Wow, Buz.
Let me give you a little help. I understand what you're trying to say...you're just not saying it very well. I don't necessarily agree (I'll expand on that at the end), but this might be a better way to communicate what you're trying to say:
In the case of a major dispersion of members of a low-population nation, the most likely result is that the culture of that small nation will be lost as its former citizens mingle with the citizens of their new homes. Their cultural identity will, over time, be lost and subsumed into the cultures of their individual destinations.
In the case of the Jews, this did not entirely happen. Many Jews kept their culture mostly intact, despite living for multiple generations in "foreign" lands. This culminated in a mass return to their ancestral homeland after WWII, when Israel was re-created as a nation.
Because this course of events was unlikely, any hypothesis that would result in a higher probability of the Jews retaining their cultural identity and returning to their ancestral nation after many generations of exile will have a probabilistic advantage over hypotheses that count that probability as low. The degree of that advantage is proportional with the degree that the retention of cultural identity was previously considered improbable.
There is one specific framework of hypotheses which predicted, in advance, that the Jews would be exiled from Israel and yet would return many generations later with their cultural identity still mostly intact.
Biblical prophecy (I'll leave inserting chapter and verse to you, Buz) predicted that this very unlikely sequence of events would occur, in advance.
Since hypotheses that correctly predict an unlikely set of observations or events have a probabilistic advantage over hypotheses that did not successfully predict those same events, this is supportive evidence (not proof) that those Biblical prophecies are based upon an accurate model - in other words, that the "Biblical record" is true. The strength of the support of this evidence is proportional to the degree of improbability of the events correctly predicted as compared to other hypotheses; other evidence must be considered independently and may shift the probability of the accuracy of the entire Biblical record up or down beyond the successful prediction of the repatriation of the Jews.
While Occam's Razor suggests that hypotheses that do not introduce extraneous terms or entities are more likely than those that do, the hypothetical framework of the Biblical record requires the existence of a deity, considered extraneous by naturalistic hypotheses.
If the Biblical record hypothetical framework is shown to be significantly more likely to accurately reflect reality than naturalism, this would then by extension provide supporting evidence for the existence of a deity; the existence of God would be included in the most parsimonious explanation for the accuracy of the Biblical record.
Does that seem to match what you're trying to say, Buz? It's not even necessarily wrong.
The problem is that I think you're overestimating the degree of unlikelihood for specific events like the retention of Jewish cultural heritage, or the reformation of the Israeli nation. Many people who emigrate to foreign countries keep their cultural heritage alive over multiple generations despite pressure to conform. This happens for several reasons, but those relevant to the Jews would likely be the formation of Jewish communities within foreign nations, racist and religious exclusion of Jews preventing integration into the surrounding culture, and the fact that the reformation of Israel was driven in large part by believers in the very prophecy you mention.
The proportional difference in likelihood between the Biblical record hypothetical framework and more naturalistic explanations for those same events is not nearly as significant as I think you believe. That being the case, I don't find the exile and return of the Jews to Israel to be particularly
strong supportive evidence for the Biblical record as a whole - certainly not sufficient to overwhelm more parsimonious explanations.
The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.
- Francis Bacon
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. — Albert Camus
"...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of
variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the
outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." Barash, David 1995.
™ Version 4.2
