Hearsay is a second-hand account of purported facts. It is "a friend of a friend said..." or "my cousin's brother's uncle said..." It is the basis of urban legend and rumor, and is perhaps the least reliable form of evidence devised by man. In fact, it is so unreliable that as a rule it is generally inadmissible in federal court, as well as the courts of all fifty states. As explained by the Supreme Court in
Chambers v. Mississippi:
So why am I boring you with arcane legal mumbo-jumbo? Because the bible is nothing more than Bronze Age hearsay. As
Thomas Paine put it:
[A]dmitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and, consequently, they are not obliged to believe it. It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication. After this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner, for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.
When Moses told the children of Israel that he received the two tables of the commandments from the hand of God, they were not obliged to believe him, because they had no other authority for it than his telling them so; and I have no other authority for it than some historian telling me so, the commandments carrying no internal evidence of divinity with them. They contain some good moral precepts such as any man qualified to be a lawgiver or a legislator could produce himself, without having recourse to supernatural intervention.
When I am told that the Koran was written in Heaven, and brought to Mahomet by an angel, the account comes to near the same kind of hearsay evidence and second hand authority as the former. I did not see the angel myself, and therefore I have a right not to believe it.
When also I am told that a woman, called the Virgin Mary, said, or gave out, that she was with child without any cohabitation with a man, and that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said that an angel told him so, I have a right to believe them or not: such a circumstance required a much stronger evidence than their bare word for it: but we have not even this; for neither Joseph nor Mary wrote any such matter themselves. It is only reported by others that they said so. It is hearsay upon hearsay, and I do not chose to rest my belief upon such evidence.
Carl Sagan once noted that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Certainly religion makes extraordinary claims - claims of gods and devils, of heaven and hell, and of cherubim and serpents. Despite these extraordinary claims, I have yet to see even ordinary evidence, of the type produced every single day in every court in America, let alone the extraordinary evidence necessary to lend credibility to outrageous claims of religion.
