So we’ve established that the probability that DH is true relies on the probability of every claim it makes, for all the claims that are required to say what DH wants to say about Torah.
We identified that the calculation of the final probability is the product of the probability of every single one of these required claims. We can’t add them because addition is the calculation for options.
We can’t go above 1. The value of 1 represents 100% probability or truth, which would mean there is observational evidence or hard physical examples of the four documents as well as of the interim products in their merger.
I know you’re saying that even if each probability isn’t 1, it could be greater than zero.
Sure, it could. All the probabilities in the DH table are between zero (false) and one (true) if you can’t disprove them and there is no external evidence that any of them happened.
You have to multiply them. What do you get? Go back to your grade school arithmetic. The product of fractions less than one is less than each of the fractions. 0.5 x 0.5 = 0.25; 0.9 x 0.9 = 0.81.
The probability of two dice turning up any given combination is 0.167 x 0.167 = 0.028 or a little less than 1 in 30 instead of 1 in 6.
The probability that a sequence of required steps will ALL happen is less than the probability of the least probable step.
Once we know the probability for each of the steps, whichever of the probabilities is SMALLEST is the most that the probability can be for DH.
The smallest value out of all of them is the highest value you can get, and after you multiply, the result will be smaller than that.
And if any claims in DH are based on fallacies, they automatically become false, and the probability of every required step based on them is zero; when you multiply anything by zero you get zero.
Now notice that even if you start with optional steps for any part of the history, you can’t get to JEDP without identifying a path of required steps to each of the documents and their combination.
No matter how you get to JEDP, you have to do some multiplication.
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