” Here is where skeptics point out that the people at Fatima hallucinated when they saw the sun (hallucinating when staring at the sun is quite common and has happened many times in history to large groups of people), or the fact that people who smoke drugs often have visions of false events. The flaw is that the skeptics use the existence of hallucinations - which are indeed common - to undermine an event which simply could have been the product of a hallucination. This is because the Jews believe that millions of their ancestors ate only manna for 14,600 days straight. If large numbers of people, millions of people, have never hallucinated for 14,600 days straight, the skeptic must show why he assumes that could have happened here, other than for the fact that it allows him to persist in his " life of debauchery", to use dzero’s words.

8

What evidence do we have that thousands of people viewed these miracles?

9

Interestingly, Wikipedia has deleted the article for being non-notable–it apparently appears in very few places outside of the rabbi’s self-published book and a few blogs. Abele, I take it you googled the term and came across this website therefore?

10

Following on from the prior post… it’s all well and good that supposedly lots of people saw something, but only one or two people recorded it. So even accepting the premise that lots of people believed this stuff, we only have one person’s account of the fact that they believed it.

Kuzari essentially ignores the issue of hearsay.

11
  1. We do not ignore the issue of hearsay. However, we claim that certain forms of hearsay - namely, national hearsay - has never shown itself to be false. If we have a form of evidence which has never, not once, shown itself to be fallible, we can confidently assume that the evidence is not fallible.
  2. We don’t care about how many accounts we have for the miracles (we happen to have two, Moses and Joshua, who each record the miracles in their own books). The issue is from the fact that the Jewish people BELIEVE that the events recorded in the Bible happened to their ancestors. Since that form of belief has never shown itself to be false, we are dumfounded why the whole skeptical community presumes that the evidence is fallible.
12

“National hearsay” is not a sensible idea. Nations don’t hear about such things, humans hear about such things. Nations similarly don’t write about such things, humans write about such things.

And the religions of the book are somewhat sui generis, inasmuch as they take as (pardon me) gospel the words of a few people.

So I reject the idea that there’s any such thing as national hearsay, much less that it’s infallible; rather, your claim is that if enough people believe that a single person’s word is accurate, there are no counterexamples in which it’s inaccurate. But by making this particular claim, you essentially exclude from examination all possible counterexamples.

13

This is more of a driveby post but I have been following the thread off and on. It seems that a lot of emphasis in support of the conjecture (I don’t think it deserves to be called a proof in any rigorous sense) seems to be placed on the absence of any proof that the facts or methodology involved have never been shown to be false. I don’t see how that amounts to affirmative support for the conjecture. I can postulate that there is a layer of reality just below our own populated by gnomes and they are responsible for the way things work in the reality we can observe. There has never been any proof that this is NOT the case, but certainly that lends my theory little or no credibility.

14

nm

15

Not a driveby, I just put it up awhile back and didn’t notice people were still responding to it. Apparently, abele joined Straight Dope yesterday and has only responded to this thread…

I finally figured out how to explain to people what my problem with the proof is and did so in a blog comment at the Seforim blog: New Writings from R Kook Part 1 by Marc B. Shapiro . Here are the important bits:
To Whom it May Concern,

…just to get my thoughts out on the Kuzari Principle:

…the Kuzari Principle simply ignores the classical process of myth-formulation. The question the Jews supposedly would have asked if the Torah wasn’t given to Moses…at Sinai – “how could this be true if my granddad didn’t tell me” – is easily answered: …your great-great-great-grandparents forgot what God had commanded them. The Redactor, akin to the Council of Nicaea, decided what’s holy and what’s not holy. Mendy [=a commenter at the blog] points to Shoftim [=Judges] as an example of where the Jews forgot God (…the fact that it can be read according to the interpretation of Mendy is what’s important; we only need to show it’s quite plausible the KP is wrong…I personally think Mendy’s interpretation seems truer to the original text, but nu); in Nechemia 8 it appears that the Jews had never heard of parts of the Bible and suddenly were “reminded” by Ezra. For a somewhat speculative account of what may have happened, see Who wrote the Bible? (Part 1) - The Straight Dope .

There’s another problem too. Dovid Gottlieb [=apologist for Haredi Judaism] for one maintains based on the principle that “We have sufficient evidence to require us to believe that the Torah is true. The only choice we have is to be rational or irrational.” Because Gottlieb thinks the Kuzari Principle is true, the Torah must be true. Therefore, Gottlieb (and IIRC this applies to Frumteens as well) can wave all the evidence for evolution and all the evidence for an old earth away because he has a mesorah: “The solution to the contradiction between the age of the earth and the universe according to science and the Jewish date of 5755 years since Creation is this: the real age of the universe is 5755 years…The bones, artifacts, partially decayed radium, potassium-argon, uranium, the red-shifted light from space, etc. - all of it points to a greater age which nevertheless is not true. G-d put these things in the universe and they lead many to the false conclusion of a much greater age.” Instead of us having to reinterpret all of our evidence for the universe’s age based on philosophical speculation, isn’t it more likely that the Kuzari Principle may just seem true to the person who wants it to be, but really evolution is true, the earth is old, the Bible is exactly what it looks like (an ancient text which includes some really barbaric ancienct ideas), and bad things happen to good people (like, say, child rape or child torture…how can a benevolent god watch that with folded arms?) because life is unfair and there is no benevolent god? Occam’s Razor seems to demand we adhere to that logic. If we overstep Occam’s Razor, we might as well think the world is flat (as the Shevus Yaakov [=17th century rabbinic authority] did, since he maintained it was obvious from the Torah that the world was flat. Like Gottlieb, the Shevus Yaakov had prior philosophical reasons for believing in the Torah’s infallibility and from that, could conclude that our science was wrong).

Anyways, that’s my two cents. Orech [=another commenter at the blog] is free to disagree. He wrote, “We have teachers, libraries, internet, friends, many of us have professors…” If he’s discussed [his] positions with a university bible scholar (re the idea of single authorship by a God-inspired Moses), a logician (re the Kuzari Principle), and a biologist (re evolution), then kol hakavod! It’s important before making one’s leap into religion to discuss the proofs with the people who would be experts on those proofs; otherwise, one can accidentally fall for ones own biases without realizing it (that’s human nature and trust me, I realize it; I was frum for four years). So if he’s done that, I think we can just agree to disagree. If he hasn’t, I would suggest he at least reconsider his views based on what the gedolim [=great ones, usually referring to big rabbis] in the fields have to say, and then we can agree to disagree.

Sincerely,
Baruch Pelta

16

This is actually a convincing proof to some people? Wow.

What evidence would that be? There wasn’t any Moses, no Exodus, no events at Sinai. This is a mythical story, not a historical one.

This is incorrect. The entire Moses myth has been proven false by archaeological evidence. Not a bit of it ever happened. The Israelites were never enslaved in Egypt, never left, never wandered in the wilderness, never witnessed anything at Mt. Sinai. The entire story is bullshit made up sometime between the 6th and 8th Centuries.

It isn’t necessary to go here since there were no thousands of people claiming to have seen anything in the first place.

17

“National hearsay is never fallible?” Whatever national hearsay is, I take it, then, that you believe King Arthur really pulled a sword from a stone and was crowned King of England?

Are you sure about that? I vaguely remember reading that there is some extra-Biblical evidence for the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, though not for any of the plagues or the desert-wandering stuff.

18

Nope. Nothing. They were never even in Egypt. The story may be vaguely based on garbled memories of the Hyksos expulsion, but the Hyksos were not Israelites (and that event happened before the Israelites even existed yet).

19

Many interesting points have been made, and I will try to answer them, although I may leave out a couple of points which I find to be tandential. If you find them to be central, please bring it up in the next post.

  1. “Left Hand” claimed that there is no such thing as national hearsay, or, National, Commemorated events. I don’t know where you got that idea from. For example, the Jews believe that there was a Second Temple in Jerusalem (let’s ignore for the moment the archeological evidence, and the ancient manuscripts of the Temple, for the sake of the argument). If a skeptic claims that there was never a Temple, we respond that since we believe that our entire nation saw the Temple in Jerusalem, and was commemorated by the same people who saw the Temple by Holidays such as Chanuka and Tisha B’av, we find that this form of national hearsay is reliable since we haven’t found a case in which it has shown itself to be false.

  2. Regarding the issue of archeology, I wonder how archeology can ever prove a negative? Did they find everything that ever existed? Furthermore, the Egyptians were notorious about not leaving any trace of embarrasing events (see what they tried to do to Anakhenton).

  3. Baruch’s point is convoluted, but I will try to reason with his comments. He claims that since we have evidence against the Torah – i.e., evolution – we must disregard the evidence for the Torah. Why, specifically, do you favor the evidence for evolution against the evidence for the Torah? Should you not, at least, be an agnostic about which evidence to follow? In fact, Rabbi Gottlieb’s approach seems to be logical, since he is accepting the evidence for evolution; however, he is claiming that the evidence was planted by God. Indeed, God himself is called the “Hidden God” by Isiah. He doesn’t leave in-your-face evidence for His miraculous actions (the whole point of Judaism is “Attem Eidai” - "You, Israel, are My witnesses, in the sense that the Jewish nation testifies to the Creator, instead of in-your-face evidence).

  4. See Rabbi Gottlieb’s comments about the event in Nehemia on his blog.

  5. In Judges, it does not mean that the entire nation forgot about the miracles of Sinai. Indeed, Pinhas himself is recorded at the end of Judges, and he was one of the people who saw the Sinai miracles with his own two eyes. So your reading of the verse was certianly not THE INTENT OF ITS AUTHOR.

  6. Diogenes: “Most scholars,” according to the Encara Encyclopedia, believe that the Hebrews were the “Habiru” not the Hyksos, so you are beating a straw man.

20

You keep saying “we”, as if you were officially designated to speak for all of Israel-you are not, and neither is the originator of this theory. You cannot read the minds of all Jews and you have no idea what they believe in their heart of hearts. The most you can claim is that you believe that there was a second temple and that you believe without evidence of any sortthat other Jews believe the same. Your beliefs have the same merit as those who claim that secretly all atheists believe in God and fear and/or hate him.
Once again-your belief that the entire nation saw the temple in Jerusalem is not proof that this is true.