Question

In notebook number 5 you wrote about Hume’s counter-argument:
“According to Hume’s approach, it is impossible for us to accept such a report from him, since we will always prefer the assumption that there was a lie, or an illusion, or some other kind of distortion here. If so, according to David Hume no report of revelation can ever be accepted by us. So now go and consider: is it any wonder that from our experience we are not familiar with revelations? Revelations could occur thousands of times before thousands of people, and yet from our perspective there are no revelations. Every report of revelation will be rejected out of hand because of Hume’s critical argument. Moreover, even if the revelation were to happen to us ourselves, we would prefer the interpretation that it was a hallucination over the possibility that it really happened. If so, Hume’s critical argument is self-reinforcing.”

I think Hume meant something a bit different from what you seem to have understood here. His intention was that for us, personally, as people weighing whether to accept the argument, there has never been a revelation. Therefore, as someone who has never experienced revelation (or any other supernatural thing), why should I believe that it is more likely that all the astonishing miracles described in the Torah happened—when astonishing miracles appear abundantly in other traditions from that period, and when this is completely outside my life experience—than that there was some implantation of a myth or some other way in which the story became rooted among the people, rather than a miraculous revelation?