Q&A: Is Our Ancestors’ Testimony Unreliable Because They Were Foolish?
Is Our Ancestors’ Testimony Unreliable Because They Were Foolish?
Question
Hello Rabbi, I’m reading your book The First Existent (and by the way, thank you for it), and in it you presented the claim that a foundational national event cannot be implanted, because our ancestors would have rejected it by saying they had never heard of it from their ancestors.
My question is: could it be that we are projecting the critical way of thinking of our generation onto an earlier period, when people were generally gullible, or at least much less critical than we are?
(After all, it is well known that in the past the masses believed all kinds of bizarre things that had no serious basis—for example, the Greek gods as an explanation for natural phenomena, or the belief that the world stands on the backs of giant elephants that hold it up while standing on a giant turtle. Clearly, such things are very hard, or even impossible, to establish argumentatively. So if the masses accepted beliefs like these, what would prevent them from accepting other baseless beliefs?)
Answer
I don’t recall writing that it could not happen. It could happen. But the burden of proof is on the one who claims that this is what happened.
Discussion on Answer
If you read my book, you can read my answers there. If you don’t accept them—then you don’t.
**It’s possible that the wording of my previous message came out inadvertently provocative. What I meant by the words "needs to prove" is that he needs to from the standpoint of logical justification, not, Heaven forbid, that the Rabbi owes me anything.
From what I saw, I didn’t see an answer to this specific question in the book (the argument appears on page 492 in section 2, the second argument for why the existence of the Jewish tradition is unlikely to be a natural process and is therefore distinctive).
I wasn’t angry, and I didn’t think you were being provocative. Everything is fine. I answered that way because my answers really are in the book. There I explained the combination of arguments, which is stronger than each one on its own. So as I wrote there, this is not really a specific question.
I’ll summarize briefly: if a tradition comes to me from people, my basic assumption is that whoever does not believe them bears the burden of proof, even if he claims that they were not critical. This is especially strengthened when that tradition joins with the evidence for the existence of a philosophical God, and with my a priori expectation (even without any tradition having reached me) that He would reveal Himself and give commandments. But I really did explain it all there.
Seemingly, there is also a difference between other bizarre beliefs and this testimony. The difference is that this testimony is about things that happened to them—that is, it is not a belief in something, but testimony that the event happened to them (or that this is what they heard from their ancestors). So it is not connected to the question of whether they were foolish or not.
The burden of proof is on the one who claims that this is what happened if we start from the basic assumption that our ancestors were as critical as we are. But if we start from the assumption that our ancestors were not critical, then the one making the faith-based argument is the one who needs to prove it.
Why should we choose the first assumption over the second?