Q&A: The Witness Argument
The Witness Argument
Question
I read your response to Hume’s argument against the witness argument, but I wasn’t convinced. I’m concerned that you ignored part of his argument.
In the fifth notebook you wrote:
“If so, according to David Hume no report of revelation can ever be accepted by us. So now think about whether it is any wonder that, in our experience, we are unfamiliar 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-confirming. It is no better grounded than the traditional alternative.”
But Hume explicitly explained why that is not plausible. He explained that those supernatural stories always occur in ignorant and ancient societies, never among educated people, at a time when we have the ability to check whether it really happened. The revelation at Mount Sinai is no exception. No one has any idea where Mount Sinai is definitely located today, it happened in a period when very similar myths were widespread among other peoples, and Hume also found room to insult the people of Israel as an ignorant nomadic people. He explained clearly why it is unlikely that one specific miracle really happened. And indeed, according to this approach we would not accept any revelation that happened in the past. But that makes perfect sense, since we know with absolute certainty that human beings invented countless other stories in that same period; meaning, there is a motive for inventing myths. Hume explains, at least as I understood it, why the most rational and sensible approach is not to accept the witness argument, and to recognize that supernatural events are blatantly improbable in light of the tendencies of the human species, the fact that countless such stories were invented, and the other points he mentioned.
Answer
That too was answered there. It does not always happen in ignorant societies. It happened only a few times, and indeed only in the past. I explained why his objection begs the question. The fact that people tend to make things up does not mean that everything is made up. Each testimony must be judged on its own merits.
Discussion on Answer
There are such testimonies even in non-ignorant societies. Today’s New Age is full of them. As I answered in the parallel thread, if we have reached the conclusion that God exists, then His revelation is not improbable.
Today’s society is no less ignorant.
From the moment it became possible to examine miraculous revelations that were supposedly beyond nature and the laws of physics, it turned out that they could be explained by natural causes, or that they were not really miraculous but rather exaggerated and inflated; and from that they drew an analogy to the older, more fantastic revelations.
I think he meant that it happened in ignorant societies in the sense that it did not happen in post-Enlightenment societies, deistic and atheistic societies that dared to deny the existence of God.
The fact that people tend to make things up does not guarantee that everything is made up, but it does significantly reduce the probability that one specific thing is not made up. As he said, hand on heart, is it really more reasonable that one supernatural event out of dozens that were invented actually happened, in the distant past and at a time when there is no way at all to check whether it really happened, than that it is simply a myth that developed over time or somehow became rooted in a people? Hume is completely right in his argument. He explains why it is more rational to believe that all the testimonies from the past are inventions, in light of the facts on the ground, than to accept one of them because of mass testimony, which does not provide nearly enough counterweight to the fact that people tend to invent myths.