The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

Shofar FTP Archive File: people//w/windschuttle.keith/killing-history.01



"...When historians accept observations about he past as evidence that an
event really happened, they are always reluctant to take one report as
proof of this. They prefer the _corroboration_ of observations from many
observers. This is what they have with the death of Julius Ceasar. Every
report they have ever seen about the Roman Empire around 44 BC, no matter
how close or how removed the source, corroborates the assassination, and
not one has yet turned up to falsify or even raise doubts about whether
the event occured. We could, if we chose, calculate the probability that
this event, out of all the possible things that might have been observed
around him at the time, did occur. For every corroboration, the odds in
favor of the hypothesis that he was killed grow geometrically. There comes
a point with histroical corroboration about such a well-recorded event
where any other scenario besides the one we have accepted becomes
impossible. Because we a re dealing with a finite world- the planet Earth
in 44 BC -we can rule out the prospect that somewhere within an infinite
number of scenarios lies one in which Caesar was not killed. Logical
possibilities based on infinity do not count in this or any historical
case. There is, in fact so much corroboration about this particular
assassination scenario that is literally impossible for there to be a
non-assassination scenario that fits everything else we know about what
was happening in Rome at the time. We know that Julius Ceasar was killed
in Rome in 44 BC just as surely as we know that John F. Kennedy was killed
in Dallas in 1963." (Windschuttle, Keith. The Killing of History, Free Press; ISBN: 0684844451. p. 203.)

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