Faith – Lesson 37

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And we say that the entire Jewish people stood at Mount Sinai. That is of course not a historical claim; it’s a normative claim. A claim that says this is binding—hold on, there’s some noise here—the claim is that it binds us as if we all stood there. But it binds us not because we actually stood there, but because the community accepted it upon itself, and de facto it is as if the whole community in fact stood there. Now, to children in kindergarten they explain this in a simple way. Adults need to understand what this is about. Just like, “Everything that an experienced student will one day innovate was shown by the Holy One, blessed be He, to Moses at Sinai.” I don’t believe that happened—not in the slightest. Clearly the intention here is to make a claim, but it’s a normative claim, not a historical one. The normative claim is that everything an experienced student will one day innovate is binding as if it had been transmitted from Sinai, since it emerged from interpretation of the Torah that we received there. So it doesn’t matter whether we actually received it there or not, because de facto we did receive it there. Because we received the Torah, and this is the interpretation we understand—yes, this is its interpretation as we understand it. A great many statements of this kind are statements that we relate to as though they were factual statements, but really the intention is normative statements and not factual ones. So that’s just something to remember in the background, just a general lesson for life too.

But for our purposes, I really do want now to go back and divide things up. So if not everyone stood there, then there are indeed two stages: one stage is those who stood there, and the second stage is the transmission from them to us. Regarding those who stood there, I spoke about that last time. I explained that although one could have said—and this logic will come back later too, so I’m summarizing it here—one could have said: look, Abraham received the command of the Holy One, blessed be He, “Take your son, your only one, whom you love, and offer him up as a burnt offering.” He could have said this was a hallucination. After all, he had very good proofs that this was a hallucination and not that the Holy One, blessed be He, was telling him this. The Holy One, blessed be He, had told him, “Through Isaac shall your offspring be called,” so how could it be that now he would kill Isaac and his offspring would be called through Isaac? And that’s logic. Morally too, it couldn’t be that the Holy One, blessed be He, who insists on morality, would expect him to kill his son. So he had every proof in the world to think that this thing was a hallucination. And Abraham did not think so. He rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and set out. He was ready to do it. Why? Because one could have said to him: look, this is so far-fetched that it’s much more reasonable to say this was a hallucination than that the Holy One, blessed be He, appeared to you. Exactly like the dilemma of Mount Sinai. Why do you think the Holy One, blessed be He, appeared? Maybe you had some kind of hallucination. Especially since in Abraham’s case it’s even more far-fetched than Mount Sinai—but we’ll see that in a moment.

In any case, the claim I made there was that there is some kind of unmediated encounter of people with a phenomenon or event or whatever it may be, where you set all the proofs aside—in practice, it is simply clear to me that it happened. That’s all. Now, I was never a prophet, the Holy One, blessed be He, never spoke to me, so I don’t know what it is like to hear the voice of God reveal itself and speak to me. But Abraham experienced it. So I, as someone who doesn’t know this, gave the parable of the blind man and the sighted man. I, as someone who doesn’t know this, ask all sorts of questions: wait, this isn’t logical, why didn’t you think it was a hallucination? But Abraham our forefather says: forget it, you’re simply blind. You never experienced this thing yourself, this encounter with divine revelation, and therefore you think you have all kinds of arguments one way or another. But I experienced it, and I’m telling you that He revealed Himself. What is there to discuss here? There’s nothing to split hairs about. So maybe he wouldn’t convince me, but for him himself it’s obvious that he went with it. He went with it because that encounter happened. It’s like a seeing person who can’t convince a blind person—who says that what he sees isn’t an illusion? The blind man says to him: listen, maybe it’s an illusion, who says it isn’t? A blind man who was blind from birth never experienced sight, so he doesn’t understand the certainty that accompanies sight. So it’s hard to explain it to him, but on the other hand all his arguments won’t help. If I saw something, then that’s the situation.

Rabbi, can I ask something about that? Briefly, because this was from last time. Yes, of course. Right, but I wanted to ask then and didn’t get the chance. What the Rabbi is saying, and also the parable of the blind man and the sighted man—that’s true in the moment itself. Really, when you see something with your eyes, people can talk to you, explain to you, but you see it. But after a day passes, two days, a week, a month, a year, you say, wait, now I’m relying only on memory. Quietly we can think, you know what, we see this infinitely often, that even if people saw something, afterward—for example Holocaust survivors say to this day, I still can’t believe it happened at all. The answer here is the same answer, and it’s a little connected to what I’ll talk about today regarding the chain of transmission, because it’s already starting to move in that direction. But the answer is the same answer. You’re right, you have an excellent argument. Now I ask you whether you think what you went through yesterday happened or didn’t happen. Of course it did, right? Or a week ago, or a year ago. So true, there are confusions, and sometimes it’s not always precise, and the details can get messed up. All true. But broadly speaking, we trust not only what we saw but also our memory of what we saw. That’s all. So this case is not exceptional; it’s exactly the same thing. But memory deceives all of us massively all the time. I can raise all these skeptical questions about anything you tell me happened a year ago. And you don’t cast doubt on everything you experienced a year ago, right? So why should I need—answer me yourself—why should I need to answer you? You conduct yourself the same way. If I remembered now that an angel had spoken to me a year ago and told me some bizarre thing, then maybe now I would probably be convinced to say that I probably had one drink too many. I have news for you: that’s simply because an angel never spoke to you. Meaning, if an angel had once spoken to you, believe me, you would remember it in such a way that you wouldn’t cast even the slightest doubt on it. Someone from the outside who didn’t experience it, of course, would ask you skeptical questions, like I said before with the blind man and the sighted man, but for you yourself it would be clear that it was true. And that seems simple to me.

In any case, let’s move now to transmission. So that was the first stage, the generation that stood there at Mount Sinai. Now I ask what happens with the chain of transmission from there onward. Maybe it got distorted, maybe it never happened at all and was somehow implanted along the way. So the question is: what do we do with that? This begins, in fact, with what is called the witness argument, and when we talk about transmission, it is basically the witness argument, because the person transmitting gives testimony to the one hearing it from him. The beginning of the witness argument is actually found in the Torah itself. It says there in Deuteronomy: “Ask now of the former days that were before you, from the day that God created man upon the earth.” Yes—“Has a people ever heard the voice of God speaking from the midst of the fire, as you have heard, and lived? Or has God ever attempted to come and take for Himself a nation from the midst of another nation, through trials, signs, wonders, war, a strong hand, an outstretched arm, and great terrors, like all that the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes?” So here the Torah itself is speaking in terms of the witness argument. It says: “Has a people ever heard the voice of God speaking from the midst of the fire as you heard, or has God ever attempted to come and take for Himself a nation from the midst of another nation,” and all these events—there was never anything like it—so that is the proof that it’s true. Really the witness argument in the Torah itself.

Now here there’s a bit of room to discuss the first part—this is just an interpretive note. “Has a people ever heard the voice of God speaking from the midst of the fire as you heard, and lived?” I think the emphasis is on “and lived.” That is, did it ever happen that God spoke to a public and the public survived it? The claim is not about the speech itself being so special that therefore it’s clear there is truth here, but rather the claim is about how the Holy One, blessed be He, preserves us. Look, He spoke to all of us and we remained alive—meaning, we managed to endure this event and come out of it alive. But the second part, the continuation of the verses, is no longer speaking about that. “Or has God ever attempted to come and take for Himself a nation from the midst of another nation through trials, signs, wonders, war, a strong hand, an outstretched arm, and all that the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes?” That is already indeed a claim about the occurrence of the events themselves and the uniqueness of the whole matter. So that is already the basis, or an initial basis, for what later came to be called the witness argument.

Now, against that, of course, this argument is directed at the very people who received the Torah; this was said in that same generation, so it speaks to them. I’m asking now: what about us? They transmitted it to us over thousands of years. The question is whether we too—somewhat like the question that was asked earlier—whether after time has passed or after generations have passed, can still relate to what happened there as though there were really some clear proof here. Maybe over the generations there was distortion; it’s a myth that was implanted into our ethos, some lie that was born at some stage and then suddenly passed on, but really has no source—there never was a revelation at Mount Sinai.

Usually they attribute to the Kuzari the argument about the reliability of tradition, although in the Kuzari—I’m a very small-time expert in the Kuzari, but what I checked was really just a few small sentences. Here it is in Essay One. “The Rabbi said: In this way I answered you when you asked me. And likewise Moses began speaking to Pharaoh by saying to him, ‘The God of the Hebrews has sent me to you,’ meaning the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—since Abraham was famous among the nations, and that the word of God joined itself to them and guided them and performed wonders for them. He did not say, ‘The God of heaven and earth has sent me to you,’ nor ‘My Creator and your Creator.’ And likewise God began His speech to the multitude of Israel: ‘I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt’; He did not say, ‘I am the Creator of the world and your Creator.’ And so too I began with you, king of the Khazars, when you asked me about my belief; I answered you with that in which I am obligated and in which the whole congregation of Israel is obligated.”

Now comes the important sentence, it’s one sentence: “That event was verified for them by the sight of their own eyes, and afterward by the continuous tradition, which is like seeing with one’s own eyes.” That is really the key sentence, right? Those who were there saw it with their own eyes, and we know it by virtue of the continuous tradition, which is like seeing with one’s own eyes. So that is basically the argument, in short—that’s the famous argument known by the name of the Kuzari.

Then people add things; in the end Saadia Gaon, for example, develops it further. He says that if many witnesses transmit it to many people—if the tradition passes on in a broad front and there are verification mechanisms so that there won’t be deviations and people won’t invent things or add or subtract, all sorts of such rules that obligate us to preserve it properly and not add or omit details—then it is not reasonable that it’s false. If it were false, contradictions would arise and some of the people would discover the truth and would not pass the tradition on further. In the end he says… falsehood has no legs. Meaning, the fact that it survives for so long with all these verification mechanisms is itself his proof that this thing exists. You can add, yes, that parents do not lie to their children, and all the familiar additions that have already been added around the witness argument. That is the witness argument in its basic form. As I said earlier, one has to see it within the broader context; this argument does not stand alone, it does not stand by itself, but now I want to focus on it and examine it.

To examine it, I first need to ask myself: a tradition reached me. Now the question is whether that tradition reflects something that happened. We talked about the broken telephone game, right? Does this tradition reflect something that happened, or some myth that was created over the generations? So before I examine the evidence this way or that way, like in a court case, I need to ask myself: who has the presumption? On whom lies the burden of proof? So I say: information passed on through tradition. If I have no indication to think the people are liars, then the assumption is that it is probably true unless proven otherwise. Meaning, the person who says that someone here is not telling the truth—whether he lied intentionally or not—the burden of proof is on him; that is generally accepted. What bothers us here? What bothers us here—well, before that, these discussions often proceed from some point of view according to which the burden of proof is on the one who claims that the tradition is true, not on the one who claims the opposite. That is seemingly the opposite of what we do in every other context. Someone comes and tells me something; my assumption is that it is probably true unless it becomes clear that it isn’t. But here the assumption is that it isn’t true unless it becomes clear that it is. It’s like, I don’t know, if I find some hieroglyph or inscription on a stone or some scroll written by somebody I have no idea who, that’s archaeological evidence. But if I have a tradition that has been publicly passed down for thousands of years among hundreds of thousands and millions of people, that is presumed mistaken or false or untrue unless proven otherwise. So there is something strange here.

Now, I brought an example here. On the website someone spoke with me about the witness argument, and he brought some opinion of a scholar—he didn’t say who—that claimed that every nation needs shared characteristics and a shared goal in order to create a unifying culture, and therefore different peoples develop mythologies. So that includes the Exodus and the biblical descriptions and so on. So I told him that maybe that could be true, but it also might not be true. Now the question is what your starting point is, and therefore clarifying the starting point is very important. I told him: look, let me ask you a question. It’s well known that scholars have a tendency to push their agendas with all kinds of hypotheses, some of which are well-founded and some of which are not, and today we know this very well—all the debates surrounding the Bible, and now with Mount Ebal too, I was dealing with that not long ago. So we see how agenda influences scholars and how important it is for them to come out with some innovative thesis, theses that suit an agenda and are innovative, all kinds of motives that are not substantive, in order to come out with—and in this field it is simply a plague. The amount of baseless hypotheses that various professors wave around as though they were scientific truth is simply ridiculous. I think it pales in comparison to the claims about tradition inventing things.

Or alternatively, I told him, then I don’t accept the scholar’s words, because scholars often invent hypotheses. What do you say about that claim? The answer to that claim is that yes, scholars often do invent hypotheses, but maybe not. And now it depends on the question of what your starting point is. The same thing I say to you about our tradition. Exactly the same thing. For some reason tradition is attacked through all sorts of things that in other contexts—including by those attacking it—would not be held to those standards; there it’s fine. It’s a very interesting business.

But there is another claim here: the claim that we are dealing with information that comes to us through tradition, but this information is about an improbable event, very rare, improbable, supernatural, all sorts of things like that—that is already something else. Meaning, here I can understand the basic assumption that this did not happen but is a myth that was invented, and whoever wants to claim that it really happened bears the burden of proof. In other words, what matters here is the probability of the information conveyed by this tradition, not the fact that it is historical information. Historical figures and everything else you want—our whole history—we learn from various traditions. Okay? So suddenly in our case tradition is not okay, but there it is? The answer to that is that this is a demagogic argument. The answer to it is very simple: because the events they tell about are natural events. Fine, whether his name was Julius or Pompeius, what difference does it make? But there was someone who was emperor of Rome and he fought this war and that war—if that information reaches me, I have no reason to doubt it. But the information tradition brings me is supernatural information, improbable, rare, something that never happened before. So it is natural to think that this is basically a myth, and therefore the burden of proof lies on the one who wants to believe this myth and not on the one attacking it.

But we need to remember that there are two sides to this coin, because the rarity of this event, the supernaturalness of this event, cuts both ways. On the one hand I say: so maybe it probably didn’t happen. Whoever claims it did happen, the burden of proof is on him, as I said earlier. But on the other hand, if I reach the conclusion that the alternative is that this is probably a myth that was implanted—and not that it was a supernatural event—and people invent a myth and so on, then why didn’t this happen in other places too? A natural event ought to happen often. One of the problems is the rarity of the event, but the rarity of the event is itself what gives it force. Because if this were a natural event, then why is it rare? It could have happened in many other nations and religions and so on. And I’ll speak about that further on—it did not happen. Although people often talk about other revelations and similar events, there are no similar events. As far as I have checked, that’s all demagoguery. I’ll get to that later. So the rarity of the event, or its supernaturalness, is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, true, I can understand that in order to accept it one would need good evidence; it is not just like testimony about a historical event. On the other hand, what is the alternative? If it’s a lie, then fine, one person decided to lie. But if it is a myth implanted into a people, I would expect there to be parallel myths, because it is a natural event that myths get implanted within a people. So I would expect in other places too that such myths would be implanted, and that did not happen in the sense that it happened אצלנו—among us—and I’ll speak about that later. But that is only the framework of the discussion.

Now I want to go into the underlying assumptions a bit. So I said that what will determine things here is what I would think a priori, before the tradition reached me. If it is a plausible event, then I accept the tradition and the burden of proof is on the one attacking it. If it is an implausible event, then the opposite. So the starting point is very important here for making the decision. What is the a priori probability, in our eyes, of such an event?

So I’ll say one thing first: the fact that a certain event is rare does not mean it is implausible. Because there is a solar eclipse. A solar eclipse is a very rare event. So now if someone comes and tells me he saw a solar eclipse, what will I say to him? I don’t believe you because it’s a rare event, so you probably invented it? Or someone tells me he heard from someone who saw a solar eclipse. There are rare events, but they are completely natural; nature simply produces them rarely. Not every natural event has to occur every minute. There are natural events that happen all the time, like there is air here—there is always air here, it’s not a one-time thing. But there are events that are no less natural and yet they are rare. Sunset happens once every 24 hours—is that rare or not rare? I don’t know, maybe not. And what about the new moon? Once a month. And what about the completion of the sun’s cycle? A year. And a solar eclipse, I don’t know, every 20,000 years, I don’t know how often. So what? The fact that a certain event is rare does not disqualify it. Therefore the fact that Mount Sinai happened once means it is rare, but that does not mean it is implausible. Especially against the background of the context I spoke about—if I arrive at the conclusion that there is a God and that He presumably should reveal Himself and convey information to us, all that I talked about last time, we won’t repeat it here—then this basically turns the matter into something that is indeed plausible according to my starting point. Maybe it happened and maybe it didn’t, but if a tradition comes that it did happen, then why not? Sounds plausible.

Therefore the problem is the supernaturalness. Meaning, there is something here that is not according to the laws of nature, something supernatural. It’s not only rare; a solar eclipse is natural, and I can also explain how it happens. I see the paths of the sun, moon, and earth and I can show you what happens in a solar eclipse and do the calculation. We’ll see that it happens once every twenty thousand years. So I have no problem with that, because it’s natural even if it’s rare. But here we are speaking about a miracle, a supernatural event. Fine, that’s already something else. So it’s not only the rarity but the supernaturalness.

Now here I come to David Hume. The man who is always quoted as the one who attacked the witness argument, who formulated the criticism of the witness argument, is David Hume, and the advantage of his formulation is that he formalizes it. In other words, he turns it into a problem—you could call it, I don’t know, not quite probabilistic, but comparative in terms of likelihood between alternatives. I’ll bring you the quotation. So he writes as follows, in David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: “We are required to examine a book written almost certainly long after the train of events it relates, unsupported by any concurrent testimony, and bearing a strong resemblance to those fabulous accounts which every nation gives of its origin.” That’s not true, by the way, but never mind. “Let every man lay his hand upon his heart and say whether he thinks that the falsehood of such a book, supported by such testimony, would be more extraordinary and miraculous than all the miracles which it relates.”

Now this is a very sophisticated argument, because it basically says the following: look, I’m not raising some crude argument. Let’s raise a probabilistic one. A tradition reaches us about some miracle that happened, a supernatural event. The Holy One, blessed be He, revealed Himself at Sinai, spoke to us, cloud, thick darkness, fire and lightning and thunder and who knows what, all kinds of things like that, not a bird chirped, all sorts of matters. Now we have two possible ways to relate to this. One possibility is to say that indeed this is what happened, there was a supernatural event. It contradicts the laws of nature, it is highly improbable, it is impossible within natural thinking. Okay, it’s supernatural. A second interpretive possibility: it never happened and was never created; this is a myth that was somehow implanted by people for one reason or another. You can raise all sorts of hypotheses. That’s it, that’s the second possibility. I have two interpretations of the fact that a tradition reached me. Now let’s compare the interpretations, and that is Hume’s greatness. He doesn’t just attack; he makes a comparison. He says: let’s compare.

On the one hand I have an interpretation which you say is implausible: that the tradition is lying or that the tradition is not reliable. Fine—what are the odds of that? Twenty percent? Okay, twenty percent. Ten percent that it’s true, ninety percent that it’s not true. But even ten percent is more than a miracle. A miracle is zero percent. Meaning, when we compare these two interpretations, the interpretation that a miracle happened I assign a probability of zero because it is supernatural, it is against the laws of nature. Zero, or very little, depending on how much you believe in nature. But without some other indication, it simply didn’t happen. Now you’ll tell me that yes, it’s unlikely that people would implant a foundational myth into the public and the public would transmit it and there would be verification that no change occurs. All true. So that lowers the likelihood of error to ten percent—raises it, sorry, lowers the chance to ten percent. Let’s say ten percent that it is true, ninety percent that it is not. So there, we won. But no, because that ten percent has to be measured against the zero. Ten percent is more than zero. Therefore the interpretation that it did not happen but was implanted, even if it is an unlikely event, is still more likely than that it did happen and the tradition is true.

The comparison here is not simply whether tradition is true or not. Is tradition true or not? Most likely, in this case, yes—sorry, yes. The starting point is that tradition is true unless proven otherwise. But here the alternative is that if the tradition is true, then it reports to us an event whose own probability of occurring is zero. So here you cannot discuss tradition as you would with Napoleon or Julius Caesar, because since the event itself is implausible, accepting the tradition is less plausible than rejecting it. Because accepting the tradition—even though traditions are usually reliable—in this case means it conveys to me an event that itself could not have happened, and that has nothing to do with the reliability of the tradition. Therefore it is clear de facto that here the tradition was probably not reliable. This comparison is a nuance that formulates the difficulty a bit differently, but makes it very strong. Sometimes it is hard to notice what exactly Hume added. He added a great deal. This formulation is an excellent formulation of testing hypotheses, like H0 and H1 in statistics. It is exactly the formulation of hypothesis testing.

And now, yes, Sherlock Holmes says in The Sign of Four—I’ve already mentioned this more than once—that after you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is probably the truth. Because if the alternative is impossible versus unlikely, then I prefer the unlikely. The fact that you say it’s unlikely is not an argument; the question is what the alternative is. If the alternative is that it cannot be, then the unlikely is the preferred alternative. Okay, this is exactly what David Hume is arguing with regard to the witness argument.

Now if you read Wikipedia, for example, on the witness argument, then you’ll see there quotes from all the—can’t hear? I didn’t hear. If I may ask a short question. Yes, yes. What is the boundary, what is the line between impossible and unlikely? Okay, excellent question, I’ll get to that later, all right? I don’t have a sharp line, but I’ll address it in a moment.

So this comparison is basically a comparison between alternatives, Hume tells us. And by the way, that’s a lesson for life: when you relate to some event and say it’s unlikely, that still doesn’t mean the necessary conclusion is that it didn’t happen. Because the question is what the probability of the opposite is. You always have to compare it to the alternative.

The classic example of this—and I’ve spoken about this more than once too—is Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Do you know this entertaining psychological topic? There is Munchausen syndrome in psychology: someone wants to attract attention—the Baron Munchausen, I assume you know the stories. Munchausen syndrome is someone who tells Munchausen stories in order to attract attention to himself. Munchausen syndrome by proxy is when you tell terrible things about someone else, about your child for example, in order to get attention. Meaning not about yourself; that’s called Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Where did they first identify the by-proxy syndrome? One of the early cases that led psychologists to this insight was a story in England where a woman had two babies die of crib death. I think they weren’t twins, but two children a year apart or two years apart, doesn’t matter, I think—but two children died of crib death. Now they put her on trial for murder, and the prosecution’s claim was that the probability of crib death is one in eight thousand. The probability of two children dying of crib death is the product, one in sixty-four million. So she probably murdered them. Meaning, it couldn’t be crib death; she probably murdered them, because it is completely implausible that this was crib death.

Then Sir Roy Meadow arrived—today he’s no longer “Sir,” I think—Sir Roy Meadow, some doctor, who basically has the copyright on Munchausen syndrome by proxy. He claimed that there is such a phenomenon in which women murder their children in order to get attention, doing terrible things so that public attention will be directed toward them, and they do it to someone else, therefore it’s called by proxy and not to themselves. And that’s how he explained this event, and the woman went to prison. She sat in prison. Based on this event—no evidence, nothing, just statistics—that’s it, she sat in prison.

Now after I don’t remember how long, but quite a while, some normal statistician came along—not the collection of idiots who accepted this ruling—and said to them, and this is the formulation relevant for our purposes: tell me, what is the probability that a woman would murder her two children? Let’s try to estimate it. I don’t know how many women in the world murdered two of their own children. Let’s say one in sixty million sounds to me like a sufficiently cautious estimate, right? I assume it might even be less. Okay then, so the probability that she murdered her two children is one in sixty million; the probability that she didn’t murder them is also one in sixty million. When you take alternative A and say it’s improbable, you have to check alternative B—what is its probability. If its probability is not greater, then you cannot reject option A.

Think about the United Kingdom: I don’t know, fifty million residents, tens of millions of mothers, twenty million mothers, I’m just guessing. Among all those mothers, how many murdered their two children? I assume, I don’t know, one, two, five, something like that, right? So the probability is already one in a million, one in ten million—it’s already very close to the probability of crib death. So how can you send her to prison on the basis of the statistical calculation that says the probability is terribly small? The probability of the alternative is not greater, or not significantly greater. It’s utter stupidity and a complete misunderstanding of statistics. But here statistics is precisely what confuses people, because if someone had thought about it with plain common sense, he would have understood it immediately even without statistics. The problem is that when you present a statistical argument, it confuses everyone and suddenly you say, wait, really, that’s true. More than that: who even says the events are independent so that you can multiply probabilities? Right? The probability of crib death is one in eight thousand. The probability of crib death for two children—is that a product? Why? Are the events independent? Nobody knows why crib death happens, so how do they know it’s independent? Maybe something in the genes of this family, I don’t know, causes crib death, and therefore if one died then probably the other would die too because there is some connection? Nobody knows why crib death happens. So even the assumption of independence is problematic. In short, there are a ton of assumptions here that are simply absurd, and this woman sat in prison for a long time until they got her out because of this statistical claim. I was amazed it took so long.

But that is Munchausen syndrome by proxy. By the way, in the end—I said “I think”—I think they wanted to revoke his medical license. Very quickly afterward they said, look, he made a mistake, this is not grounds to revoke his medical license, but I think they did take away his knighthood because he had received it for discovering this syndrome, yes, this condition. To this day I think it’s not even clear that it exists. There is a debate among psychologists whether there is such a thing at all, as far as I understand—I didn’t really check. It’s not clear at all that it exists, because all the evidence for it is evidence of that same kind. So you can never know that such a thing exists, because maybe in truth the woman did not murder anyone and it just happened by chance. So it is very hard to know such a thing.

In any case, this teaches us how important it is to compare alternatives. Right? When you say—the believers in our case are the ones who put the woman in prison—what do they say? What is the probability that tradition deceives us? A broad tradition with verification, no error, all that, yes? And one must neither add nor subtract, and a tradition we have been aware of for thousands of years, documented in books and orally, father to son and rabbi to student and all these things. The probability is very, very small. Agreed, five percent, fine, just for the exercise. Therefore it is clear that the Torah was at Mount Sinai and everything was transmitted to us. Wait—but we need to compare those five percent to the alternative. The probability that the tradition here did not deceive us basically means that there occurred there an event against the laws of nature, and that has a probability of less than five percent. So there goes our proof. You see? See? It’s exactly the same mistake as Munchausen syndrome. We take something and, like Sherlock Holmes, say: this is impossible, therefore it’s very improbable, therefore clearly its opposite happened. Not true. Its opposite may be impossible. So one side is improbable and the other impossible; then the improbable is apparently more probable. Everything is relative.

And that is the power of David Hume’s argument, because he basically takes us to a place where it is very hard to argue with him. He really asks us in the most existential way possible: forget it, put yourself in the situation. Tell me, honestly, without pilpul, without statistics, without anything—what seems more likely to you? How seriously are you really prepared to take testimony about a supernatural, miraculous event, as opposed to the assumption that some myth arose here—perhaps improbable, but possible, not contradicting the laws of nature; it can happen. There is no contradiction to the laws of nature here. So this formulation is a very strong one. And if you look at Wikipedia, as I told you, there is an entry on the witness argument, and you can see tremendous excitement there from all the atheists explaining that once miracles were the strongest argument in favor of faith, and today miracles are the greatest refutation of faith. Meaning, after David Hume this is a death blow to religious faith and to religious traditions; he left nothing of them. There are lots of expressions of amazement from philosophers and all sorts of such people, of course mainly atheists, attacking this argument.

Now I want to explain why I do not agree with this argument. I have two points, or two aspects, of Hume’s critique that need to be taken into account. The first critique is that it is basically based on intellectual conservatism. And the second critique is that it begs the question. So let’s begin with these two critiques in a more orderly way. Let’s start with the intellectual conservatism.

Do you remember the story about the jaundice? Did I tell it? Yes? Someone brought pigeons, and after months he recovered from jaundice within a few days and returned to functioning. I came to my parents and told them about this obvious miracle. They wanted to hospitalize me, worried that the yeshiva had driven me crazy, turned me into an irrational person, and things like that. And then I told them: look, I received testimony about this from a person I trust as not being a fantasist; I know him well, and he saw it himself. True, the case itself seems very strange to me—a miracle, yes, against the laws of nature, I don’t know exactly what, maybe the laws of medicine—but I have good testimony on this matter. So a rational person is not supposed to reject testimony just because its content seems improbable. If the testimony is reliable, then maybe it’s not true—but check, see, maybe you’ll find an explanation and then suddenly it will also become plausible. A rational person is supposed to deal with the facts before him and try to understand them. If a person were to treat every fact that doesn’t fit with his current picture as an incorrect fact, we would still have the science of Adam. Because science advances through experimental results that show us that what we think is not correct. And if we never accept that, then we basically doom ourselves never to change our position. We will always remain with what we think, and that’s it. So in that sense there is a kind of intellectual conservatism here.

Think: if Einstein had rejected the strange conclusions he arrived at because they didn’t fit his experience, then today we would still be with Newtonian mechanics, and of course if they had accepted Einstein then even today we’d still be without quantum theory, and so on. Meaning, the willingness to accept things that are against the so-called laws of nature—or at least against what we understand as the laws of nature—is part of the possibility of scientific progress. Therefore the claim that one should not accept such a thing is really a claim that hides intellectual conservatism behind it.

I’ll ask you another question: suppose the Holy One, blessed be He, exists and wanted to reveal Himself to us. According to David Hume there is no way to do that, even if He wanted to. Why? Because even if He revealed Himself with signs and wonders, whenever that testimony reached me I would always prefer the option that it is a lie or a mistake or a myth or something like that over the possibility that it happened. Meaning, there is no way at all to bring to my knowledge information that is new to me, according to David Hume. I will never accept information that is impossible or implausible from my perspective. Isn’t that exactly what Maimonides says about Mount Sinai? What? For he says that in the end all miracles cannot contribute to faith. I didn’t understand. Maimonides explicitly says what the Rabbi just said. What? That these miracles of Mount Sinai cannot convince, because people will always say it’s deception, it’s errors. No, but I’m claiming the opposite. No, but the Rabbi says about Maimonides—you really cannot, God cannot prove Himself through miracles. David Hume already said that Mount Sinai did not convince anyone; right afterward they made the calf. Miracles apparently have very limited persuasive power.

Okay, in any case, back to our matter. Understand that David Hume, in the name of science, accepts a thesis that cannot be refuted. His thesis that there cannot be supernatural events cannot be refuted. Why? If I find a supernatural event and tell him about it, he won’t accept it because a supernatural event cannot occur. And then of course it turns out that a supernatural event indeed cannot occur because no testimony about it reached me. Oh, testimony did arrive? No, I didn’t accept it because it can’t be, so no testimony reached me, therefore it’s impossible, therefore I don’t accept all the testimonies, therefore it’s impossible, and so on. Do you understand that here, in the name of science, Hume entrenches himself in a position that cannot be refuted? He does not meet the scientific criterion, this so-called scientific thesis. Which is absurd. If something like this happened—even if it’s against the laws of nature—check it, see. But the fact that you think it’s impossible doesn’t make it so. Testimonies have force; you have to show otherwise.

But Rabbi, if a new phenomenon happens to you that seemingly contradicts the laws of nature, and you say it’s a law of nature—you’re simply saying there’s a law of nature that I don’t know. Wait, I’ll get to that, one second. Let me just build the argument.

So the claim here about conservatism is that it blocks us from any paradigm shift. Since the laws of nature as we know them today prohibit relativistic and quantum phenomena—well, not today, a hundred years ago they prohibited relativistic and quantum phenomena—then the theory of relativity and quantum theory are basically unacceptable according to Hume. Now I’ll say more than that: in fact this is not only about… Hume talks about the chain, because after all we weren’t there, we only heard it from others. Forget it—I ask the same question about someone who was there. Why distance the testimony? Even someone who was there—we spoke about the binding of Isaac in the previous lesson, the same argument. I said it would come up again. There too, I am there, the Holy One, blessed be He, reveals Himself. Now I have two possibilities: either I’m hallucinating, or it’s happening. Now if it’s happening, it’s a supernatural event, impossible, against the laws of nature. If it’s a hallucination—true, it’s not likely that I hallucinate, but it can happen, small chance, two percent. Fine, two percent versus zero—the two percent wins. So even someone standing at Mount Sinai, not only someone far away who receives it through a chain of transmission, he too can use Hume’s argument and say: I don’t accept it. And then not only do I fail to accept testimony about unnatural events, I myself will never have witnessed a supernatural event. I’m telling you this about myself. Even if everyone around me hallucinates the same hallucination? Of course, because the probability that we all hallucinate the same hallucination means that someone manipulated our perception—it could happen. Small chance, but it can happen. But the alternative is supernatural—it’s a miracle—that can’t happen at all. So the fact that everyone experiences it lowers it from ten percent to one percent or half a percent, fine. And even half a percent is more than zero. From this argument you can go very far, unless you tell me that the supernatural is not zero either and can happen—but then we already need to start measuring probabilities and seeing which is preferable.

Look, the point is that David Hume’s theory sounds terribly persuasive and terribly rational, but it isn’t. First—and I’ll discuss this further—it begs the question. But it is also a guarantee of conservatism, and conservatism is a guarantee of mistakes. Because you will not accept facts just because they don’t fit what you currently think. And that makes no sense. As I said before, after all it may be that what I currently think is not correct, and I will never find that out, even if it really is so. Because I will not accept testimony about what happened—not even experiences, not only testimony. I block the possibility of changing my paradigm, and in doing so the paradigm becomes unscientific because it cannot be refuted. I think it is not rational to operate in this way.

Now I’ll say more than that: I’ll show you that in fact we ourselves use this phenomenon. I’ll tell you a story that happened to a friend of mine, a completely secular friend, who works in inventive systematic thinking. Inventive systematic thinking, yes? He founded a company; he consults for governments and huge corporations all over the world. They invite him, and their company now has dozens of employees, and it’s been around for decades, and he travels all over the world. Among other things he also does pro bono work in places where he feels it is a social contribution to solve social problems or something like that. The techniques—they collected techniques; this was basically some Russian Jew named Altshuller who collected some set of such techniques and built a theory of how to solve problems, how to arrive at creative solutions, but in a systematic way. Usually creativity sounds to us like the opposite of systematicity; he built systematic techniques for arriving at creative solutions, which of course is worth millions.

So once he told me—or actually I once read that he wrote this—about an event that happened in the Midwest in the United States. In one city there, I no longer remember which one, quite a large city, there were many problems around gender, race, LGBT issues, all kinds of things; there was tremendous tension in the city. And they decided to take action: to gather sixteen representatives of all the communities—women, men, LGBT people, Blacks, whites, Hispanics, whatever, every sort and type—sixteen representatives. They probably found one Hispanic woman and so on, which saved them numbers, and she was also a lesbian and so on, so with sixteen they managed to represent quite a few groups at least. And they sat for a two-day workshop, which he gave them pro bono; he led the workshop.

He says: on the first day they did all kinds of things, worked, ran the workshop. On the second day he asked each of the people sitting there to stand up, say something from their experiences of the previous day, and invite someone else among the sixteen to speak—to do the same, say something of his own, and then invite someone else, and so on. Fine, so the first person stood up. Then it had already begun to move to the next stage. Suddenly some Black woman sitting there raised her hand. She said: tell me, did you notice that the Black participants were not invited to speak here? Not one of them. Meaning, those who spoke were only—meaning, all those who were not Black. No one invited the Black participants. Not only did no one invite them, but no one even noticed that they had not been invited. Meaning, they were sure they had covered everyone. And this was an event whose purpose was to mediate tensions, among other things on a racial basis.

Amnon was stunned, because he himself had not noticed either. And he is very sensitive to such things, even apart from events like this, and still he did not notice. He was stunned. So he wrote a post about it: look how deeply this thing is embedded in us. So I told him what I told that fellow on our website. I said to him: listen, Amnon, I read your post and I want to ask you a question. I have two ways to relate to what you told me. Right, he’s secular, so we had many arguments on this basis. So I have two ways to relate to what you told me. One possibility is that it really happened, and that is very strange. In this event they forgot all the Black participants and nobody even noticed they had forgotten them. That’s almost impossible—what are the odds of that? I don’t know, two percent. Okay? Second possibility: you fantasized it. It never happened. Now I also have a good explanation for why you would fantasize this, because it’s a story with a wonderful anti-racist lesson, and after all you are a well-known fighter against racism. Right? Like the scholar who likes provocative hypotheses in order to make a name for himself and get into the media with his thesis. Okay? So I have two possibilities. Which of the two do you propose I accept? It sounds more sensible to me that it simply never happened—you’re fantasizing. Because the probability that it happened is very small. The probability that you are fantasizing is also small, but it sounds to me greater than the probability that it happened. Do you see? That is exactly David Hume’s argument.

Now if you ask me, this whole thing is just a story, because I do believe him. I believe Amnon completely, I know him, he is a reliable person. Why do I believe him? The statistical calculation seems, ostensibly, to point in the other direction. The answer is that a statistical calculation comparing two possibilities has to take both sides into account. To compare them. And sometimes we are captive to the comparison and forget that there are two sides in it. Who says a supernatural event has zero probability? You are making an assumption here, and here we come to begging the question. A supernatural event—or not a supernatural event, but simply that my laws of nature are wrong and this is a natural event, either way it could be—but what is the probability that the laws of nature I know today are not correct? It can happen. The probability may be small, but still, it can happen. It is not zero. And that I need to compare to the probability that you are unreliable, or that the tradition that reached me is unreliable. I know you as a reliable person; I know such a broad tradition that I have examined as a reliable tradition. So even if it reaches me and conveys an improbable event, it is not true that I automatically need to reject it. That is not the rationally necessary conclusion, not always. One has to compare the degree of reliability of the tradition, or of the channel that brings me the information, with the probability that the information is incorrect or fabricated. And that is a very non-trivial comparison, and of course that comparison depends on the starting point. Because if your starting point is that miracles cannot happen and there is no God, then clearly you choose the option that this is a myth and the events did not happen. Because from your perspective the probability of the alternative—that the events did happen—is zero.

But I—precisely because of the context I spoke about earlier, and I said that divine revelation and miracles and the existence of God are, on the contrary, even plausible; not only are they not implausible, they are entirely plausible—indeed, they are the required conclusion from the philosophical considerations. So now information also reaches me that He revealed Himself. True, it is supernatural, it is rare, all true. But I have no problem with this supernatural event because the Holy One, blessed be He, exists. So there exists in the world a supernatural dimension, and therefore when there is testimony that He appears before my eyes, the fact that it is rare—we said that is like a solar eclipse, that does not interest me—but the fact that it is supernatural now also turns out not to interest me. Fine, I believe in the existence of God, and if He revealed Himself then He revealed Himself. What problem do I have with that? I have no principled problem accepting it. Now you tell me, can tradition go wrong or not? That I examine—how much reliability do I assign to this tradition.

And here we come to my second criticism of Hume’s argument: begging the question. Hume begs the question. He assumes there is no God and there cannot be miracles, only nature, and he arrives at the conclusion—surprise, surprise—that there are no miracles and no God, only nature. Since any testimony that would break his paradigm he will not accept, he will of course remain in it, and that will strengthen it even more. Then, look, we see there are no miracles, because there is no testimony about miracles. There are millions of testimonies? No, no, those are unreliable testimonies, because miracles—miracles cannot happen. So if the testimonies are unreliable, then there is no testimony about miracles, therefore there are no miracles, therefore the next testimonies that come will probably also be false, therefore there is no testimony about miracles and there are no miracles, and that’s it. So you are basically assuming the conclusion. You assume there are no miracles and no God, and the conclusion you arrive at—surprise, surprise—is that there are no miracles and no God.

But I assume that there is a God and there are miracles, or at least miracles can happen; it is not something absurd. If there is a God, He created nature and He can also perform miracles. Now a tradition reaches me, so I examine how reliable the tradition is, but I have no problem accepting it. So Hume’s argument is much weaker than it appears at first glance. Every step in life we ourselves act against it, all the time. Now Hume can tell me, fine, I’m an atheist. No problem, that’s your right. But don’t tell me you have an argument that strengthens atheism. It really doesn’t. I did not prove that atheism is false. I argued that their argument in favor of atheism is false. Atheism may be true, but your argument begs the question. It’s worth nothing. And all this marvelous excitement of atheists over Hume’s argument is so ridiculous. It is simply a basic misunderstanding, really. It is very characteristic there, but atheists are a church, as we already discussed, no less fanatical than the religious church. The absurd arguments on both sides can often compete very well with one another. These arguments sometimes really give me goosebumps from anger, not from excitement.

So this is a good example. Maybe we’ll continue a bit with this next time. Up to here. I said that I would return to the question of how I personally relate to miracles; we’ll get to that next time. Anything else? Questions? Sabbath shalom. Thank you very much. Shalom, goodbye.