People believeing something doesn’t prove that it is real. However, it depends what the belief is. For example, if I believe that I ate cookies this morning, that is evidence that I ate cookies. If I believe that I am a white male, that is evidence that I am. If I Joseph Smith claimed to believe that the Angel spoke to him, that is evidence that the Angel spoke to him. Reliable evidence? Infallible evidence? Overwhelming evidence? Not at all, but it is evidence.
Regarding Kuzari, as, yes, Marley, I really don’t want to get back to Kuzari, we have to diffrentiate between beliefs.
Some people believe that Jews are horrible people; some people used to believe that the earth sat on three turtles. Are those cases of irrational beliefs? Not really. Why? Because there is no evidence that that the Jews aren’t horrible, behind closed doors. There was no evidence that the earth didn’t sit on the back of three turtles.
However, believing that millions of your ancestors stood at the foot of sinai is strikingly dissimilar. Here, a prophet comes and tells the population: “Millions of your ancestors stood at sinai and were commanded to relate the miracles of sinai to you.” Here, if those events did not happen, people must have been extremely irrational to accept those beliefs. Extremely irrational.
People who aren’t impressed by Kuzari do so because they think that the ancients were barbarians who didn’t care about themselves, and weren’t selfish. There is no reason to come to that conclusion.
No, it is an unsupported claim, not evidence.
Claim =/= Evidence
Claim =/= Evidence
Claim =/= Evidence
Claim =/= Evidence
It’s not evidence at all, actually, at least not scientific evdience, which is all that matters. I don’t even see an argument for how it’s any evdience at all. Saying that claims can be evidence for themselves is not very logically sound.
Then
Quit
Using
The
Damn
Word
Over
And
Over
And
Over
Again.
The belief was irrational, and the explanation you’ve provided does not make it any less so. “You can’t prove it didn’t happen” is not a rational basis for a belief. In fact it’s the ultimate irrational defense for a belief.
The alleged prophets didn’t say there were millions of people there.
People are frequently irrational. But again, you are assuming these people knew what they were being told was not true. I doubt they did. Taking the word of someone you trust is a lot less irrational than deciding you believe something which you know is not true.
No, it isn’t. That’s the claim, and we evaluate the claim based on the evidence. (That is, if you hadn’t told us you ate cookies, we wouldn’t know about it one way or the other.) If we’re dealing with a claim about what you ate this morning, most people would take you at your word because there probably won’t be much evidence either way and your claim is within the realm of our experience. We’ve all eaten cookies. It’s unlikely we will find any evidence you didn’t eat cookies, so we leave it at that. If we have reason to doubt you are telling the truth, like knowing you are on the Atkins Diet or that you are traveling in a country where cookies are forbidden under penalty of death, then maybe we’d want more evidence.
Actually no those beliefs are not evidence. For example if a person says I must have eaten the cookies because everyone told me I did, that is not evidence. If the person recalls eating the cookies that is. In the case of some ancient writings it is not. We don’t know if it is a myth or an actual memory or what and we can not cross examine the writer and in most cases the writer and the witness are not even the same person.
Yes, those are irrational beliefs. There’s no evidence that there isn’t a china teapot orbiting the Sun between Earth and Mars. Is it therefore rational for me to believe there is a teapot there, despite the lack of positive evidence? No, it’s an irrational belief because there is no basis for that belief.
Well, if by “extremely irrational” you mean “typically irrational for a member of Homo sapiens” then you’re right.
Not at all. If we go with the evidence - basically that this didn’t happen - we can simply surmise that over a long period of time the people grew to hear this story and accept it as true. Same thing with the world sitting on three turtles. Urab myths arise this way all the time.
I would much like to prefer to discuss Pascal’s Wager and Biblical criticism - i.e., whether Moses wrote the Torah or not - rather than the Kuzari proof. However, since I brought up the Kuzari proof, and people have responded to it, I think I guess I have to respond to those points. Sorry, if I am goind to be extremely brief, since I would rather discuss other stuff right now.
Smiley: You claim that it makes sense to you that the sinai history was not a de novo lie, a sort of big-bang where a “prophet” comes down from the mountain and says ‘500 years ago, all your ancestors experienced miracles and started to keep the sabbath forever.’ However, you claim that it evolved slowly, over many centuries.
As much as it makes sense to you, you would have to admit that your scenario is quite unlikely. WHY? Because national, commemorated history has not evolved anywhere else. It is for this exact reason that I don’t take your hypothesis too seriously. Because, it is not in line with the facts, the facts of how rational nations act.
His scenario is more likely than yours. He’s proposing that people tell stories about themselves and that those stories evolve over time. You’re proposing the existence of God, miracles, and a series of events contradicted by historical evidence.
If something only happens once, then it’s hard to call it “likely.” The existence of God or miracles isn’t inherently likely or unlikely. Once we have evidence for those realities, we accept it.
If we you would hear God’s voice on sinai, roaring at you, “Observe the Sabbath day,” would you believe in God? Probably, despite the fact that it may seem likely that this was a case of mass hallucination. As likely as hallucination may seem to you, you yourself realize that you haven’t hallucinated in your lifetime, and you will therefor be confident that God does exist.
Regarding the issue of archeology, I don’t think the case against the Exodus is as absolute as Hitchens’ “God is not Great” would make it seem.
This seems to be an excuse for the fact that gods don’t fit anywhere into the observable universe or even a logical explanation for the universe. Sorry, I don’t buy this at all. By definition, creator gods are as difficult to explain as the universe is, and then there’s the added difficulty in explaining how they got there.
I haven’t read the book, so this isn’t relevant. The evidence that was laid out in the last thread was overwhelming, and in the end you fell back on unproved observations about the Egyptians erasing their own history (which they didn’t do) and miracles covering up some of the evidence (and miracles being what they are, you had no evidence for the claim that was supposed to excuse your lack of evidence).
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You seem to be focused on Dawkins’ “Ultimate 747” argument, that the existence of god is unlikely. However, the existence of everything is unlikely. The universe, and life, are unlikely, but we still believe that life exists.
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I am not an expert in archeology. I was merely pointing out that: The egyptains didn’t record embarrasing event. Furthermore, I said, they erased, or tried to erase the existence of one of their king. Diogenes claimed that they didn’t erase his name; they rather defaced it to the point that it was no longer legible.
He may be right. He may be wrong. But my orginial point stands: the egyptians never recorded their defeats. ALL ANCIENT “HISTORY”, not just Egypt’s, was propaganda. That was the style of the ancient historical records (the only egyptians who could write were the Pharaoh and his payed scribes). The only historical document that criticizes itself is, not surprisingly, the Bible.
Another problem is this. If you were in Egypt and you saw the Exodus, would you believe it, despite the fact that the egyptians didn’t record it?
If you were in the Holocaust, and the Germans erased all their documents, would you believe it? Of course you would. Because your own vision is good enough evidence, that even if the oh-so-compassionate egyptians decided not to record it you believe your eyes. I beleive my national, commemorated history.
Are you claiming that everything is equally unlikely?
That’s nice. Tell me-do any other nations possess this “national, commemorated history” that you rely on?
That doesn’t mean everything is equally unlikely. And we do exist.
You were wrong about that. And there would have been other evidence not recorded by the Egyptians. Both those points was explained to you over and over again.
I really don’t know. I guess we can extrapolate a bit. Once we know that life exists on earth, we can have a hunch that it exists elsewhere. But assuming we would have no evidence that any universes exist, I would say that the existence of the universe is as unlikely as he existence of God.