Is there any evidence whatsoever that would lead you to conclude that the Kuzari proof is non-valid?
If so, can you enumerate how you would test it?
There are so many posts, I simply don’t have the time to answer all of them. I will just pick a few.
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Regarding Joseph, according to the Jewish Oral Tradition he wasn’t buried in Egypt. His coffin was dunked in the Nile, and Moses raised his bones from the Nile during the time of the Exodus, and was subsequently buried in Shechem. See Translation of Jonathan Ben Uziel to Exodus 13:19 (circa 100 B.C.). The reason for this practice was that Jacob and Joseph were frightened that if they were buried in Egypt, they would be worshiped as a diety. They therefore pre-arraigned that they should not be buried in Egypt.
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Hunter Halk, this is how one could show that the Kuzari proof is not valid. If one could show a national event, not neccesarily 2 million people, but it should be a similarly large group of people, which viewed an event which could not have been the product of a hallucination, and that event was believed by the descendants of those people. Finally, that event must have been believed to have been commemorated by those people who saw the event.
The logic of the Kuzari proof is simple. We claim that this event could not have been foisted upon the Jewish people, since they would have immediately asked “If millions of our ancestors saw miracles for forty years, and were commanded to commemorate those events FOREVER, then why haven’t we ever heard of the event.” The skeptic will respond that the event could have over a long period of time. We tell the skeptic, fine, you may be right. The event may have evolved, but we have no reason to assume that your scenario is possible since we haven’t ever encountered a NATIONAL, HALLUCINATION-PROOF, COMMEMORATED EVENT which was false. -
Kinthalis, wonderful point. Yes, their records were burned in Alexandria. I have no reason to assume that the records of the Exodus were fire-proof. They probably burned in Alexandria, if they were ever written.
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The Jews in the desert could not leave archeological remains, since their “clothes did not whither, and their shoes did not rub out,” according to the miraculous version described in the Bible.
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I know there were many other points. I am sorry that I simply don’t have the time to respond. C U 2morrow.
Did they make camp?
Did they shit?
I’d just like to say that when you believe something and someone shows you factual evidence that it’s not true, an honest person would reconsider his belief.
If you’re simply gonna hold on to your belief no matter how little evidence there is for it and how much there is against it, you aren’t debating. You’re reciting bullshit that makes you comfortable.
Sorry repeat
Point 4 is patently ridiculous, but even if we were to accept it for the sake of argument, footprints and clothes are not the kind of evidence we would be expected to find anyway. Where are the tools, bones, fires, graves, habitations and mountains of shit?
I was going to bring this up. American national hearsay has George Washington as first president, and, more relevantly, when I was a kid has him throwing a dollar across the Potomac, which would be a miracle. Even better, this latter miracle was written down by someone very soon after his death, not hundreds of years later. Yet this national hearsay is incorrect.
And many people even cared about correct history 210 years ago when Parson Weems wrote.
Can you provide operational definitions of “national”, “hallucination-proof”, “commemorated”, “event”, and “false”?
The same argument has been floated, and shot down, before:
Is the Roman army at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge big enough to meet that criterion?
Plenty of Italian Catholics will tell you that IN HOC SIGNO VINCES was the word of God and could not possibly be attributed to hallucination by anyone but obnoxious heathens.
Are you suggesting he wasn’t? Because he was the first man to hold the job we now think of as being ‘President of the United States of America’, given that the job is defined in the Constitution and not the Articles of Confederation.
There were men who held the job of being presiding member of Congress prior to George Washington. That is not the same position.
(I only bring this up because some people, often people who make those annoying ‘little known facts (that are likely wrong)’ lists, actually think Washington wasn’t the first President. And given that we’re talking about how important it is to get these things right… )
It’s really interesting how religion blinds people. I find it hard to fathom that the OP can’t understand that if the exodus is fiction then his central argument is gone.
A huge group of people witnessing something isn’t evidence, if the people aren’t real.
Ftr, it’s not the OP. I’m the OP. I just had trouble for a bit trying to figure out how to (shortly) explain to interlocutors why the argument is BS. But now I figured it out (see my earlier comment in that vein).
My bad, I remembered the thread from way back and didn’t reread the first few posts. I assumed abele derer had started it. I apologize.
I can prove the Fantastic 4 really did battle Galactus. After all, the event was seen by thousands of New Yorkers.
That right there is awesome.
That’s very true.
The reason the idea is very enticing for certain groups is that, in their mind, it isn’t just “a huge group of people”. It’s their ancesters. Their direct great-great-great-…-grandfather. And, they feel, well, their father wouldn’t lie to them, and their grandfather wouldn’t lie to their father, and their great-grandfather wouldn’t lie to their grandfather, and so on, so it must be true.
When you put it into terms like that it becomes very personal. It’s not just a religious belief, it’s your own relatives, whom you trust more than anyone else. For some people, that’s very powerful.
No, no. Just pointing out that some of the things in the “national hearsay” are right, and some are wrong. Everybody knowing something, especially if they get fed it for political or social reasons, is not guarantee that it is right.
Specifically, that the second temple exists says nothing about the Exodus or Moses.
Voyager: Ah, OK.
A lot of speculation is going on about the astronomical knowledge in earlier times (even cave paintings have been re-interpreted in the past decades by some archeologists to symbolize constellations and periodic astronomical events). We know that we have underestimated the knowledge of the Bronze Age in that respect considerably since we have found the Nebra sky disc.
We also know that the Saros cycle was mentioned in Babylonian astronomical texts as early as 750 BC; once you know this cycle, you are able to predict the corresponding eclipses of the sun and the moon pretty reliably.
I am not aware of any Egyptian documents that show a similar level of knowledge, but I find it hard to believe that they were totally ignorant of such an observation when they showed so much interest in astronomy in other respects and maintained contact with their neigbours.
Still, we don’t know much about the mathematical abilities of the older Egyptian culture; the papyrii „Rhind“ and „Moscow“ are our most important documents in this regard and neither they nor the other fragments that are already translated contain any mention of the calculation of eclipses.
If you have any other information, I’d be glad to hear it.
All in all, I find it reasonable to assume that the astronomers/priests/higher civil servants in the cultural sphere around the Mediterranean Sea either had a precise knowledge of astronomical events or, in principle, access to it long before the known Greek calculations.
But we also know that not all knowledge was (or is) convenient; the Egyptian priests, for example, refused to abandon their traditional solar calendar even after they had learned of better alternatives and couldn’t miss or hide the fact that the date for the heliathic rising of Sirius (Sôthis) was, well, out of date another day every four years – which meant that it took 1460 years for the calendar year and the natural/real year to match up again.
Tradition and religion are the most likely and also somewhat documented reasons for their refusal to change anything.
I don’t know the reason for the absence of almost any mention of eclipses in Egyptian documents; maybe they were indeed not noteworthy, as you pointed out (though I’d consider this less likely given their religious beliefs), maybe we have simply not found them – after all, it’s unreasonable to think that the Egyptians didn’t have a rich library of math papyrii, even though we have found so little.
But it’s also possible – and reasonable – to assume that the influence of the priests played a crucial role in this question. Religion and denial seem to be a happy couple. 
Whatever the reason, this is not one of the cases where the absence of evidence points to the evidence of absence, unlike the examples Dio mentioned. We know very, very little for sure.