An Interesting Fallacy

Biblical critics and adherents of the Documentary Hypothesis (especially outspoken ones in the Blogosphere) often argue along these lines:

It is true that believers can offer convincing responses to some of the problems raised by Biblical Criticism. Use of literary and other innovative approaches to textual analysis may indeed remove some of the difficulties that academics have found with the Torah. However, while traditional scholars need to develop new responses for every one of challenges with which they are confronted, the superiority of the Documentary Hypothesis lies in the fact that it provides a single answer (i.e., multiple authorship) that accounts for all of the questions at once. In other words, Occham's Razor supports the Critical Theory.

The fallacy of this approach should seemingly be obvious but is often overlooked. Occham's Razor is a methodological principle that teaches that the simplest explanation of a phenomenon or set of phenomena is always the preferred one. The reason we prefer simplicity is because more complex explanations require us to posit the existence of additional factors or entities that are superfluous under the circumstances.

Let us take an imaginary example to illustrate this point. When a ball is released midair, it falls to the ground. The same thing happens when an apple, a tire, a kerchief, or a stone is dropped. A scientist will infer that there is a single physical force at work, called gravity, which is responsible for the observed attraction between all material bodies and the Earth.

If another investigator were to come along and suggest an alternative approach to the problem - ex., that one invisible angel carries balls downward, an invisible demon carries apples downward, an invisible fairy carries kerchiefs downward and an invisible troll carries stones downward - we would hesitate to accept it. This is because, whereas the scientist's explanation involves only two basic entities (the Earth and the object) the alternative explanation requires us to introduce additional, unnecessary forces or entities (the various supernatural beings) to account for the same set of phenomena. Only when a simpler explanatory model fails would we be pressed to assume that there are more entities at work than meet the eye.

Academics try to draw an analogy between the aforementioned case and that of traditional scholars' responses to skeptical questions. They believe that the fact that the traditionalists must offer new and innovative analyses and readings to deal with each difficulty they raise is akin to the activity of the alternative "scientist" who invokes a different metaphysical being to account for each instance of falling objects.

The fallacy of Biblical Critics who try to utilize Occham in support of their views is that they confuse the complexity of an explanatory model with the number of problems that require resolution. In other words, let us assume that academics raised 500 difficulties with the Torah's text, and that, for each one of these difficulties, a cogent answer was offered. Again, the temptation is to equate this with a laboratory setting in which 500 observed falling objects are accounted for with 500 different explanations rather than a single, unified, elegant one.

However, in every case regarding the Bible, the erroneous premise of a question, or the clarification of the meaning of a passage in the text, is presented in response to the Critic's challenge. It is quite possible - and in my opinion, quite likely - that each one of the challenges thus deflated was simply ill conceived, superficially based or otherwise flawed from the outset, and that further investigation just served to reveal what was already the case. Nothing new is actually introduced at any point in the process of clarification.

The 500 answers brought to resolve the 500 problems do not require us to invoke the existence of hundreds of newfound entities or causal factors to function as part of a cumbersome explanatory model. That would indeed be a gross violation of Occham's Razor. On the contrary, the premise of the answers is that the problems are merely imaginary, and that a more lucid reading of the text, or a correction of shabby thinking, can eliminate them systematically.

Unlike falling objects - multiple phenomena that should rightly be accounted for with one theory and attributed to a single cause - the traditionalists attempt to show that the questions of the skeptics never were real 'phenomena' to begin with! The believing scholars are not introducing new factors to explain something, because a difficulty is not itself a "something". Rather, they are delving into the text to expose the shaky foundations of the academics' challenges and, as a result, the problems dissipate of their own accord.

In summary, problems are not phenomena, they represent a lack of understanding in need of correction. So it should come as no surprise that multiple answers are offered for multiple problems, since each difficulty may need to be addressed and disposed of separately. Occham's Razor, on the other hand, states that we should posit the smallest number of really existing causal factors to account for the greatest number of really existing observed phenomena possible, thus minimizing the assumptions we make in our explanatory models. This has no relevance whatsoever to the literary and/or logical rejoinders offered by traditionalists to counter the claims of skeptics and Biblical Critics.

On the other hand, taking a single, unified text, accepted and understood as such for millenia, and attributing it to multiple authors with multiple motivations at different periods of time, whose work was subsequently covered up by anonymous redactors and priests who then presented it in its current form to a gullible population long after it was purported to have been written - now that sounds like a violation of Occham's Razor if I've ever heard one....