The Existence of God (2)
The question which arises at this point is whether the ontological argument has not then become question-begging. An argument is question-begging if one’s only reason for accepting a premise in the argument is that one already accepts the conclusion, so that one in effect reasons in a circle. In the present case it might seem that the reason one thinks that it is possible that a maximally great being exists is that one has good reasons to think that a maximally great being does exist.
But this misgiving may arise as a result of thinking of the project of natural theology in too linear a fashion. The theistic arguments need not be taken to be like links in a chain, in which one link follows another so that the chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Rather they are like links in a coat of chain mail, in which all the links reinforce one another so that the strength of the whole exceeds that of any single link. The ontological argument might play its part in a cumulative case for theism, in which a multitude of factors simultaneously conspire to lead one to the global conclusion that God exists. In that sense Anselm was wrong in
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thinking that he had discovered a single argument which, standing independently of all the rest, served to demonstrate God’s existence in all his greatness. Nevertheless, his argument does encapsulate the thrust of all the arguments together to show that God, the Supreme Being, exists.
Practical Application
One of the things that most incenses contemporary non-theists is that Christians believe in God without having any evidence of God’s existence. The material in the last two chapters will enable you to shatter that stereotype. Even though I argued in chapter 1 that we can know that God exists wholly apart from evidence, nevertheless the evidence for God’s existence which we have surveyed makes it more probable than not that God exists. If you will master the material in these chapters, you will completely disarm the unbeliever of his chief complaint and excuse for his unbelief.
What is the force of these arguments? We needn’t claim that we can prove to the unbeliever that God exists. In the minds of most people the word prove or proof connotes a mathematical demonstration. There’s just no reason to set the bar so unrealistically high. It’s a better strategy to set the bar low and then really exceed all expectations. So we should simply claim that “There are good arguments for the existence of God” or “In light of the evidence it’s more probable than not that God exists” or even more modestly, “The arguments make it rational to believe that God exists.” If the unbeliever asks us if we’re saying that atheism or agnosticism is irrational, we should say, “I’m not interested in making personal judgments about whether non-theists are rational or not in what they believe. I’m just saying that there are good arguments for God’s existence.” Worldviews, as such, are neither rational nor irrational; rather people are either rational or not in holding to the worldviews they do. A person can be rational in believing something that is false, if he thinks that he has good arguments for that view. Thus, the same worldview may be rational for some people to hold and irrational for others. So whether atheism is rational for some people or not is really quite beside the point. The issue is rather whether atheism is true. What we aspire to show is that atheism is false, not that it is irrational for anybody to hold. We do that by presenting good arguments for theism. Remember: persons are rational; arguments are sound.
We’re interested in whether there are sound arguments for God’s existence based on premises which are more plausible than their denials. We don’t need to make a personal judgment on the rationality or irrationality of non-theists. Such an approach has the advantage of not offending the person we’re trying to convince.
We’re simply saying to him, “Here are some arguments for God’s existence that I think are really good. What do you think of them?”
I’d encourage you to memorize the premises of each of the arguments we’ve discussed. Most of the formulations are very brief so that this is easily done. So doing has a couple of advantages. First, it enables you always to have at your finger-
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tips an answer to anyone who asks you for the reason for your hope (1 Pet. 3:15).
As a result you will find tremendous confidence and boldness in talking about your faith with non-believers. Most unbelievers are ignorant of natural theology and have never confronted a Christian who is ready to offer carefully formulated arguments for his belief in God. Having logically valid, clearly formulated arguments is going to make you look smart and increase your credibility in their eyes, which will only make your witness more effective. Second, a huge advantage of laying out the premises of each argument is that it enables you to stay on track and not be misled by red herrings which the unbeliever will drag across your path.
Always ask yourself when confronted with an objection, “Exactly which premise of the argument does the objection challenge?” Many times you’ll find that the objection doesn’t really challenge any premise and so is irrelevant to the argument!
For example, I can almost guarantee that if you present the moral argument, the response will be either “How dare you say that nonbelievers can’t live good moral lives!” or else “You don’t have to believe in God in order to know right from wrong!”
These objections are aimed at straw men and so are irrelevant to the argument.
By writing out the premises on a piece of paper for your non-believing friend, you can help him to see what is and is not relevant and to have something to take with him from the conversation.
I also find it helpful to be able to lay out a cumulative case comprising several arguments for God’s existence. It’s funny, but it’s been my experience that just being able to name several arguments for God’s existence (even without giving the premises!) astonishes many people and lends weight to theism’s credibility. The arguments themselves show how the God hypothesis makes sense of a broad range of the facts of human experience and therefore how very powerful a hypothesis it is. As I mentioned earlier, we should think of the arguments like a coat of chain mail in which the links reinforce one another. Many unbelievers have been taught to raise stock objections, like “That argument only proves a Designer of the universe, not a Creator” or “That argument only proves that there is a Creator of the universe, not that he is good.” One can freely admit that the cosmological argument doesn’t prove the goodness of the Creator; that attribute is shown instead by the moral argument; and the cosmological argument proves that there is a personal Creator of the universe, even if the teleological argument does not.
Having a variety of arguments not only reinforces common conclusions but also rounds out the nature of the being whose existence they prove.
Of course, it goes without saying that we should present these arguments with gentleness and respect. We mustn’t be quarrelsome with a non-believer, or we’ll only succeed in alienating him. Having solid arguments will actually help you to remain calm in the face of angry attacks because you will realize how misled many people are and will respond to them with compassion. When you have good reasons for what you believe and know the answers to objections to your arguments, then there’s just no reason to get hot under the collar. Instead you’ll
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find it a pleasure to discuss these important and interesting questions with people who do not yet believe.
Some of you may be wondering, “But how could I possibly share all this material in an evangelistic contact?” Here we must simply exercise a little common sense and be sensitive to where the other person is in his thinking. Of course, you don’t lay all this stuff about actual and potential infinity, the expanding universe, fine-tuning, Boltzmann Brains, supervenient moral properties, and the possibility of maximal greatness on the poor non-Christian at once! You need to understand how deep his thinking and background concerning these subjects are in order to know just what to relate to him. You start simple and go deep as he has further questions. I know this material is effective, because I’ve seen God use it when it’s communicated with sensitivity.
For example, my wife, Jan, was once talking to a gal in the student union who said that she did not believe in God. Jan replied, “Well, what do you think of the argument for a first cause?” “What’s that?” she said. Jan explained, “Everything we see has a cause, and those causes have causes, and so on. But this can’t go back forever. There had to be a beginning and a first cause which started the whole thing. This is God.” Now that was obviously a very simple statement of the kalām cosmological argument. The young woman responded, “I guess God exists after all.” She wasn’t ready to place her faith in Christ at that point, but at least she had moved one step closer, away from her atheism.
When one talks with a person who has a deeper understanding of these issues, then of course one must go deeper. For example, many years ago when we were studying in Germany on a research fellowship, we met a Polish physicist who was there on a similar fellowship. As we chatted, she mentioned that physics had destroyed her belief in God and that life had become meaningless to her. “When I look out at the universe all I see is blackness,” she explained, “and when I look within myself all I see is blackness.” (What a poignant statement of the modern predicament!)
Well, at that point Jan volunteered, “Oh, you should read Bill’s doctoral dissertation. He uses physics to prove God exists.” So we loaned her my dissertation to read on the cosmological argument. Over the ensuing days, she became progressively more excited. When she got to the section on astronomy and astrophysics, she was positively elated. “I know these scientists that you are quoting!” she exclaimed in amazement. By the time she reached the end, her faith had been restored. “Thank you for helping me to believe that God exists,” she said.
We answered, “Would you like to know him in a personal way?” Then we made an appointment to meet her that evening at a restaurant. Meanwhile we prepared from memory our own hand-printed Four Spiritual Laws.
After supper we opened the booklet and began, “Just as there are physical laws that govern the physical universe, so there are spiritual laws that govern your relationship to God . . .”
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“Why, physical laws! Spiritual laws!” she exclaimed. “This is just for me!” When we got to the circles at the end representing two lives and asked her which circle represented her life, she put her hand over the circles and said, “Oh, this is so personal. I cannot answer now.” So we encouraged her to take the booklet home and to give her life to Christ.
When we saw her the next day, her face was radiant with joy. She told us of how she had gone home and in the privacy of her room prayed to receive Christ. She then flushed all the wine and tranquilizers on which she had been relying down the toilet. She was a truly transformed individual. We gave her a Good News for Modern Man and explained the importance of maintaining a devotional life with God. Our paths then parted for several months. But when we saw her again she was still enthusiastic in her faith, and her most precious possessions were her Good News Bible and her hand-made Four Spiritual Laws. So it was a great victory for God. It was one of the most vivid illustrations I’ve seen of how the Holy Spirit can use arguments and evidence to draw someone to a saving knowledge of God.
Let me add few words about each of the arguments in particular. The Leibnizian cosmological argument has a tremendous philosophical pedigree, historically speaking. It is based upon a very deep-seated metaphysical puzzle, namely, why does anything at all exist? This question has bothered philosophers for literally millennia. In sharing the argument, we should try to evoke a sense of the mystery of existence in unbelievers. Nevertheless, I must confess that I’ve not had much occasion to use the Leibnizian cosmological argument in evangelism. My suspicion is that it’s too abstract to be comprehensible to most people. But for philosophically-minded people the argument may be appealing. The key to the argument will be the first premise. Unbelievers recognize no other exception to this principle apart from the universe itself; but why should the universe be an exception? We saw that attempts to justify an exemption for the universe turned out to be question-begging. Use an illustration like Richard Taylor’s story of the ball in the woods, which we keep increasing in size until it becomes co-extensive with the universe, to motivate acceptance of the principle. I personally like this argument very much.
As for the kalām cosmological argument, I have found it very useful in evangelism. Just recently Jan and I were on a trip to China with the Society of Christian Philosophers, where we had the chance to participate in conference at Fudan University in Shanghai. There I heard a presentation from a Chinese graduate student in philosophy that floored me: it was a defense of kalām arguments for the finitude of the past! I said to Jan, “I wonder if he’s hit upon these arguments independently.” After his presentation, I gave him a booklet in Chinese of my article on the existence of God and the beginning of the universe. The next day when we saw him, he could hardly contain his excitement. “I had no idea that someone else has had similar thoughts about this,” he said. “When I read your booklet, I was so thrilled—in fact, I cried!” We gave him further materials on the
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existence of God and the resurrection of Christ, which he gratefully received. A bridge had been built through the kalām cosmological argument.
The kalām argument is also a natural bridge to sharing with Muslims, having, as it does, so rich a heritage in medieval Islamic thought. I’m not sure how I feel about this, but I’ve been told by Muslim apologists how much they’ve appreciated my work because they use my arguments all the time in debates with atheists!
That made me realize all the more how important it is that Christians be trained to share these arguments, lest they be co-opted by Muslims. At any rate the kalām argument gives us a point in common with Muslims from which we may go on to share the gospel.
Probably the most common response that you’ll get to the kalām cosmological argument is the retort, “What caused God?” This is usually put with an air of triumph, as though it were a profound and unanswerable question, a stake in the heart of theism. I am just amazed to hear this childish question even on the lips of intelligent professors. In fact, the question is easy to answer. Recently speaking at Oxford University, I was put this question, so I patiently explained that the first premise of the argument is not that “Everything has a cause” but that “Everything that begins to exist has a cause,” and since God didn’t begin to exist, he doesn’t require a cause. Indeed, an eternal being cannot have an antecedent cause. So God is simply uncaused. Afterwards, Richard Cunningham, the Inter-Varsity Director for the United Kingdom, took me aside and said, “Bill, your answer was fine, but you need to help people see just how dumb the question is by poking a little fun at it.” So when I was in Cambridge the next week and was asked the same question, I said, “You know, that’s really a meaningless question. It’s like wracking your brain wondering, ‘What is the cause of the First Uncaused Cause?’” That got a laugh out of the audience and did seem a more effective way of communicating the point.
Asking for God’s cause is sort of like asking for a bachelor’s wife.
I also find that most people don’t understand the Big Bang theory. They seem to think that there was a super-dense pellet of material existing in empty space from time immemorial which then blew up. You need to help them see that this is a complete misunderstanding of the model. Explain to them that according to the theory all matter and energy, even physical space and time themselves, came into being at the Big Bang: there was literally nothing before it (that is to say, there wasn’t anything before it). So the cause of the universe has to be a transcendent being. Don’t let them try to wriggle out by saying that we don’t understand the physics of the very early universe, for the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem we discussed does not depend upon having a physical theory of this era.
As for the teleological argument, the great advantage of the fine-tuning version is that it enables you to do an end run around the emotionally loaded question of biological evolution and to show that in order for evolution to take place anywhere in the universe the initial cosmic conditions had to be incomprehensibly fine-tuned. This version of the argument enjoys the strategic advantage that instead
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of bucking a widely accepted scientific theory, it is wholly in line with accepted scientific thinking. Therefore, belief in evolution is a non-issue; we’re not asking the unbeliever to abandon his belief in biological evolution.
With respect to the moral argument, notice that the argument is formulated in terms of objective morals rather than moral absolutes. The term absolute is misleading and can raise unnecessary obstacles in the unbeliever’s mind. An action can be objectively wrong without its being absolutely wrong. Killing another person may be wrong in some circumstances and right in others (as when a policeman shoots a terrorist); but in each set of circumstances there will be objectively right and wrong things to do, right to kill in some circumstances and wrong in others.
What we’re interested in is objectivity, not absoluteness.
In my experience, the moral argument is the most effective argument for the existence of God. I say this grudgingly because my favorite is the cosmological argument. But cosmological and teleological arguments don’t really hit people where they live and so can be dismissed as curiosities. But the moral argument cannot be so brushed aside. Every day that you get up you answer the question of whether there are objective moral values and duties by how you live. It’s unavoidable.
Moreover, this argument has tremendous force because students have been indoctrinated to believe both premises. They’ve just never put them together to see the inevitable implication. On the one hand, they’ve been taught to believe that moral relativism is true, that moral values and duties are culturally and even personally relative and that you have no right to judge another. They’ve been told the evolutionary story and believe that morality is the byproduct of nature and nurture. On the other hand, they’re steeped in political correctness and the values it entails. For example, the sentiment expressed above that no one has the right to judge another is not meant to be a denial of moral obligation but rather the affirmation of the obligation to be tolerant and open-minded. The conviction is that it is wrong to judge another. Although students give lip service to relativism, they don’t really believe it nor do they live that way. Just ask them, “So, do you really think that it would be all right if the government rounded up all homosexuals and threw them into concentration camps the way the Nazis did? You don’t really have a problem with racial discrimination, I suppose? You think there’s nothing really bad about wife beating or child abuse?” You can make the point especially effectively by using moral atrocities perpetrated in the name of religion. “You think it’s okay for Catholic priests to sexually abuse little boys and that the Church did nothing wrong in trying to cover it up? I guess you don’t have any problem with the Crusades or the Inquisition. On your view, there’s nothing really wrong about imposing your beliefs on another person, right?” If you’re dealing with someone who is an honest inquirer I can guarantee that 95 percent of the time that person will agree that there are objective moral values and duties.
Now this puts the unbeliever in a real dilemma. Realize that you don’t need to prove the premises of the argument to be true. The premises in a sound argument
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just need to be true. So long as the non-believer believes the premises to be true, then he’s logically committed to believing the conclusion as well. If he’s to avoid the argument’s conclusion, he must deny one of the premises. But which one? He believes them both. This quandary can lead to some really strange conversations.
I remember one case in which the nonbeliever I was talking with would jump back and forth between the premises. When we talked about the first premise, he’d agree with it and deny the second. But when we talked about the second, he’d agree with it and deny the first. And so back and forth we went, with him unable to make up his mind! This may seem funny, but in fact it’s pathetic to see someone floundering in this way in a vain attempt to avoid God.
Very frequently, non-theists in the free thought crowd respond to the moral argument by attacking the morality taught in the Bible or pointing to seeming moral atrocities commanded by God in the Bible like the slaughter of the Canaanites. “The God of the Hebrew Bible is a moral monster!” they’ll declare. This attempt to turn the tables is a red herring, and you shouldn’t be fooled by it. Just ask yourself: which premise of the moral argument does it refute? Certainly not the second! Indeed, in order to denounce God’s actions recorded in the Bible as immoral, one must presuppose that objective moral values exist. So the objection actually presupposes belief in the second premise. So what about the first premise, that if God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist? Is that premise in any way defeated by the objection? Well, no; stories of atrocities in the Bible do nothing to undermine the naturalistic account of morality. Can you imagine trying to refute Michael Ruse by pointing to stories in the Bible?
So what does the objection prove? At the very most, it would prove that certain biblical writers got it wrong in attributing these commands to God. That conclusion wouldn’t even faze a theist who is outside the Judaeo-Christian tradition. And even in the case of Jews and Christians, what adjustments to their theology would such a conclusion necessitate? Certainly, it wouldn’t require them to give up the existence of God or his moral perfection. Rather, they would be forced at most to give up biblical inerrancy. So doing would require them to adjust their doctrine of biblical inspiration so as not to imply inerrancy. That would doubtless be a major adjustment, but it would be wholly irrelevant to divine command moral theory.
What we come to see, then, is that this attack upon the portrayal of God in the Hebrew Bible is not really an attack upon divine command moral theory or God’s moral perfection but is rather an attack upon biblical inerrancy and so should be treated as such.42 It does nothing to defeat the moral argument for God’s existence.
So if you keep your head and don’t get distracted by irrelevancies, I think you’ll find the moral argument for God to be very defensible and extremely persuasive.
Which brings us finally to the ontological argument. It’s been said that probably no one in the history of mankind has come to believe in God on the basis of 42. For responses to such objections see Paul Copan, “That’s Just Your Interpretation” (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2001); idem, “How Do You Know You’re Not Wrong?” (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2005).
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the ontological argument. That’s not really true—one of my fellow grad students who was writing his dissertation on the ontological argument told me that his adviser had come to believe that the argument was sound—but still the point is undeniable that it hasn’t played much of a role in evangelism. After a long period of skepticism about the argument, I came to believe that the argument is not merely sound but a good one. I’ve not used it in evangelism simply because it’s so difficult for people to understand and because there are other, more compelling arguments. I did finally use it as part of a cumulative case in a talk at a Veritas Forum at Ohio University this past year, but all the questions from the audience concerned the other arguments. I’d like to use it more often. Remember: you don’t need to prove a premise to someone in order for the argument to be a good one for him. So long as he believes the premises to be true, he is rationally obliged to accept the conclusion. So we may simply present the argument to the unbeliever as a conditional: if God’s existence is even possible, then God exists. That alone is a mind-boggling revelation! We could grant, if we wish, that we can’t prove in a non-question-begging way that God’s existence is possible, but still rightly insist that if the unbeliever agrees that God’s existence is possible, then he’s logically committed to the conclusion that God exists. That should give him something to think about!
So I encourage you to master these arguments and learn to communicate them with sensitivity. One of my apologetics teachers once advised, “Know your subject profoundly and share it simply.” If you can’t answer an unbeliever’s objection on some point, admit it and refer him to literature on the subject that can satisfy his question. In an age of increasing atheism and agnosticism, we cannot afford to forgo an apologetic for this most basic of all Christian beliefs: the existence of God.
Literature Cited or Recommended
Historical Background
Al-Ghāzalī. “The Jerusalem Tract.” Translated and edited by A. L. Tibawi. The Islamic Quarterly 9 (1965): 95–122.
———. Kitab al-Iqtisad fi’l-I’tiqad. Cited in Beaurecueil, S. de. “Gazzali et S. Thomas d’Aqin: Essai sur la preuve de l’existence de Dieu proposée dans l’Iqtisad et sa comparaison avec les ‘voies’ Thomistes.” Bulletin de l’Institut Francais d’Archaeologie Orientale 46 (1947): 199–238.
———. Tahafut al-Falasifah [ Incoherence of the Philosophers]. Translated by Sabih Ahmad Kamali. Lahore, Pakistan: Pakistan Philosophical Congress, 1958.
Anselm. Proslogion. In Anselm of Canterbury, 4 vols., edited and translated by Jaspar Hopkins and Herbert Richardson. London: SCM, 1974. See particularly 2, 3.
Aristotle. The Works of Aristotle. 12 vols. Edited by W. D. Ross. Oxford: Clarendon, 1908–1952.
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Chroust, Anton-Hermann. “A Cosmological (Teleological) Proof for the Existence of God in Aristotle’s On Philosophy.” In Aristotle: New Light on His Lost Works. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972. 2:159–74.
Craig, William Lane. The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz. New York: Barnes
& Noble, 1980.
Hume, David. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Edited with an introduction by Norman Kemp Smith. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1947.
Leibniz, G. W. F. von. “Monadology.” In Leibniz Selections, edited by P. Wiener, 533–52.
New York: Scribner’s, 1951.
———. “On the Ultimate Origin of Things.” In Leibniz Selections, edited by P. Wiener, 345–55. New York: Scribner’s, 1951.
———. “The Principles of Nature and of Grace, Based on Reason.” In Leibniz Selections, edited by P. Wiener, 522–33. New York: Scribner’s, 1951.
———. Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil.
Translated by E. M. Huggard. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951.
“Modernizing the Case for God,” Time, April 7, 1980, 65–66.
Paley, William. Natural Theology: Selections. Edited with an introduction by F. Ferré. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963.
Plantinga, Alvin, ed. The Ontological Argument. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965.
Plato. The Dialogues of Plato. 4 vols. 4th ed., rev. Translated with introductions and analyses by B. Jowett. Oxford: Clarendon, 1953.
Smith, Quentin, “The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism” Philo 4/2(2001); http://www.philoon-line.org/library/smith_4_2.htm.
Sorley, William R. Moral Values and the Idea of God. New York: Macmillan, 1930.
Stephen, Leslie. History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. 2 vols. 2nd ed. London: Smith, Elder, 1881.
Tennant, F. R. Philosophical Theology. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930.
His teleological argument is in volume 2.
Thomas Aquinas. On the Truth of the Catholic Faith. Edited and translated by Anton C. Pegis, et al. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975. See particularly 1.13.
———. Summa theologiae. 60 vols. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode for Blackfriars, 1964.
See particularly 1a.2, 3.
Assessment
Adams, Robert Merrihew. Finite and Infinite Goods. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
———. “Flavors, Colors, and God.” In The Virtue of Faith. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Alston, William. “What Euthyphro Should Have Said.” In Philosophy of Religion: a Reader and Guide, edited by William L. Craig, 283–98. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001; New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001.
Balaguer, Mark, Platonism and Anti-Platonism in Mathematics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
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———. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “Platonism in Metaphysics,” by Mark Balaguer (Summer 2004). Edited by Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2004/ entries/platonism/
———. “A Theory of Mathematical Correctness and Mathematical Truth,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 82 (2001): 87–114.
Barrow, John D. Theories of Everything. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
Barrow, John D. and Frank J. Tipler. The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986. A compendious update of Paley’s catalogue.
Boa, Kenneth and Robert M. Bowman. 20 Compelling Evidences That God Exists. Tulsa, Okla.: RiverOak, 2002.
Boltzmann, Ludwig, Lectures on Gas Theory. Translated by Stephen G. Brush. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964.
Borde, A. and A. Vilenkin, “Eternal Inflation and the Initial Singularity.” Physical Review Letters 72 (1994): 3305–8.
Borde, A., Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin, “Inflation Is Not Past-Eternal.” http://arXiv: gr-qc/0110012v1 (October 1, 2001).
Bousso, R. and B. Freivogel, “A paradox in the global description of the multiverse.” http://
arXiv:hep-th/0610132.
Brink, David O. “The Autonomy of Ethics.” In The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, edited by Michael Martin, 149–65. Cambridge Companions to Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Burrill, Donald R. The Cosmological Arguments. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967.
Chihara, Charles S., Constructibility and Mathematical Existence. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.
———. A Structural Account of Mathematics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004.
Collins, Robin. “A Scientific Argument for the Existence of God: The Fine-Tuning Design Argument.” In Reason for the Hope Within, edited by Michael J. Murray, 47–75. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999.
———. The Well-Tempered Universe: God, Fine-Tuning, and the Laws of Nature. 2 vols.
(forthcoming).
Copan, Paul. How Do You Know You’re Not Wrong? Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2005.
———. That’s Just Your Interpretation. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2001.
Copan, Paul and William Lane Craig. Creation out of Nothing: A Biblical, Philosophical, and Scientific Exploration. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2004.
Copan, Paul and Paul Moser, eds. The Rationality of Theism. London: Routledge, 2003.
Craig, William Lane. The Kalām Cosmological Argument. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979.
———. ed. Philosophy of Religion: A Reader and Guide. New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001.
———. Time and Eternity. Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 2001.
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Craig, William Lane and Antony Flew. Does God Exist? Edited by Stan Wallace. With responses by K. Yandell, P. Moser, D. Geivett, M. Martin, D. Yandell, W. Rowe, K. Parsons, and Wm. Wainwright. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2003.
Craig, William Lane and Paul Kurtz. God and Ethics: A Contemporary Debate. Edited by Nathan King and Robert Garcia, with responses by L. Antony, W. Sinnott-Armstrong, J. Hare, D. Hubin, S. Layman, M. Murphy, and R. Swinburne. Lanham, Md.: Rowman
& Littlefield, 2007.
Craig, William Lane and J. P. Moreland, eds. Companion to Natural Theology. Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming. An outstanding collection of lengthy articles treating the principal thesitic arguments by Robin Collins,William Lane Craig, Stewart Goetz, Kai Man Kwan, Mark Linville, Lydia and Timothy McGrew, Robert Maydole, J. P. Moreland, Alexander Pruss, Victor Reppert, and Charles Taliaferro.
Craig, William Lane and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. God? A Debate between a Christian and an Atheist. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Craig, William Lane and Quentin Smith. Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
Davies, P. C. W. “The Big Bang—and Before.” The Thomas Aquinas College Lecture Series.
Thomas Aquinas College. Santa Paula, Calif., March 2002.
———. “The Big Questions: In the Beginning.” ABC Science Online, interview with Phillip Adams, http://aca.mq.edu.au/pdavieshtml.
———. The Mind of God. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.
———. The Physics of Time Asymmetry. London: Surrey University Press, 1974.
———. “Spacetime Singularities in Cosmology.” In The Study of Time III, edited by J. T.
Fraser, N. Lawrence, D. Park, 74–91. Berlin: Springer, 1978.
Davis, Stephen T. “The Cosmological Argument and the Epistemic Status of Belief in God.” Philosophia Christi 1 (1999): 5–15.
———. God, Reason, and Theistic Proofs. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1997.
Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.
Dembski, William A. The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities.
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———. “The Pseudo-Problem of Creation in Physical Cosmology.” In Physical Cosmology and Philosophy, edited by John Leslie. Philosophical Topics, 92–112. New York: Macmillan, 1990.
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———. “Quantum Theories of the Creation of the Universe.” Unpublished paper, a pre-liminary version of which appears in Interpreting the Universe as Creation. Edited by V. Brummer. The Netherlands: Pharos, 1991.
———. “Space, Time, and Quantum Cosmology.” Paper presented at the conference “God, Time, and Modern Physics.” Science and Religion Forum, March 1990.
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5
The Problem of Historical
Knowledge
“The uniqueness and the scandal of the Christian religion,” writes George Ladd,
“rest in the mediation of revelation through historical events.” Christianity is not a code for living or a philosophy of religion; rather it is rooted in real events of history. To some this is scandalous, because it means that the truth of Christianity is bound up with the truth of certain historical facts, such that if those facts should be disproved, so would Christianity. But at the same time, this makes Christianity unique because, unlike most other world religions, we now have a means of verifying its truth by historical evidence.
This, however, brings us face-to-face with the problem of historical knowledge; that is to say, how is it possible to learn anything about the human past with any degree of assurance? On the popular level, this expresses itself in the attitude that history is uncertain and irrelevant to us today. It has been said that history is a series of lies that everyone has decided to agree on. On the scholarly level, the problem finds expression in the outlook of historical relativism, which denies the objectivity of historical facts. This outlook has profound implications for Christian theology in the areas of apologetics, hermeneutics, and the doctrine of revelation, to name a few. It would make it impossible to demonstrate historically the accuracy of the biblical narratives, since the past cannot be objectively established.
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since facts have no meaning. And one could leave aside the doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture, since it would be meaningless to speak of “errors” if historical relativism were true. Therefore, it is imperative that the Christian scholar handle certain critical issues in the philosophy of history as a prelude to an examination of the biblical documents themselves.
Historical Background
Though people have written histories from earliest times, historiography as a science is a product of the modern age.
Medieval Period
To understand the development of this science and its impact upon apologetics, let’s turn back to the Middle Ages.
MEDIEVAL DEARTH OF HISTORIOGRAPHY
After the Patristic age, the West, in contrast to the Byzantine lands, lapsed into a period of intellectual and cultural decline that lasted from the fifth to the eleventh centuries. Only in ecclesiastical circles were literacy and learning retained, for the masses were to a great extent illiterate. Most of the medieval histories of this time consisted of chronicles that simply listed events and their dates. Around a.d. 900 historiography almost completely disappeared. For the medieval historians, the biblical writers and the Church Fathers on the one hand, together with the classical writers and poets on the other, were considered “authors” or authorities, whose testimony was not questioned. Their successors counted as mere “writers” or
“compilers,” who adduced the testimony of authorities. Thus, verbatim reiteration became a virtue, and a writer describing the history of the recent past, for which no authorities could be adduced, often felt obliged to apologize to his readers for writing in his own words.
The character of medieval historical writing as reiteration of authorities was largely determined by Isidore, Bishop of Seville (d. 636), who argued in his Etymologies that since history, as contrasted to both fable and myth, narrates what truly took place, it must be an eyewitness account. Therefore, the narration of past events is simply a matter of compilation of the testimonies of authorities, who were taken to be eyewitnesses. Writing history consisted of copying one’s sources.
This historiographical method has been called the “scissors and paste” method by modern historians such as R. G. Collingwood, who emphasize the historian’s liberty to criticize his sources.
Although the eleventh and twelfth centuries experienced a revival of culture and learning, this had little effect on historiography. With important exceptions, history continued in the main to be a recapitulation of authorities; and by the thirteenth century history as a literary form had collapsed back into chronicle. It is instructive to note that when in 1286 the administration of the University of
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Paris drew up a booklist of all the texts necessary for basic reading at the university, only three out of 140 were historical in nature. It was not until the fifteenth century that modern historiography was born, and not until even later that history became a widely read literary genre.
IMPACT ON APOLOGETICS
Given this circumstance, it would be unrealistic to expect a historical apologetic for the Christian faith from medieval thinkers. What then could be done to commend rationally the Christian faith to unbelievers? Some thinkers, epitomized by Anselm, sought to prove the deity and incarnation of Christ (and hence the truth of the biblical books authorized by him) by a priori reasoning alone. At the conclusion of Cur Deus Homo Anselm’s dialogue partner confesses: All things you have said seem to me reasonable and incontrovertible. And by the solution of the single question proposed, do I see the truth of all that is contained in the Old and New Testament. For, in proving that God became man by necessity, leaving out what was taken from the Bible . . . you convince both Jews and Pagans by the mere force of reason. And the God-man himself originates the New Testament and approves the Old. And, as we must acknowledge him to be true, so no one can dissent from anything contained in these books.1
Anselm’s deductive approach circumvented the need for any historical investigation of the facts, since everything was proved by deductive reasoning from intuitively obvious premises.
On the other hand, we find very early on, and then with increasing sophistication in the thirteenth century, the development of a philosophical framework well suited for historical argumentation, even if it was itself devoid of such argumentation. According to this approach, one supported the authority of Scripture by the empirical signs of credibility, mainly miracle and prophecy. Those were the chief signs employed by Augustine to justify belief in the authority of Scripture.
Although early scholasticism tended to follow Anselm’s a priori approach, during the thirteenth century this approach became less convincing, and increasing weight was given instead to the external signs.
According to Thomas Aquinas, the truths of faith, while unprovable directly, can nevertheless be confirmed or proved indirectly by means of miracle and prophecy. For Aquinas, miracle is the most important sign of credibility. It confirms the truths of faith in two ways: it confirms the truth of what the miracle worker teaches, and it makes known God’s presence in the miracle worker. Hence, he says with regard to Christ’s miracles: “Christ wrought miracles in order to confirm his teaching, and in order to demonstrate the divine power that was his.”2 I shall argue in the next chapter that this approach to the interpretation of miracle is 1. Anselm, Cur Deus homo 2.22.
2. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 3a.43.3.
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essentially correct. For Aquinas, therefore, the crucial problem is historical: how do I know that the miracles in question ever occurred? Here there is danger of reasoning in a circle: miracles confirm that the Scripture is from God; therefore, what it teaches is authoritatively true; therefore, the miracles recorded in Scripture really occurred. Now Aquinas himself never so reasons—he just leaves the historical question unanswered. But the philosophical framework he constructs is well suited to historical argumentation for the events in question, thus filling the gap and avoiding circularity.
Because the medievals lacked the historical method, they could not argue in any substantial way for the historicity of the events recorded in the Gospels. About the only proof they offered for the historicity of the miracles and fulfilled prophecies was the origin and growth of the Christian church. But with the rise of historical consciousness, that deficit could be remedied and the medieval framework could be filled out with historical evidences.
Modern Period
Modern apologetics has been to a great extent historical apologetics. Let’s examine briefly how this came to pass.
RISE OF HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS
It is probably no coincidence that the rise of historical apologetics parallels the rise of modern historiography. The modern science of historical study was born in the Italian Renaissance. The first stirrings of the Renaissance spirit in Italy found expression in the search for ancient manuscripts. The humanists cultivated the use of classical Latin and Greek and found their greatest delight in the discovery of documents of antiquity in those languages. They developed the skills of historical criticism; on the basis of internal criteria alone Lorenzo Valla was able to expose the famous Donation of Constantine, on the basis of which the Catholic Church claimed secular authority over Italy, as a forgery. Despite this embarrassment, for nearly a century the papacy supported the humanist writers, and learning and the arts flourished in Rome. In search of ancient manuscripts, Italian humanists visited the monasteries of Northern Europe, and the new learning spread, eventually making its way into the university chairs of Germany and into cultivated circles elsewhere. France, after its invasion of Italy in 1494, thoroughly imbibed the spirit of the Italian Renaissance. Before the end of the fifteenth century, Oxford University was already offering courses in classical Greek and Latin, and Cambridge University soon followed suit.
The embodiment of the ideal Renaissance humanist was Erasmus, who occupied much of his life translating classical works into Latin and editing the Greek New Testament. Lorenzo Valla sought to restore the original Greek text of the New Testament through the use of ancient manuscripts. Erasmus published Valla’s corrections as annotations on the New Testament in 1505, and they provided the model for Erasmus’s edition of the Greek New Testament in 1516.
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The Protestant Reformation spurred the development of the science of history by turning attention to the Patristic age in order to accentuate the Roman Catholic Church’s departures from the faith of the Fathers. In their effort to demonstrate that Catholic doctrines and institutions were not of divine origin, but were human accretions not present in the early church, the Reformers stimulated historical research. And, of course, the Catholic Counter-reformers had a tremendous stake in the study of history, because for the Catholic Church a defense of a historical tradition was a defense of the Catholic faith.
By the end of the seventeenth century, the most successful practitioners of the science of history were Catholics of the scholarly orders. Historical writing also became popular literature. Every class in European society took interest in the new historical scholarship and sought to use it to support its own point of view.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, historical writing became one of the most popular literary forms, avidly sought by a growing reading public. It has been estimated that between 1460 and 1700 more than 2.5 million copies of seventeen of the most prominent ancient historians were published in Europe.
During the eighteenth century this interest intensified. According to J. Westfall Thompson, “No other age had such a voracious interest in historical literature as the eighteenth century. Everyone read and talked history.”3
IMPACT ON APOLOGETICS
Without the rise of modern historical consciousness the development of historical apologetics would have been impossible. Protestant apologists were especially effective during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in their use of historical arguments for the faith. The course of this development is quite interesting.
Although Hugo Grotius may rightly be called the father of modern apologetics, he had important precursors in Juan Luis Vives and Philippe de Mornay.
Vives was a Spanish humanist educated in Paris. He lived very much in the mainstream of European life and traveled so frequently to England and throughout the Continent that Erasmus called him an amphibious animal! After his fifth stay in England, he left for the Netherlands, never to return to Spain. From 1538–1540
he worked on his apology De veritate fidei christianae. He died in 1540, and the book was published in 1543. In Vives we find a blend of medieval theology with humanist methodology. That is to say, Vives was a Thomist who accepted the framework of the signs of credibility, but as a humanist he began to provide historical reasons for the credibility of Scripture.
His work tries to deal critically with the question of why Christ is mentioned primarily in Christian sources. He speaks of the true history of Christ and provides a list of historical facts about Jesus. He provides both internal and external evidence for the authenticity of the Gospels. His arguments are primitive and 3. J. Westfall Thompson and Bernard J. Holm, A History of Historical Writing, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1942), 2:94.
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amount to little more than assertion, but they are the first glimmerings of a historical approach to the credibility of Scripture. Vives is significant because in him we see the links between modern historical apologetics and the Renaissance rise of historical consciousness on the one hand, and the medieval framework of the signs of credibility on the other.
Mornay, one of the most important Reformed leaders of the late sixteenth century, was a veteran of the Huguenot persecution in France and founder of the Protestant Académie de Saumur. In 1581, writing in French instead of Latin, Mornay penned his treatise De la vérité de la religion chrestienne. Although never quoting Vives, Mornay nonetheless appears to have been influenced by him, judging by parallel structure and passages between their works.
Mornay makes explicit his appeal to history: he claims that one can prove the divinity of Christ by means of philosophy and history. He says, “The philosopher thinks only of nature; the historian only of his documents. And from the two we have concluded the deity of Christ and the truth of our Scriptures.”4 Hence, his case is based on what he calls arguments and testimonies. The historical material is brought to bear in the final chapter, demonstrating that “the Gospel truly contains the history and doctrine of Jesus, Son of God.”5 Here he argues for the reliability of the Gospel accounts on the basis of the disciples’ unwavering witness even unto death. He appeals to the great number of witnesses, to the changed lives of the disciples, and to the conversion of Paul as evidence for the historicity of the resurrection. Again, his arguments are not sophisticated by modern standards; but they represent an important advance over his predecessors in the development of historical apologetics.
A renowned expert in international law and himself a historical writer, Hugo Grotius was the first to provide a developed historical argument for Christianity in his De veritate religionis christianae (1627). He openly expressed his appreciation of the works of his predecessors, Vives and Mornay. De veritate is divided into six books: book one defends a cosmological argument and demonstrates God’s revelation in Israel’s history; book two contains historical proofs for Jesus’
miracles and resurrection; book three treats the authority of Scripture; book four demonstrates Christianity’s superiority to paganism; book five contains the proof from prophecy to show Christianity’s superiority to Judaism; and book six refutes the Islamic religion.
Grotius clearly understood the importance of the science of history for the truth of the Christian faith. He discriminates between the methods employed in mathematics, physics, ethics, and history. In historical proofs we must rely on testimony free from all suspicion of falsity—otherwise the whole structure and use of history collapses. He notes that many historical narrations are commonly 4. Philippe de Mornay, De la vérité de la religion chrestienne (Anvers: Imprimerie de Christofle Plantin, 1581), Preface.
5. Ibid., 835.
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accepted as true on no other ground than authority; but the history of Christ is attested by strong proofs that declare it to be true.
Grotius begins by pointing out that it is certain that Jesus of Nazareth was an actual historical person living in Judea under the reign of Tiberius. This fact is acknowledged in historical writings from Christians, Jews, and pagans alike.
Further, he was put to death and thereafter worshiped by men. The reason for this worship was that he had performed various miracles during his life. Many of the early Christians such as Polycarp, Irenaeus, Athenagoras, Origen, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and so forth were raised in other religions, yet came to worship this man Jesus as God, because they had made a diligent inquiry and discovered that he had wrought many miraculous deeds. Moreover, none of their opponents—neither Celsus nor Julian nor the Rabbinic doctors—could deny that Jesus had done these miracles. It is not possible to explain away Jesus’ miracles as either wrought by nature or by the devil. With regard to the first of these possibilities, it is not naturally possible that terrible diseases and infirmities should be cured by the sound of a man’s voice or his mere touch. As to the second, Christ’s teaching was diametrically opposed to Satan, so that his miracles could hardly be attributed to demonic power.
Grotius then argues that Christ’s resurrection can also be proved by credible reasons. He points out that the apostles claimed to be eyewitnesses of the risen Christ. They even appealed to the testimony of five hundred brethren who had seen Jesus after his resurrection. Now it would have been impossible for so many to conspire together to perpetrate such a hoax. And what was there to gain by lying? They could expect neither honor, nor wealth, nor worldly profit, nor fame, nor even the successful propagation of their doctrine. If they lied, says Grotius, it had to be for the defense of their religion. But in this case, they either sincerely believed that this religion was true or they did not. If not, then they would never have chosen it for their own and rejected the safer, more customary religions. But if they believed it to be true, then the resurrection of Jesus cannot be avoided. For had he not risen, contrary to his prediction, that would have destroyed the very foundation of any faith the disciples had. Moreover, their own religion prohibited lying and any bearing of false witness. And besides this, no one, and especially so many, would be willing to die for a lie that they themselves had made up, a lie that would bring them absolutely no worldly good. And it is clear from their writings that the apostles were not madmen. Finally, the conversion of the apostle Paul bore witness to the reality of the resurrection.
Grotius concludes by handling two theoretical problems. First, to those who object that the resurrection is impossible, Grotius simply replies that it involves no logical contradiction to say that a dead man has been restored to life. Second, the significance of the resurrection Grotius finds in its confirming the new doctrine taught by Jesus, especially in light of Jesus’ prediction that he would rise from the dead.
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In his argument for Jesus’ resurrection, Grotius presents his opponents with a dilemma. Given the authenticity of the Gospels and 1 Corinthians, the apostolic testimony to the event of the resurrection can only be denied if the apostles were either lying or sincerely mistaken. But neither of these are reasonable. Therefore, the resurrection must be a historical event. We find here in rudimentary form the dilemma that would be sharpened and pressed by subsequent generations of Christian apologists against their Deist opponents.
The period between Blaise Pascal (d. 1662) and Pierre Bayle’s skeptical Dictionnaire historique et critique (1695) has been called the golden age of classical French apologetics. This period included thinkers such as Malebranche, Huet, Bossuet, and Abbadie. The tone for this era—and indeed for that of the next century—was set by Pascal’s disciple Filleau de la Chaise in his Discours sur les preuves des livres de Moyse (1672). He was important because he inaugurated as a self-conscious methodology in apologetics the method of proof par les faits (by the facts).
Filleau held that the proper method of persuading people of the truth of the Christian religion does not consist in trying to make its theological mysteries comprehensible or reasonable, but in showing that the mysteries are entailed in the truth of certain indisputable historical facts. He states: If men know anything with assurance, it is the facts; and of everything that falls within their knowledge, there is nothing in which it would be more difficult to deceive them and over which there would be less occasion for dispute. And thus, when one will have made them see that the Christian religion is inseparably attached to facts whose truth cannot be sincerely contested, they must submit to all that it teaches or else renounce sincerity and reason.6
This method of proving Christianity by the facts was in French apologetics a logical extension of the function of the signs of credibility in attesting the truths of faith coupled with the historical method. Because truths of faith are above reason, they cannot be directly proved but can nevertheless be indirectly confirmed by miracle and prophecy. Similarly, Filleau contended that we may prove the mysteries of the faith, not directly, but indirectly by the historical facts that entail their truth.
Thus, French apologists began to make a bifurcation between the contenant and the contenu of the faith. Roughly rendered, the distinction contrasted the
“container” of the faith to the “content” of the faith. Though the content of the Christian religion, that is, the body of theological doctrines, may be above reason, nonetheless the container of this religion, that is, the historical events of the gospel story, is demonstrable by the facts; hence, the contenu is indirectly proved by historical verification of the contenant. Under the influence of this conception, there 6. Filleau de la Chaise, “Discours sur les livres de Moise,” in Discours sur les “Pensées” de M. Pascal, ed.
with an introduction by V. Gitaud (Paris: Editions Bossard, 1922), 104–5.
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was during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a marked swing in French apologetics toward historical apologies.
In eighteenth-century England there was a similar turn toward empirical, historical proofs of Christianity. Although John Locke set the pattern for English thought in this century by his defense of the reasonableness of Christianity on the basis of Jesus’ miracles in his The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), it was Charles Leslie who enunciated clearly the method of proving Christianity by the facts in his Short and Easie Method with the Deists (1697).
The short and easy method recommended by Leslie is the historical proof of the matters of fact on which Christianity is founded. He argues that when one examines the biblical narratives as one would any matter of fact, one will find them to be historically reliable. Hence, he maintains that one must either reject all the historical works of classical antiquity or else admit the Gospel accounts along with them. Following in Locke’s footsteps, Leslie helped to set the tone for the hundreds of historical apologies published in England during the next century.
There was a subtle, yet decisive, difference between French and English historical apologetics. Both agreed that revelation may be discerned by what the medievals called the signs of credibility (miracle and prophecy), but they differed in the following way. By making a distinction between the contenant and the contenu, the French thinkers underscored the bifurcation between truths of reason and truths of faith, the latter being in themselves rationally incomprehensible and only indirectly verifiable; the English apologists tended to dissolve the distinction between truths of reason and truths of faith, the upper story collapsing down into the lower, so that all truths became in a sense truths of reason, demonstrable by philosophy, science, history, and so forth. When English writers spoke of truths above reason, they did not generally mean mysterious or incomprehensible truths, as did their French counterparts; rather they meant simply truths that we lack the necessary facts to prove. But in both cases, it was the methodology of history that they counted on to carry the weight of the case for the truth of the Christian faith.
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the parallel development of historiography and historical apologetics was disrupted.
HISTORICISM, RELATIVISM, AND POSTMODERNISM
The nineteenth century saw the greatest advances in the science of history that had theretofore occurred. The climax of this development came in the school of historicism, shaped by the prodigious influence of the German historian Leopold von Ranke. Von Ranke, through his doctoral students and in turn through their students, was responsible for shaping a whole generation of great historians. The earmark of nineteenth-century historicism was objectivity. The task of the historian was to uncover the objective facts, and let those facts speak for themselves. The subjective element—the historian’s own personality, biases, outlook, milieu, and so
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forth—did not enter the historical equation. Von Ranke’s goal in doing history, to use his famous phrase, was to describe the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist” (as it actually was). He apparently saw no reason, given the enormous industry that he brought to his research and that he instilled in his students, why this goal could not be achieved.
During the twentieth century there came a sharp reaction to von Ranke’s naïve objectivism. The school of historical relativism emphasized the inextricable subjective element in the writing of history. In the United States, relativism was associated particularly with the historians Charles Beard and Carl Becker. Against von Ranke, they denied that historical facts are “out there,” waiting to be discovered. Facts do not bear their own meaning piggy-back; it is the historian who must ascribe meaning to the facts. And the historian, who is himself a product of his time and place in history, cannot assume the point of a neutral observer in writing history.
The personal element is always in the equation. Von Ranke’s goal of describing the past as it really was is illusory; rather, the historian must himself reconstruct the past on the basis of the present. Ironically, the viewpoint of historical relativism is often referred to today as historicism, so that this term now means exactly the opposite of what it meant in the nineteenth century.
During the 1970s the postmodernist critique of objective canons of rationality and truth revitalized the old debate between historical objectivists and relativists.
Rooted in Continental philosophy and hermeneutics and in the anti-realism of Wittgenstein, there has emerged a powerful postmodernist current of relativism which flows through virtually every academic field, including history. Calling the conflict between objectivism and relativism the “central cultural opposition of our time,” Richard Bernstein remarks, “Relativism, a stream in the philosophy of the past two hundred years that began as a trickle, has swelled in recent times into a roaring torrent.”7 As a result, he observes, “There is an uneasiness that has spread throughout intellectual and cultural life. It affects almost every discipline and every aspect of culture.”8 In 1986, writing in the journal History and Theory, F. R. Ankersmit called for the abandonment of what he termed the old
“epistemological,” or objectivist, philosophy of history.9 The objectivist approach aimed at specifying the conditions under which we are justified in believing the historian’s statements about the past to be true, whereas the narrative approach is concerned only with the interpretation of texts and makes no distinction between the historian’s language and what that language is about. The narrative approach tends to ignore the intent of the original author and evaluates texts only on aesthetic or non-cognitive grounds, while the objectivist hermeneutical 7. Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 7, 13.
8. Ibid ., 1.
9. F. R. Ankersmit, “The Dilemma of Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Philosophy of History,” in “Knowing and Telling History: The Anglo-Saxon Debate,” History and Theory Beiheft 25 (1986): 1–27. Cf. F. R.
Ankersmit, History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994; idem, in K. Jenkins, The Postmodern History Reader (New York: Routledge, 1997).
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approach seeks to discern the author’s intent and so to penetrate more deeply into the past. Narrative non-realists are thus unconcerned with historical truth of narratives or with what actually happened. Hayden White, for example, believes that because historical events must be embedded by the historian in narratives involving a plot structure which is his own construction, historical writing is not different from fictional writing and should be assessed only by means of literary and aesthetic criteria.10
Indeed, it is not clear whether there really is such a thing as the past on a thor-oughgoing postmodernist view, since the multiplicity of historical reconstructions and texts seems to lead to multiple pasts, none of which is privileged. Moreover, radical postmodernists like Keith Jenkins deny that there is any extra-linguistic reality corresponding to the historian’s statements, since there are no facts independent of a description that constitutes a fact. Thus, Jenkins asserts that the idea that facts/reality can exist independently of the historian “is an implausible idea.”11
All we are left with is inter-textuality, the interplay of texts, not extra-linguistic facts. A more moderate non-realist like Leon Goldstein affirms the existence of the unique, actual past, but denies that it concerns him as a historian. As Goldstein puts it, “the standpoint of God does not enter into the work of historians attempting to constitute the human past.”12 Goldstein remains objectivist in affirming that ultimately there is one interpretation of the past which best accords with the evidence, but he is non-realist or constructionist in that it is a matter of indifference to him whether the historian’s construction corresponds to reality as it actually was in the past. Contemporary historical relativism thus comprises two challenges to any claim to know the past as it actually happened: (1) non-realism, or constructionism, the view that all we know are historical reconstructions of the past, rather than the past itself, and (2) non-objectivism, or subjectivism, the view that no historical reconstruction can legitimately claim to be superior to alternative reconstructions.
IMPACT ON APOLOGETICS
One might expect that during the nineteenth century the historical apologetic for Christianity would flower. Seeing instead that it withered away, we might suspect that the historical method had simply gotten too big for its theological britches and had exposed the Gospels as historically unreliable documents. That would, however, be misleading. The chief obstacle to a historical case for the Gospels, as 10. Hayden White, “The Burden of History,” in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 27–50. “Tropics” or “tropology” derives from the Latin tropus, meaning “metaphor” or “figure of speech”; postmodernists take historical writing to be inherently metaphorical and non-literal.
11. Keith Jenkins, “Introduction: On Being Open about Our Closures,” in The Postmodern History Reader (London: Routledge, 1997), 17.
12. Leon J. Goldstein, “History and the Primacy of Knowing,” in “The Constitution of the Historical Past,”
History and Theory Beiheft 16 (1977): 29–52. See also his Historical Knowing (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1976).
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we shall see, was the nineteenth century’s conviction that miracles had no place in a historical narrative. Because this presupposition was accepted into biblical criticism, the historical method assumed great importance there, whereas it did not take hold in apologetics. The nineteenth century’s enthusiasm for the historical may be seen in the old quest for the historical Jesus. One after another life of Jesus appeared during this century, each trying to rediscover the non-miraculous Jesus behind the supernatural figure of the Gospels. Indeed, in that movement one may see the greatest weakness of von Ranke’s method exemplified: apparently unaware of the personal element they all brought to their research, each writer reconstructed a historical Jesus after his own image. There was Strauss’s Hegelian Jesus, Renan’s sentimental Jesus, Bauer’s non-existent Jesus, Ritschl’s liberal Jesus, and so forth. To paraphrase George Tyrell, each one looked down the long well of history and saw his own face reflected at the bottom.13 The movement finally ground to a halt in skepticism, since no non-miraculous Jesus could be uncovered in the Gospel traditions. Rather than accept the supernatural Jesus as historical, however, biblical critics ascribed that belief to the theology of the early church, which they said had so overlaid the traditions about the historical Jesus that he was no longer recoverable.
During the twentieth century, the historical method—usually called the historical-critical method—continued to play the decisive role in biblical exegesis. But both dialectical and existential theology severed the theological truth of the Gospel from the facts concerning the historical Jesus. Hence, any historical apologetic was conceived to be worse than useless, since it focused on the historical Jesus instead of the Christ of faith—a distinction introduced by the German theologian Martin Kähler at the close of the nineteenth century and subsequently taken up into dialectical and existential theology. It is only since the second half of this century that a new quest of the historical Jesus has begun, this time more cautious and chastened; and once more historical apologetics is beginning to reassert itself.
Not even the challenge posed by postmodernist relativism has been able to slow its advance.
Assessment
If a historical apologetic for the Christian faith is to be successful, the objections of historical relativism need to be overcome. This does not mean a return to naive von Rankian historicism. Of course, the subjective element cannot be eliminated.
But the question is whether this subjective element need be so predominant that the study of history is vitiated. In order to answer this question, let us examine more closely the objections of historical relativism.
13. George Tyrrell, Christianity at the Cross-Roads (London: Longman, Green, 1910), 44.
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Objections to the Objectivity of History
The case against the objectivity of history may be summarized under two main points: first, we cannot know anything about the past as it actually happened because we cannot directly observe the past; and second, we cannot reconstruct the past objectively because we are not neutral observers, but rather products of our time, place, culture, circumstances, and so forth. Postmodern relativists will put a linguistic spin on these points: because of our lack of direct access to the past we cannot get outside our linguistic milieu, and the historian’s descriptions or representations of the past will be determined by the concepts and language which he brings with him to the task. Let me explain each of these objections in turn.
THE PROBLEM OF LACK OF DIRECT ACCESS
The things and events of the past no longer exist or are happening today, except in the peculiar sense that events of the recent past may be continuing in the present (a war, say, or a session of Congress) and some things existing in the past may have endured to the present (for example, the pyramids). But for the most part, events of the past have ceased, and things of the past no longer exist. Having slipped through our grasp, they are no longer available for direct inspection. At best all we have of the past are the remains and memories of the past, which are in the present. All we seem to know, then, is what exists in the present. How, then, can one avoid skepticism about the past? As historian Patrick Gardiner asks, In what sense can I be said to know an event which is in principle unobservable, having vanished behind the mysterious frontier which divides the present from the past? And how can we be sure that anything really happened in the past at all, that the whole story is not an elaborate fabrication, as untrustworthy as a dream or a work of fiction?14
Even if one admits the reality of the past, of what relevance is it to the historian? Goldstein points out that historical realism doesn’t add anything factually to the historian’s store of information; he is still wholly dependent on the present evidence for his reconstructions and inferences about the past.15 Since past events and things are forever gone, the historian has no way to check if his reconstructions correspond to reality, that is to say, are true. Historical realism and historical truth are otiose for the historian and should therefore be ignored.
Old-line relativists often emphasized the contrast between history and science on this score. The scientist has the objects of his research right in front of him and is free to experiment repeatedly upon them in order to test his hypotheses. By contrast, the historian’s objects of research no longer exist and so are not subject to either observation or experiment. Historical knowledge thus fails to measure up to the standards of objectivity set by scientific knowledge.
14. Patrick Gardiner, The Nature of Historical Explanation (London: Oxford, 1961), 35.
15. Goldstein, “History and Primacy of Knowing,” 30–31.
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More recently, however, postmodern relativism has invaded science as well, threatening to undermine the objectivity of the scientific enterprise. Old-line historical relativists prized the objectivity of science because it served them well as a foil for exposing what they considered to be the comparative non-objectivity of historical constructions. But during the 1960s proponents of so-called Weltanschauung analyses of scientific theories, such as Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, radically challenged the old, positivistic view of science. According to these thinkers, scientific work takes place within the context of an all-embracing worldview ( Weltanschauung) or paradigm, which is so intimately linked with a given scientific theory that for scientists working within that paradigm, their observations are not neutral, but theory-laden; the very meanings of terms used by them are determined by the theory, so that scientists working within a different paradigm aren’t even talking about the same things; and what counts as a fact is determined by a scientist’s Weltanschauung, so that there are no neutral facts available for assessing the adequacy of two rival theories. On this analysis, scientific change from one theory to another becomes fundamentally arational and is to be explained sociologically. On Weltanschauung analyses, scientists find themselves in the same boat with historical relativists, for scientific theories are constructions which are not based on objective facts and cannot claim to describe the world as it actually is. Ironically, then, the old-line relativist complaint that the scientist (unlike the historian) has direct access to the objects of his study has been undercut by postmodernist relativists who challenge the positivist idea that scientists neutrally observe the uninterpreted world around them. The scientist’s understanding of the present is just as much a theoretical construction as is the historian’s understanding of the past, a construction which cannot be checked for its correspondence with the objective facts, since one’s Weltanschauung determines what the facts are. The implication is that science and history alike are anti-realist and non-objective.
Now, according to historical relativists, our lack of direct access to the past has two important implications. First, it affects how one views historical facts. According to one famous relativist, Carl Becker, it means that historical facts are only in the mind. The event itself is gone, so all we have are the historian’s statements about the event. It is those statements that are historical facts. If one were to reply that the event itself is a historical fact because it had an enduring impact on the course of history, Becker would say it had an impact only because people had “long memories.” If everyone forgot the event, it would no longer be a historical fact.
Thus, historical events really only exist in your mind, not in the past. The claim of postmodernist philosophers of history like F. R. Ankersmit and Hayden White that historical narratives do not refer to reality at all and therefore constitute their own linguistic universe is the linguistic variant of classical relativism’s denial of mind-independent facts.16 Two further sub-implications follow.
16. See Chris Lorenz, “Historical Knowledge and Historical Reality: A Plea for ‘Internal Realism,’”
History and Theory 33 (1994): 311 for this connection.
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The first sub-implication is that facts have no meaning and that the historian must put his own meaning onto the facts. Because the event itself is gone and the facts are only in the historian’s mind, this means, in Becker’s words, that “even if you could present all the facts, the miserable things wouldn’t say anything, would say nothing at all.” Therefore, the historian must put his own meaning on the facts.
As Becker says, “the event itself, the facts, do not say anything, do not impose any meaning. It is the historian who speaks, who imposes a meaning.”17
The second sub-implication is that history is largely a result of the historian’s own biases, personality, interest, and so forth. Because the historian determines the meaning of the facts himself, the history he writes will be just a reflection of himself. Hayden White gives the following example: “no historical event is intrinsically tragic. . . . For in history what is tragic from one perspective is comic from another. . . . The important point is that most historical sequences can be emplotted in a number of different ways, so as to provide different interpretations of those events and to endow them with different meanings.”18 In this way the past is really the product of the present.
There is a second important implication of the historian’s not having direct access to the past. There seems to be no way to test the truth of historical facts.
A scientist has the method of experimentation to test his hypotheses. But the historian cannot do that, because the events are gone. The scientist at least has the advantage of predictability and repeatability which the historian lacks. So how can the historian test his hypotheses? As Gardiner says, We cannot reproduce what we believe to have been the conditions that determined the collapse of the Roman Empire and then watch for the consequences, in the fashion in which we can combine certain chemicals and then see whether the result agrees or disagrees with a prediction of the result of such a combination.19
So because the historian cannot directly observe the facts, there is the unsolved problem of how to test for truth in history. This problem has led postmodernist historian Keith Jenkins to proclaim the “end of history.”20 That is to say, a realist understanding of history as an accurate description of the past is no longer tenable. “In fact history now appears to be just one more foundationless, positioned expression in a world of foundationless, positioned expressions.”21
Thus, the problem of the lack of direct access to the past raises two challenges to those who want to learn something from history: first, what is the nature of historical facts, and second, how can one test the truth of historical facts?
17. Carl Becker, “What Are Historical Facts?” in The Philosophy of History in Our Time, ed. H. Meyerhoff (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), 130–31.
18. White, “Burden of History,” 84–85.
19. Gardiner, Historical Explanation, 35.
20. Jenkins, “Introduction,” 8.
21. Ibid., 6.
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THE PROBLEM OF LACK OF NEUTRALITY
The second objection of historical relativists to knowledge of the past as it actually happened is that we cannot reconstruct the past objectively because we are not neutral observers, but are the products of our time, place, culture, language, and so forth. The historian cannot “stand back” and describe what has happened from a neutral perspective because the historian, too, is caught up in the historical flow of events. Henri Pirenne makes the point:
Historical syntheses depend to a very large degree not only upon the personality of their authors, but upon all the social, religious, or national environments which surround them. It follows, therefore, that each historian will establish between the facts relationships determined by the convictions, the movements, and the prejudices that have molded his own point of view.22
Because of this, each new generation must rewrite history in its own way. The history written today will be judged inferior and obsolete by the historians of the next generation. But their work will also be shaped by their culture and so forth.
Thus, in the words of philosopher Karl Popper, “There can be no history of the past as it actually did happen; there can only be historical interpretations; and none of them final; and every generation has a right to frame its own.”23 Therefore, history can never be objectively written. The historian always looks at the past through the colored glasses of the present, as determined by his society and environment.
Critique of Historical Relativism
These two basic objections, then, need to be answered before we examine the historical foundations of Christianity: first, the problem of the lack of direct access to the past, which issues in anti-realism; and second, the problem of the lack of neutrality, which issues in subjectivism.
THE PROBLEM OF LACK OF DIRECT ACCESS
The things and events of the past are obviously for the most part gone; the question is whether our lack of direct access to them forces us to become historical constructionists or narrative non-realists. Here it will be helpful to distinguish between constructionism as a methodology and constructionism as a metaphysic.24
Postmodern relativism at its most radical takes constructionism metaphysically as an ontological thesis about how reality is constituted. Ontological constructionism holds that the historian actually constitutes the past events themselves via his representations; that there really is not nor ever was a past-in-itself, but only a past-for-me, relative to each person. As such, this view implies a fantastic subjec-22. Henri Pirenne, “What Are Historians Trying to Do?” in Philosophy of History, 97.
23. Karl Popper, “Has History Any Meaning?” in Philosophy of History, 303.
24. P. H. Nowell-Smith, “The Constructionist Theory of History,” in “The Constitution of the Historical Past,” History and Theory Beiheft 16 (1977): 1–2.
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tive idealism which flies in the face of our common sense beliefs that things and events of the past really existed independently of oneself before one arrived on the scene, that we share together a common past issuing in a shared present, that after we die the world will go on without us. Indeed, insofar as postmodernist constructionists claim that language constitutes reality and that there is therefore no extralinguistic reality, their position is self-refuting, since those claims, if true, would be descriptive of the way reality is! Given the radical nature of ontological constructionism, Nowell-Smith is surely right when he states that the burden of proof lies on the person who claims that what the historian constructs is not an account of past events, but rather the past events themselves. But as we shall see below when we discuss the nature of historical facts, the postmodernist’s arguments for ontological constructionism are weak, to say the least.
Moreover, ontological constructionism has some bizarre implications, as Plantinga points out in his biting satire of postmodernist Richard Rorty’s claim that
“truth is what my peers will let me get away with saying”: Although this view is very much au courant and with-it in the contemporary intellectual world, it has consequences that are peculiar, not to say preposterous. For example, most of us think that the Chinese authorities did something monstrous in murdering those hundreds of young people in Tiananmen Square, and then compounded their wickedness by denying that they had done it. On Rorty’s view, however, this is an uncharitable misunderstanding. What the authorities were really doing, in denying that they had murdered those students, was something wholly praiseworthy: they were trying to bring it about that the alleged massacre never happened. For they were trying to see to it that their peers would let them get away with saying that the massacre never happened; that is, they were trying to make it true that it never happened; and who can fault them for that? The same goes for those contemporary neo-Nazis who claim that there was no holocaust; from a Rortian view, they are only trying to see to it that such a terrible thing never happened; and what could be more commendable than that? This way of thinking has real possibilities for dealing with poverty and disease: if only we let each other get away with saying that there isn’t any poverty and disease—no cancer or AIDS, let’s say—then it would be true that there isn’t any; and if it were true that there isn’t any, then of course there wouldn’t be any.25
The serious point in this justifiably deserved satire is that ontological constructionism is not only obviously ridiculous, but even sinister, in that it lends itself to wicked and self-justifying distortions of history.26
25. Alvin Plantinga, The Twin Pillars of Christian Scholarship (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Calvin College and Seminary, 1990), 21–22.
26. On this see Gertrude Himmelfarb, “Telling It as You Like It: Postmodernist History and the Flight from Fact,” in Postmodern History Reader, 164. Zagorin blasts Jenkins’s postmodernist historiography on these grounds: “A historiography of the kind Jenkins hopes to see . . . would probably forsake its critical senses and respect for evidence, be thoroughly serviceable to a repressive political orthodoxy, and breed lies and myths without restraint.” Perez Zagorin, “Rejoinder to a Postmodernist,” History and Theory 39
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A constructionist might insist that one’s construction of the past must be constrained by present evidence. Not only would this not solve the moral problem exposed by Plantinga (one can imagine, for example, someone’s destroying present evidence so as to bring about a different past), but a moment’s reflection exposes the untenability of such a view. For it is clearly impossible to act only on present evidence, since this would necessitate abandonment of all memory beliefs, including everything we have learned in our research. The very notion of “present evidence”
is past-infected, for it has been assembled, digested, catalogued, remembered, and so on. The only present evidence we have is our immediate sensory awareness, which cannot restrain ontological constructionism. Lionel Rubinoff is therefore amply warranted in his observation that postmodern relativism “risks succumbing to all the pitfalls and skeptical implications of the epistemological anarchism that follow from unqualified, radical relativism or subjectivism.”27
But suppose the philosophical constructionist adopts a more moderate line such as Goldstein’s, who holds, it will be remembered, that the past is real independent of our reconstructions, but that we cannot or do not come to know that past. The untenability of even this moderate philosophical constructionism may be seen by reflecting on a case in which every putatively factual statement in a historian’s reconstruction of the past happens to be true, where by “true” we understand minimally that a statement “S” is true if and only if S. So “Snow is white” if and only if snow is white. In such a case the past would have been just as the historian’s statements say that it was. Now if the evidence justifies belief in that historian’s statements, as Goldstein admits it may, then how could we be said to have knowledge only of the historian’s reconstruction and not of the past itself? Perhaps Goldstein would say that in such a case we do not know that the reconstruction corresponds with the past and so we do not have true knowledge of the past, but only a sort of unwitting true belief. But consider the case of a detective who on the basis of the evidence independently offers a reconstruction of a crime which an eyewitness knows to be correct. Wouldn’t the detective be said to know what really happened, since he believes exactly what the eyewitness believes and does so on the basis of the evidence? In general, the claim that in order to know something we must be able to know that we know it, that is, to justify our justification, is an epistemological principle which should be rejected.28 Like the detective, the historian who holds to a correct picture of the past and does so on the basis of justifying evidence by definition knows the past.
Admittedly, Goldstein is right that historical realism doesn’t contribute factually to the historian’s work in the sense of adding one more event to our knowledge (2000): 208. Fortunately, Jenkins’s notion of historiography is “a fantasy rather than something to be taken seriously” (ibid.).
27. Lionel Rubinoff, “Introduction,” in Objectivity, Method and Point of View (Leiden: E. J. Brill), 3. Cf.
J. Appleby, L. Hunt, and M. Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 7.
28. See discussion in Frederick Suppe, “Afterword,” in The Structure of Scientific Theories, 2nd ed. (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 717–27.
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of the past which we otherwise would have missed. But realism is a philosophical thesis which lends to science and history a significance they would otherwise lack, for on the realist view such enterprises really do tell us something about the world we live in, as opposed to historical or science fiction. Indeed, on Goldstein’s view it is hard to see a qualitative difference between the writing of history and the writing of historical novels, since the latter cohere with all known evidence, too.
He might insist that history is limited to what the evidence requires us to believe; but then what is the rationale for such a limitation if not the fact that history aims at truth about the real past whereas historical novels do not? Moreover, as W.
H. Dray points out, historical realism serves a quasi-methodological function in that a real past cannot have incompatible properties, and realism thus serves as a restraint on the anti-realist tendency toward acceptance of multiple, incompatible reconstructions of the past.29
But if historical constructionism fails as a metaphysic, what about constructionism as a methodology? As a historiographical methodology, constructionism may be interpreted as the thesis that the historical past should be regarded as what the evidence indicates that it was. The historian reasons, “The evidence is such and such; it would not be such and such unless my hypothesis were true; therefore, my hypothesis is true.” So understood there is no incompatibility between historical realism and methodological constructionism. On the contrary, it is precisely the historian’s goal, using all his critical skills, to determine what happened in the past by reconstructing it on the basis of the evidence. Of course, in many cases, various proffered reconstructions will be underdetermined by the evidence, so that one does not know which one, if any, is correct; but that in no way implies that there is no objective past or that in other cases where the evidence is clear we cannot know with confidence what really happened.
Nowell-Smith points out,
Some results of historical thinking are so well established that it would be madness to doubt them; others have only the status of being a more probable explanation of the evidence than any rival hypothesis. This is a point on which it is worth while to dwell. Why is it still reasonable to doubt whether there ever was such a person as King Arthur but utterly unreasonable to question the existence of George Washington? The reason is not far to seek. If we took seriously the hypothesis that there never was any such person as George Washington, we should be faced with the problem of accounting for the existence of such a vast body of evidence—not testimony, but evidence, documents of whose existence and nature we are now aware—that it would soon become obvious that the task is impossible. To put it mildly, the hypothesis that there was no such person is in a very weak position vis-a-vis the hypothesis that there was; and that is all that the standard of proof in history requires.30
29. W. H. Dray, “Comment,” in Objectivity, Method and Point of View, 183.
30. Nowell-Smith, “Constructionist Theory of History,” 4.
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We shall have more to say below about how the historian weighs the evidence for his hypotheses; but for now the point seems clear that while constructionism fails as a metaphysical thesis, it is a vital part of historical methodology aimed at recovering the real past.
Turning then to the traditional relativist claim that the historian finds himself in a disadvantaged position compared to the scientist due to the greater inaccessibility of the objects of historical study, let me say two things. First, it is naïve to think that the scientist always has direct access to his objects of study. Not only is the scientist largely dependent on the reports of others’ research (which, interestingly, constitute for him historical documents) for his own work, but furthermore, the objects of the scientist’s research are often only indirectly accessible, especially in the highly theoretical fields like physics. Such theoretical entities as black holes, quarks, and neutrinos are postulated as the best explanations for the observable data, but they themselves cannot be directly observed. It might be thought that this point actually serves to reinforce the relativist’s objection, since it is precisely in the case of such theoretical entities that a non-realist interpretation of scientific theories is most plausible. The plausibility of non-realism in the case of high-level theoretical entities, such as those postulated in particle physics, need not be disputed; but what this retort fails to appreciate is that scientific theories also populate the world with very low-level theoretical entities whose real existence is far more difficult to deny, entities such as dinosaurs, Ice Age glaciers, and even galaxies! The relativist will have to swallow hard before denying that such things are real simply because they are not susceptible to direct observation.
Secondly, while the historian does not have direct access to the past, the residue of the past, things that have really existed, is directly accessible to him. The modern historian is not simply dependent on the reports of earlier historians. For example, archaeological data furnish direct access to the objects of the historian’s investigation. The renowned English historian R. G. Collingwood states, scissors and paste [is] not the only foundation of historical method. Archaeology has provided a wonderfully sensitive method for answering questions to which not only do literary sources give no direct answer but which cannot be answered even by the most ingenious interpretation of them.31
Thus, the historian, like the scientist, often has direct access to things he is investigating. Now I’m not confusing the evidence with the events themselves, which are admittedly past; but I am saying, in Van der Dussen’s words, that “from the epistemological point of view evidence has the peculiar feature of being itself directly observable and accessible for inspection, while the knowledge it may lead to is not.”32 And archaeology is only one of the means to secure such evidence.
31. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), 135.
32. W. J. Van der Dussen, “The Historian and His Evidence,” in Objectivity, Method and Point of View, 157; cf. Gardiner, Historical Explanation, 39.
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As Old Testament scholar R. K. Harrison explains, modern historians are not so heavily dependent on subjective literary sources as before, because the sciences of linguistics, sociology, anthropology, numismatics, and archaeology have become so developed.33
In fact, we can at this point draw a very instructive analogy: what history is to the humanities, geology is to the sciences. The major difference between history and geology is the human factor, not the accessibility of the data. Whereas the subject matter of the geologist is the earth’s history, the subject matter of the historian is human history. Basically their task is the same. As Collingwood states,
“The historian’s real work is the reconstruction in thought of a particular historical event; the geologist’s, the reconstruction in thought of a particular geological epoch at a particular place.”34
If this is the case, then the relativists’ argument based on the inaccessibility of the past loses all its punch. For the subject matter of the geologist is every bit as indirect as that of the historian, and yet geology is part of science, which has traditionally been the model of objectivity to the relativist. Since lack of direct access cannot preclude geological knowledge, neither can it preclude historical knowledge.
But what, then, of the postmodern relativist’s claim that science, as well as history, is non-realist and subjective? It does not appear to be widely appreciated outside the field of philosophy of science—especially by postmodernist theologians who continue to invoke the authority of Thomas Kuhn and to talk freely of paradigms, as though this notion were accepted or even well-defined—that after an initial stir Weltanschauung analyses had already been widely discredited by philosophers of science by the late 1970s.35 Contemporary philosophy of science is post-positivist, post-Kuhnian, and generally realist.
Consider the anti-realist claim that all observation is theory-laden. Taken in the radical sense that our theory actually determines the way the world is, this thesis leads at once to the same subjective idealism implied by ontological constructionism, which is, as Scheffler says, the reductio ad absurdum of such a thesis.36
What about a more moderate claim, that our Weltanschauung determines how we observe the independently existing world? Here one need not dispute that observation is theory-laden in the sense that it involves “seeing that something is the case” or “seeing something as a certain kind of thing,” which is relative to the observer’s background knowledge. For example, if a scientist and a layman enter a laboratory together, the scientist may see an interferometer on the table, while the layman sees only a piece of machinery. Or again, a baseball fan may leap to his feet at seeing a home run at the ballpark, while someone ignorant of the game 33. R. K. Harrison, Introduction to the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1969), 292.
34. R. G. Collingwood, “Croce’s Philosophy of History,” in Essays in the Philosophy of History, ed. W.
Debbins (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1965), 19.
35. See Suppe, “Afterword,” 633–49.
36. Israel Scheffler, Science and Subjectivity, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982), 19.
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sees only a ball going over the fence. This sort of theory-ladenness characterizes historical observation and writing as well: when a historian describes the history of primitive man in terms of “magic” and “mythology,” for example, this is only possible because he is writing from the standpoint of a scientific culture for which the distinction between science and magic is meaningful.37
Now I think that it is obvious that this sort of theory-ladenness does nothing to undermine the objectivity of science or history or to support anti-realism. As the great historian of philosophy Frederick Copleston argues, to say that I experience something as x is not to imply that it is not in fact x. “Why should it?” he asks. “I am aware of an object lying on my table. I see it as a pencil. It by no means follows that the object is not a pencil.” Similarly, “It is reasonable to claim that the people who were present at the beheading of King Charles I saw the course of events as the beheading of the king. It by no means follows that this was a purely subjective interpretation or reading of the events.”38 Nor does the failure of someone else to see something as I see it do anything to suggest that either of us fails to see correctly. If an aboriginal fails to see the slender, yellow object on the table as a pencil, that in no way proves that it is not a pencil, as I see it to be. Now, of course, I may be mistaken in seeing x as a pencil. But I can discover my mistakes.
I can pick up x and try to write with it and find that what I thought was a pencil isn’t one after all. Here we return to the notion of evidence. “Sometimes,” observes Copleston, “the available evidence is such as to eliminate any reasonable doubt about the validity of an interpretation.”39 (Recall the case of George Washington; similarly no scientist could today justifiably hold to a pre-Copernican cosmology or a pre-Harveyian theory of blood circulation.)
Now, to be sure, the evidence itself is also seen as such and such. But for people with shared background knowledge, certain observed facts can simply be taken as data. For example, the layman and the scientist both see the interferometer as machinery, so that that fact is for them a datum; but for a very primitive person, say a troglodyte, that fact would not be a datum. What counts as data or interpretation is thus relative, but in order for much of the evidence available to us to count as data the level of shared background beliefs is not very high at all. Even a caveman could not justifiably see the interferometer as, say, his mate or a saber-toothed tiger.
Thus, when the historian or scientist assesses the evidence for a theory, he needn’t try to justify all over again every datum which he uses. Some data are reasonably taken as given. As Copleston says, “it is foolish to demand uninterpreted experiential data before we are prepared to admit that historiography is not a purely subjective construction.”40
37. Lionel Rubinoff, “Historicity and Objectivity,” in Objectivity, Method and Point of View, 137.
38. Frederick Copleston, “Problems of Objectivity,” in On the History of Philosophy (London: Search Press, 1979), 54.
39. Ibid., 55.
40. Ibid., 53–54.
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The evidence which the historian uses will include texts, as well as artifacts, and here, too, his reconstruction will be limited by the data. Copleston states: The historian is not free to interpret the texts as he likes. Some statements may be ambiguous; but there are others, the meaning of which is clearly determined independently of the historian’s will. For example, he is not at liberty to deny the fact that Marx asserted the priority of matter to spirit or mind. As far as the historian is concerned, the texts constitute something given, something which limits his reconstruction.41
Texts have limits to the meanings which can be seen in them. No one employs postmodern hermeneutics in reading the instructions on a medicine bottle. The fact that texts taken as evidence have limits is of particular importance to our project, since most of the evidence which we shall assess involves the texts of the New Testament.
The above leads to one final point about theory-ladenness. As Suppe explains, it is false that there is a different Weltanschauung uniquely correlated with each scientific theory.42 If the notion of a Weltanschauung is defined too broadly, then it just becomes equivalent to one’s total-background, experience, beliefs, training, and so forth, in which case the striking fact is that scientists possessing widely different Weltanschauungen do employ the same theories and come to agreement on the testing, articulation, and use of such theories. On the other hand, if one tries to narrow the definition of a Weltanschauung, then the fact is that scientists involved in research programs on different theories do not necessarily have different Weltanschauungen, but clearly understand the competing theory, the observations and evidence that support it, and regularly communicate with one another about such matters. It would be bizarre, for example, to say that all proponents of the standard Big Bang theory have a unique and different Weltanschauung than cosmologists who advocated the old Steady State theory, rather than to say that they just disagreed on which theory offered the best explanation of the evidence. Thus, theory-ladenness of observation, insofar as this is a plausible notion, undermines neither science nor history.
The second major thesis of Weltanschauung analyses, that the meanings of terms in theories are theory-dependent, has proved even more indefensible.43 It implies that two different theories could not agree or disagree with each other, in which case it makes no sense to speak of them as alternatives between which a choice is to be made; instead, every theory becomes true by definition and the testing of theories circular (since anything purportedly contradictory to the theory will have a different meaning). This is just a gross distortion of what science is. If one 41. Ibid., 57.
42. Frederick Suppe, “The Search for Philosophic Understanding of Scientific Theories,” in Structure of Scientific Theories, 218–20.
43. See ibid., 199–208.
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adopts a more moderate thesis to the effect that in our formulations of theories the meanings of some of the terms are partially determined by some of the principles of the theory, then one gives up the characteristic claim of Weltanschauung analyses that theories are incommensurable and cannot be adjudicated from outside the paradigm. In any case, it is not clear how the incommensurability thesis for scientific theories would apply to the terms of historians’ reconstructions of the past, since the latter do not employ theoretical terms and principles, but are formulated in ordinary language.
Finally, the third major claim of Weltanschauung analyses, that what counts as a fact is determined by the Weltanschauung, is patient of a radical or a moderate interpretation.44 Radically construed as the thesis that facts about the world are literally determined by our Weltanschauung, it leads once again to a sort of solipsism.
A more moderate claim, that what one can entertain as a fact is determined by one’s Weltanschauung, can only be defended when due consideration is given to the criticisms of the first two theses above. There exists a body of evidence which can serve to adjudicate rival theories. While a theory will shape some of the criteria for its assessment, such as which questions the theory should address or what is the appropriate methodology for testing its assertions, still the requirement that an adequate theory be empirically true guarantees that subjective factors will not nullify the objectivity of science. Similarly, in history, while different reconstructions of the past may be prompted by different questions on the part of the historian and no single methodology exists for testing historical reconstructions, still any acceptable reconstruction must make its peace with the empirical evidence.
The appeal of postmodern relativists to Weltanschauung analyses of science in order to undermine objectivism in history thus proves vain. According to Suppe, Weltanschauung analyses “are not widely viewed as serious contenders for a viable philosophy of science. Contemporary philosophy of science, although strongly influenced by these Weltanschauungen views, has gone beyond them and is heading in new directions. The Weltanschauungen views, in a word, today are passé, although
. . . they continue to be much discussed in the philosophical literature.”45 The turn to realism by contemporary philosophy of science is an encouraging development which can only reinforce historical objectivism.
The Nature of Historical Facts
Now it will be remembered that there were two supposed implications of our lack of direct access to the past. First, there’s the problem of the nature of historical facts. Becker says that facts exist only in the mind. He says that the facts are merely the historian’s statements about events. But this is clearly untenable. For Becker also says the facts have no meaning. Now surely he doesn’t want to say that the historian’s statements have no meaning! His position is thus self-refuting. Rather a 44. See discussion in ibid ., 208–17.
45. Suppe, “Afterword,” 633–34.
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historical fact is either the historical event itself or a piece of accurate information about that event. Thus, a historian makes statements about the facts.
Seen in this light, Becker’s statement that facts exist only in the mind is somewhat silly. His belief forces him to the bizarre conclusion that Lincoln’s assassination made a difference in history only because people have long memories, but that if everyone had forgotten Lincoln’s death within forty-eight hours, then it would have made no difference at all and would have ceased to be a historical fact! It’s difficult to take such an idea seriously. For clearly, Lincoln’s death would have made an immense impact on United States history whether anyone remembered it or not. It was primarily Lincoln’s absence, not memories of Lincoln, that made such a difference in United States history. Even if everyone had forgotten that there even was a Lincoln, the absence created by the death of that great man would still have had its devastating results. In other words, the facts exist independently of our minds and still have their impact even long after they are forgotten.
There were two sub-implications arising from the idea that historical facts are just in one’s mind. A little reflection will reveal that the first sub-implication, that historical facts have no meaning, is a preposterous notion. For what do we mean by the phrase facts without meaning? What in the world is a “meaningless” fact? This is a notion trembling on the brink of self-contradiction. Meaning is inherent in the very concept of fact. To describe a fact is to give its meaning. Thus, if I say “It is a fact that Garfield was the twentieth president of the United States,” the meaning of the fact, if not obvious enough, is given by simply defining its terms: it is a fact that a man named Garfield was the twentieth man to be the head of the executive branch of the government of the country named the United States. What the fact is is its meaning. The notion of a meaningless fact is absurd; there can be no such thing. Insofar as a thing is a fact, it has meaning, because meaning is inherent in the concept of fact. That is the half-truth of the postmodernist’s claim that there are no facts independent of a description. The above description of Garfield uses terms that only a person with a political vocabulary could understand. But that in no way implies that the description fails to express a fact about the world. Again, only a scientist will see the object on the table as an interferometer, but that does not imply that there is no interferometer on the table! When postmodernists assert that historians impart meaning to facts, they are often, as White’s example of regarding events as either tragic or comic reveals, using the word meaning in some evaluative sense such as “significance” or “importance,” in which case the varying assessments attributed by people from different perspectives to events in the past do nothing to undermine the objectivity of our knowledge of the course of past events.46
46. See the three levels of meaning distinguished by José Carlos Barrera, “Making History, Talking about History,” History and Theory 40 (2001): 199, the first of which, reference, is independent of narrative and evaluative context. See also Hayden White, The Content of Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 10: “It is this need or impulse to rank events with respect to their significance for the culture or group that is writing its own history that makes
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The second sub-implication of the relativists’ argument that facts are just in the mind is that history is the product of the historian himself. I plan to deal with this argument when I discuss whether the historian can reconstruct the past objectively or whether what he writes is determined by his cultural milieu and so forth. I’ll argue that because the facts are not just in his mind but are, as it were, “out there,”
subjective influences are constrained by the facts themselves.
Testing Historical Hypotheses
The second major implication of the lack of direct access to the data concerns the testability of historical hypotheses. Since the historian cannot perform experiments like a scientist, how can he test his theories? It seems to me that the historian’s hypotheses are to be tested like anyone else’s: by their logical consistency and their ability to explain the evidence.
The problem arises as to how to apply this test in history. I suggest that the historian applies this test in exactly the same way as the scientist. Whatever model of explanation one adopts in the sciences will do nicely for history as well. One popular model is the hypothetico-deductive model. The scientist invents a hypothesis to provide an explanation of the facts, and then he deduces from the hypothesis specific conditions that would either confirm or disprove his hypothesis. Then he performs certain experiments to see which conditions obtain.
The historian can follow the same procedure. He reconstructs a picture of the past. This is his hypothesis. Then he deduces certain conditions from it that will confirm or disprove his hypothesis. He then checks to see which conditions exist.
He does this not by experiments, as the scientist does, but by historical evidence.
As Collingwood says, “The historian’s picture of the past stands in a peculiar relation to something called evidence. The only way in which the historian can judge of its truth is by considering this relation.”47 Collingwood is saying that the historian’s hypothesis must be corroborated by the evidence, for example, archaeological evidence. “By treating coins, pottery, weapons, and other artifacts as evidence,” one historian writes, “the historian raises his study to the level of a science. What happened in the past is what the evidence indicates as having happened.”48
Alternatively, one may employ the more recently developed model of inference to the best explanation. According to this approach, we begin with the evidence a narrative representation of real events possible”; and Robert F. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 53: “Evidence is not fact until given meaning in accordance with some framework or perspective.” Raymond Martin rightly comments on this sense of meaning, “Since there is no limit to the ways in which something can be humanly significant, there is no limit to what events can mean and, hence, no such thing as the meaning of events” (Raymond Martin, “Progress in Historical Studies,” History and Theory 37 [1998]: 33). Still, Martin shows how facts constrain interpretations of them.
47. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, ed. T. M. Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 246.
48. William Debbins, “Introduction,” in Essays in the Philosophy of History, xiv. See also Dray, “Comment,” 182.
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available to us and then infer what would, if true, provide the best explanation of that evidence. Out of a pool of live options determined by our background beliefs, we select the best of various competing potential explanations to give a causal account of why the evidence is as it is rather than otherwise. The scientist can test his proposed explanation by performing experiments; the historian will test his by seeing how well it elucidates the historical evidence.
The process of determining which historical reconstruction is the best explanation will involve the historian’s craft, as various factors will have to be weighed. In his book Justifying Historical Descriptions,49 C. Behan McCullagh lists the factors which historians typically weigh in testing a historical hypothesis: 1) The hypothesis, together with other true statements, must imply further statements describing present, observable data.
2) The hypothesis must have greater explanatory scope (that is, imply a greater variety of observable data) than rival hypotheses.
3) The hypothesis must have greater explanatory power (that is, make the observable data more probable) than rival hypotheses.
4) The hypothesis must be more plausible (that is, be implied by a greater variety of accepted truths, and its negation implied by fewer accepted truths) than rival hypotheses.
5) The hypothesis must be less ad hoc (that is, include fewer new suppositions about the past not already implied by existing knowledge) than rival hypotheses.
6) The hypothesis must be disconfirmed by fewer accepted beliefs (that is, when conjoined with accepted truths, imply fewer false statements) than rival hypotheses.
7) The hypothesis must so exceed its rivals in fulfilling conditions (2)–(6) that there is little chance of a rival hypothesis, after further investigation, exceeding it in meeting these conditions.
Since some reconstructions may fulfill some conditions but be deficient in others, the determination of the best explanation requires skill and may often be difficult.
But if the strength and scope of any explanation are very great, so that it explains a large number and variety of facts, many more than any other competing explanation, then, advises McCullagh, it is likely to be true.
In his process of formulating and testing hypotheses the historian is very much like the scientist, especially the geologist or paleontologist, who also lacks direct access to his data and the opportunity of lab experiments on past events. Collingwood gives the conclusion: “The analysis of science in epistemological terms is 49. C. Behan McCullagh, Justifying Historical Descriptions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 19.
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identical with the analysis of history and the distinction between them as separate kinds of knowledge is an illusion.”50
One final point needs to be made. The goal of historical knowledge is to obtain probability, not mathematical certainty. An item can be regarded as a piece of historical knowledge when it is related to the evidence in such a way that any reasonable person ought to accept it. This is the situation with all of our inductive knowledge: we accept what has sufficient evidence to render it probable. Similarly, in a court of law, the verdict is awarded to the case that is made most probable by the evidence. Even in a criminal case, in which the burden of proof is highest, the jury is asked to decide if the accused is guilty—not beyond all doubt, which is impossible—but beyond all reasonable doubt. Similarly, in history we should accept the hypothesis that provides the most probable explanation of the evidence.
To summarize, then, we test for truth by assessing historical hypotheses in light of the evidence, and the method of applying this test is the same in history as it is in science. The historian should accept the hypothesis that best explains all the evidence. Thus, the supposed lack of direct access to the data is no stumbling block to testing for truth in history and so gaining an accurate knowledge of the past.
THE PROBLEM OF LACK OF NEUTRALITY
Let’s move now to the second major objection to our gaining knowledge from the past: the lack of neutrality. Relativists argue that because we are all shaped by personality and environment, no historian can objectively reconstruct the past. In what I’ve said already we have begun to expose the fallacies of this objection.
When we judge the truth of a historical work, it is not so important how the knowledge of the past was learned, as what the content of that knowledge is. As the historian Maurice Mandelbaum explains, if we say that a historical work is false, we say that it is false because it does not accord with the facts, not because of sociological factors surrounding the historian.51 As long as historical realism is correct and historical hypotheses must square with the evidence, then the cultural conditioning of the historian is secondary.
Another way of putting this is that it is not so important how the historian comes to arrive at his hypothesis as how his hypothesis is tested. So long as it is tested by the objective facts, it is of secondary importance what factors influenced the historian to come up with his hypothesis in the first place. Thus, Morton White emphasizes that although a number of psychological and social factors may influence the formulation of a hypothesis, the historian still has to submit to objective tests that have nothing to do with personality, milieu, or general worldview.52 It 50. R. G. Collingwood, “Are History and Science Different Kinds of Knowledge?” in Essays in the Philosophy of History, 32.
51. Maurice Mandelbaum, The Problem of Historical Knowledge (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 184.
52. Morton White, “Can History Be Objective?” in Philosophy of History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), 1957), 199.
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is the same situation as in science. This is not to say that there isn’t a “logic of discovery” that the scientist (or historian) follows in framing fruitful hypotheses.
The point is that so far as the truth of the hypothesis is concerned, it doesn’t matter how the historian or scientist comes up with his hypothesis—he could have learned it at his mother’s knee, for all that matters. So long as the hypothesis is tested by the facts, there is no danger of sacrificing objectivity.
In reality, relativists recognize that our knowledge of history is not awash in subjectivism. For although they deny historical objectivity, they do not really treat history in so roughshod a manner. This is evident in three ways: 1) A common core of indisputable historical facts exists. Thus, one relativist confesses that “there are basic facts which are the same for all historians,” facts which it is
“the duty” of the historian to present accurately.53 Even Becker, while saying that facts have no meaning, admits that “some things, some ‘facts’ can be established and agreed upon”—examples include the date of the Declaration of Independence, Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon, the sale of indulgences in 1517, Lincoln’s assassination, and so forth.54 The same goes for postmodernist historians.55 Not even the most radical theorist is really prepared to abandon history as a hopeless bog of subjectivism. As historian Isaiah Berlin puts it, if someone were to tell us that Hamlet was written at the court of Genghis Khan in outer Mongolia, we would not think that he was merely wrong, but that he was out of his mind!56
But if there is a common, incontrovertible core of historical facts, then the relativist has surrendered his point that the facts do not speak for themselves or that historical objectivity is vitiated. It is a simple truth that, in historian Christopher Blake’s words, there “is a very considerable part” of history that is “acceptable to the community of professional historians beyond all question,” be they Marxists or liberals, Catholics or Protestants, nineteenth-century Germans or twentieth-century Englishmen.57 If one were to ask what some of the facts are which make up this backbone of history, I think few historians would disagree with very much of what has been catalogued in a book such as Langer’s Encyclopedia of World History.
Thus, the existence of a common core of historical facts shows that even relativists believe that lack of neutrality does not obviate the objectivity of history.
2) It is possible to distinguish between history and propaganda. “All reputable historians,” states W. H. Walsh, make a distinction between history and propaganda.
The latter may serve some purpose, says Walsh, but, he insists, it is “emphatically 53. E. H. Carr, What Is History? (New York: Random House, 1953), 8.
54. Becker, “Historical Facts,” 132.
55. Cf. Perez Zagorin, “History, the Referent, and Narrative: Reflections on Postmodernism Now,” History and Theory 38 (1999): 14; T. L. Haskell, “Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Rhetoric vs. Practice in Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream,” History and Theory 29 (1990): 155–56.
56. Isaiah Berlin, “The Concept of Scientific History,” in Philosophical Analysis and History, ed. W. H.
Dray (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 11.
57. Christopher Blake, “Can History Be Objective?” in Theories of History, ed. P. Gardiner (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1959), 331.
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not history.”58 A good example of such propaganda was the Soviet practice of rewriting history to serve their political purposes. According to Morton White, when Stalin came to power, he had Russian history rewritten so that it was he and Lenin who led the Bolshevik Revolution instead of Lenin and Trotsky. According to White,
It has been shown by students of the Russian Revolution that mountains of books, newspapers, pamphlets, decrees, and documents had to be consigned to the “memory hole,” mashed to pulp, or brought out in corrected editions in order to substitute for Lenin-Trotsky a new duality-unity, Lenin-Stalin.59
White charges that the most dangerous thing about historical relativism is the way it can be used to justify historical distortions. The ultimate result of this totalitarian fiddling with the past is envisioned by George Orwell in 1984:
“There is a Party slogan dealing with control of the past,” he said. “Repeat it, if you please.”
“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,” repeated Winston obediently.
“Who controls the present controls the past,” said O’Brien, nodding his head with slow approval. . . .
“I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.
Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth.”60
If the facts have no meaning and can be made to say whatever the historian wants, then there is no way to protest this propagandizing of history. On relativist grounds, there is no way to distinguish history from propaganda. But again, not even postmodern relativists can countenance such a notion. Brian Fay reports, Postmetaphysical metatheorists as much as any know the difference between propaganda and genuine history; they can recognize the ideological blindness which sanctions revisionist histories bent on denying the existence of the Holocaust, can identify the ways Soviet historiography was contaminated by Stalinist political correctness, can criticize not just the conclusions but the entire practice of racist historiography (such as Nazi Aryan history).61
58. W. H. Walsh, Philosophy of History: An Introduction (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 111.
59. Morton White, Foundations of Historical Knowledge (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 268; see also Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 5th rev. ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966).
60. George Orwell, 1984: A Novel (London: Secker & Warburg, 1949), pt. 3, chap. 2.
61. Brian Fay, “Nothing but History?” History and Theory 37 (1998): 84.
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Relativists of all stripes want to say that the facts do make a difference and that propagandists cannot distort them at will. But the only way to do that is to acknowledge that historical objectivity is in some measure attainable.
3) It is possible to criticize poor history. All historians distinguish good history from poor. A good illustration is the reaction to Immanuel Velikovsky’s attempt to rewrite ancient history on the basis of worldwide catastrophes caused by extra-terrestrial forces in the fifteenth, eighth, and seventh centuries b.c. Velikovsky completely reconstructs ancient history, dismissing entire ancient kingdoms and languages as fictional. In a meticulously documented essay on Velikovsky’s theories, archaeologist Edwin Yamauchi incisively criticizes the proposed reconstruction, relentlessly plucking out one support after another by a detailed analysis of ancient documents, archaeology, and philology until the whole structure tumbles down in ruin. His conclusion is succinct: “Velikovsky’s reconstruction is a catastrophic history in a double sense. It is a history based on catastrophe, and it is a disastrous catastrophe of history.”
Now no relativist could make such a statement. If history is simply the subjective product of the historian’s own biases and background, then Velikovsky’s views are as good as anybody’s. Yet, as Yamauchi observes, the reaction of historians to Velikovsky’s proposals was “quite hostile.”62 In saying that such a rewrite is poor history or biased or inaccurate, historians implicitly admit that the facts themselves do say something and are not like a waxen nose that can be pulled and twisted about to suit any historian’s whim. So in criticizing poor history the relativist acknowledges the objectivity of history.
Finally, the objection based on lack of neutrality fails to appreciate that the lack of neutrality can be mitigated in a number of ways. Michael Licona lists six factors which can help to mitigate the unavoidable absence of neutrality:63
(1) proper historical method, including the way in which data are viewed, weighed, and contextualized, correct criteria for testing the adequacy of hypotheses, and fair consideration of competing hypotheses; (2) public acknowledgment of one’s horizon and methodology; (3) peer pressure and review by the community of historians; (4) submitting hypotheses to hostile experts, (5) the presence of certain minimal facts which all contemporary historians regard as historical facts and may be taken for granted; (6) a serious effort at detachment from one’s biases.
Popper says that the best way out of the problem of having unconscious points of view is to state clearly one’s view and to recognize that there are also other points of view.64 Raymond Aron states that “relativism is transcended as soon as the historian ceases to claim a detachment which is impossible, recognizes what 62. Edwin Yamauchi, “Immanuel Velikovsky’s Catastrophic History,” Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation 25 (1973): 138, 134.
63. Michael Licona, “Some Hermeneutical and Historiographical Considerations Pertaining to the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Pretoria, forthcoming), chap. 1.
64. Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), 152.
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his point of view is, and consequently puts himself in a position to recognize the points of view of others.”65
Why, then, are histories rewritten each generation? In his classic book The Problem of Historical Knowledge, Maurice Mandelbaum provides seven reasons.66
None of these counts against historical objectivity. Some of the reasons are: new sources and evidence are discovered; recent history always needs to be reworked as we gain perspective on what has happened; new appreciation of a certain form of art, music, literature, and so forth may arise in one generation after another. Far from eliminating knowledge of the past as it actually was, the rewriting of history serves to advance our knowledge of the past as new discoveries are made.
One aspect of the problem of lack of neutrality is of special interest for our inquiry: the presupposition of naturalism or supernaturalism on the part of the historian. Naturalism, in contrast to supernaturalism, holds that every effect in the world is brought about by causes which are themselves also part of the natural order (the spacetime realm of matter and energy). It follows that no naturalist as such can accept the historicity of the miraculous events of the Gospels, such as Jesus’ resurrection: he must deny either their miraculous nature or their historicity.
The presupposition of naturalism will thus affect the historian’s assessment of the evidence of the Gospels. R. T. France has commented:
At the level of their literary and historical character we have good reasons to treat the Gospels seriously as a source of information on the life and teaching of Jesus, and thus on the historical origins of Christianity. . . . Beyond that point, the decision as to how far a scholar is willing to accept the record they offer is likely to be influenced more by his openness to a “supernaturalist” world-view than by strictly historical considerations.67
We have seen, for example, that in inferring to the best explanation, one chooses from a pool of live options a candidate to serve as one’s explanation for the evidence. For the naturalist historian confronted with, say, the evidence of the empty tomb and resurrection appearances, the hypothesis that Jesus rose from the dead would most probably not even be a live option.68 If a supernaturalistic historian were to offer such an explanation of the evidence, his naturalistic colleague would probably find it incredible.
But on what grounds? In a fascinating comment on the criteria for assessing historical hypotheses, McCullagh actually considers the Christian hypothesis of the resurrection of Jesus and observes, “This hypothesis is of greater explanatory scope and power than other hypotheses which try to account for the relevant 65. Raymond Aron, “Relativism in History,” in Philosophy of History, 160.
66. Mandelbaum, Problem of Historical Knowledge, 298–304.
67. R.T. France, “The Gospels as Historical Sources for Jesus, the Founder of Christianity,” Truth 1
(1985): 86.
68. See Peter Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation (London: Routledge, 1991), 122.
The Problem of Historical Knowledge 239
evidence, but it is less plausible and more ad hoc than they are. That is why it is difficult to decide on the evidence whether it should be accepted or rejected.”69
The question of whether the resurrection hypothesis is more ad hoc than its rivals can be deferred until our discussion of that event, but for now we may ask why this hypothesis should be considered less plausible than rival hypotheses. Degree of plausibility is defined by McCullagh as the degree to which a hypothesis is implied by accepted knowledge, including both background knowledge and the specific relevant evidence for the hypothesis. Now with respect to the background knowledge alone, the supernaturalist may agree with the naturalist that the resurrection hypothesis has virtually zero plausibility in McCullagh’s sense, for nothing in that information alone implies that the resurrection occurred (for the sake of argument, we set aside our experience of the Risen Lord). But by the same token, the hypotheses that the disciples stole the body or that Jesus was taken down from the cross alive, and so forth, also have zero plausibility with respect to the background information alone, for nothing in that information implies that any of these events took place either. That means that the greater plausibility enjoyed by naturalistic hypotheses must derive from the specific evidence itself. But here it is very hard to see how the specific evidence confers greater plausibility on any naturalistic hypothesis than on the resurrection hypothesis; on the contrary, these rival hypotheses, far from being rendered plausible by the evidence, are usually thought to be made implausible by the evidence.
Perhaps McCullagh’s claim, then, should have been that the resurrection hypothesis is more implausible than rival hypotheses. Degree of implausibility is defined as the degree to which our present knowledge implies the falsity of a hypothesis. Now, again dividing present knowledge into background information and specific evidence for the hypothesis, it cannot be that the specific evidence renders the resurrection hypothesis more implausible than its competitors, for that evidence in no way implies the falsity of the resurrection hypothesis. Hence, there must be something in our background knowledge that renders the resurrection hypothesis more implausible than its rivals. I strongly suspect that the reason the naturalist finds the resurrection implausible is because included in our background knowledge of the world is the fact that dead men do not rise, which he takes to be incompatible with Jesus’ resurrection. I’ll have much more to say about this problem in the next chapter. But in passing we may agree that our background knowledge makes the hypothesis of the natural revivification of Jesus from the dead enormously implausible, in that the causal powers of nature are insufficient to return a corpse to life; but such considerations are simply irrelevant to assessing the implausibility of the hypothesis of the resurrection of Jesus, since according to that hypothesis God raised Jesus from the dead. I should say that the hypothesis that God raised Jesus from the dead has about zero implausibility with respect to our background knowledge—leaving aside any implausibility thought to attend to 69. McCullagh, Justifying Historical Descriptions, 21.
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the hypothesis of God’s existence. Only if the naturalist has good reasons to think that God’s existence is implausible or his intervention in the world implausible could he justifiably regard the resurrection hypothesis as implausible.
The upshot of this discussion is that the objective facts can lead a historian to abandon his naturalistic stance if a miraculous hypothesis should clearly exceed any naturalistic hypothesis in fulfilling the conditions of a best explanation. Of course, a historian could be so deeply prejudiced in favor of naturalism that he resolutely refuses to accept any miraculous hypothesis. But that is just a fact of psychology, which does not undermine the objectivity of history, any more than does the case of a Marxist historian who shuts his eyes to noneconomic causes of historical development or a Confederate historian who refuses to acknowledge any responsibility of the South in bringing on the Civil War. The point is that naturalism (or supernaturalism) does not inevitably determine how one weighs the evidence.
Indeed, one’s naturalism might be very lightly held, a sort of unconscious assumption unreflectively embraced as a result of one’s upbringing, and quickly abandoned upon the presentation of powerful evidence for a miraculous hypothesis.70
All this has been said concerning metaphysical naturalism. But it has been argued, even by Christian thinkers, that there is a sort of methodological naturalism which must be adopted in science and history. According to methodological naturalism, science and, by implication, history just don’t deal with supernatural explanations, and so these are left aside. Now in this case the issue does not concern a lack of neutrality; it is merely a question of methodology. For my part, I see no good reason for methodological naturalism in either science or history. But we may simply sidestep the issue, since our purpose is not to show that the historian qua historian should accept the miraculous events of the Gospels, any more than our aim was to show that the scientist qua scientist should accept the existence of a Creator. A methodological naturalist will simply remain agnostic when speaking professionally about such issues, but acknowledge that as a human being he accepts the supernaturalistic explanations.
Conclusion
Therefore, we can conclude that neither the supposed problem of lack of direct access to the past nor the supposed problem of the lack of neutrality can prevent us from learning something from history. And if Christianity’s claims to be a religion rooted in history are true, then history may lead us to a knowledge of God himself.
Practical Application
The content of this chapter has little direct applicability to evangelism. I have never met a non-Christian who overtly objected to the gospel message because of 70. See the special issue “Creation/Evolution and Faith,” of Christian Scholar’s Review 21/1 (1991); Alvin Plantinga, “Methodological Naturalism,” paper presented at the symposium “Knowing God, Christ, and Nature in the Post-Positivistic Era,” University of Notre Dame, April 14–17, 1993.
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historical relativism. But in an age self-consciously postmodern, historicism and subjectivism are rampant. As people who believe in an objective revelation medi-ated through historical events, Christians cannot afford to sacrifice the objectivity of history. Otherwise, the events of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus cannot be said to be part of the objective past, since the Gospels do not represent objective history. It is critical if we are not to lapse into mere mythology that we defend the objectivity of history and, thus, of the Gospels.
It is therefore heartening to find that the community of professional historians has remained unmoved by the blandishments of postmodern relativists. Nancy Partner observes, “For all the sophistication of the theory-saturated part of the profession, scholars in all the relevant disciplines that contribute to or depend on historical information carry on in all essential ways as though nothing had changed since Ranke, or Gibbon for that matter.”71 One might think that although they go about their task in the same way as before, practicing historians, as a result of the influence of postmodernism, have nonetheless become non-realists about their narratives. But by all accounts such an inference would be mistaken. Practicing historians know better, and even the theorists have largely rejected postmodern approaches to history. Zagorin reports, “In contrast to scholars in the field of literary studies, the American historical profession has been much more resistant to postmodernist doctrines; . . . the latter’s influence upon the thinking and practice of historians is not only fading but increasingly destined to fade.”72 Postmodernist doctrines are so obviously self-refuting that it is difficult for most philosophers of history to take them seriously. As Fay complains,
Postmetaphysical theories claim to tell us what is the case about history (and thus invoke the idea of truth); claim that their accounts better fit the evidence than do their rivals’ (and thus invoke the idea of objectivity); and claim to reveal something about the ways things are (and thus invoke the idea of reality). Most postmetaphysical metatheories implode because they utilize what they deny is legitimate.73
As for practicing historians, Lorenz opines that it’s a good thing that they do not take postmodernist views seriously because if they did, “it would be completely incomprehensible why they would actually leave their armchairs to do research.”74
Historians know the difference between fiction, which is essentially invented or made up, and history, which requires investigation of a mind-independent reality.
71. Nancy F. Partner, “History in an Age of Reality-Fictions,” in A New Philosophy of History, ed. Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1995), 22.
72. Zagorin, “History, the Referent, and Narrative,” 1. He observes that nearly all the well-known philosophers in Great Britain and the United States who have shown greatest interest in philosophy of history have been almost entirely unresponsive or opposed to postmodernist approaches to historiography.
Cf. Jenkins’ admission, “Most historians . . . have been resistant to that postmodernism which has affected so many of their colleagues in adjacent discourses” ( Jenkins, “Introduction,” 1).
73. Fay, “Nothing but History?” 84; cf. Zagorin, “History, the Referent, and Narrative.”
74. Lorenz, “Historical Knowledge and Historical Reality,” 316.
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Moreover, when sharing the gospel, one does occasionally encounter non-Christians who seem very skeptical about history. With such persons I think it would be especially effective to share the three ways in which relativists implicitly concede the objectivity of history. If they insist on a complete historical skepticism, then we should explain to them the utter unliveability of such a view. If we are to get along in this world, we need a method of sorting out to the best of our ability what has and has not happened. The results of this procedure will allow for the possibility that the historical foundations of the Christian faith will be as well established as many other purely natural events. Therefore, it would be hypocrisy to admit the one but not the other. Insist on this fundamental dilemma in dealing with the non-believer.
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Assessment
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