"Now , if we found an account from Roman times of how Julius Caesar split the waters of the Rubicon by urinating in it so his troops could pass ... Occam 's Razor would not point towards accepting it as true ."
"It does not matter what the document contains ! The same procedure should be done for every document . What the writing says is irrelevant to its authenticity ! You wrongly use Occam 's Razor as well . If the document is well preserved , has many copies , has copies relatively close to the original , etc , then the most likely assumption we can make is that the document itself is a valid source . Then and only then , should we examine the contents within and determine if they happened . We can do this through archaeological evidences and from other writings as well that agree with that one . Much of which we in fact do not have for many of Caesar 's expeditions , but yet again , we accept them as fact in our history books . But , it is funny that you should mention Caesar splitting a river . While he did n't do that , he did claim to have created a massive bridge in a very short time period and then destroyed it a few days later . Sounds like a pretty audacious claim from guys without any modern equipment . Should we discount this too because it 'does n't seem practical ' as we do with the bible despite the overwhelming documentation for it ? But here you are admitting that you set different standards 'depending on what the writing claims ' . Thanks again for proving my point I guess ."
"Now , if we found an account from Roman times of how Julius Caesar split the waters of the Rubicon by urinating in"
"It does not matter what the document contains !"