Follow-up on the reliability on historical documents

Your criteria for the reliability of historical documents would eliminate a sizable chunk of what we know about human history from before about A.D. 1200.

“the person who wrote the document must have witnessed these events themself” – Very little of what we know about history comes from accounts written down by the eyewitnesses themselves. This only starts to be common around A.D. 1200, when writers started authoring more biographies and memoirs from their own experiences, and also when organizations started producing regular records of their activity. A great deal of our knowledge from before 1200 comes, not from eyewitnesses, but from historians who compiled other people’s testimony, whether written or oral. Of course we need reason to believe there was an eyewitness *somewhere* down the line, but it’s not often that they actually wrote down their own account.

If you only accept history which was actually written by a person who witnessed the events himself, then along with large chunks of the Old Testament and the Gospels, you’d better throw away:

- the Trojan War (Iliad of Homer our earliest account, written hundreds of years later)

- the Buddha (earliest documents written hundreds of years later)

- the Greco-Persian wars and the Peloponnesian War (Herodotus and Thucydides both collected other people’s testimony when compiling their histories)

- the first 500 years of Rome’s history (earliest accounts written about 200 BC)

- practically all of the history of England before about A.D. 700 (Bede wrote his History about 732)

- in general, large chunks of European history in the ancient and medieval periods

- probably practically all of the rest of the world’s history before the sixteenth century

Certainly this would mean that there is no history of aboriginal peoples: no history of Canada before the arrival of Europeans!

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I think you’ve spoken judiciously and well about how to evaluate the credibility of historical accounts. I have nothing to add except I would tend to put more stock in poetic or epic material and oral traditions than you seem to be willing to do. Partly it’s because I’ve learned that many cultures pre-Gutenberg have developed the training of memory to a very high degree (for instance, getting a law degree in a medieval university required feats of memory which hardly anybody today could accomplish), to the point that the accurate transmission of history in a mnemonic form seems plausible. But it’s also just my subjective sense of things, and I don’t expect I could persuade anybody about it by argument.

I was going to make a distinction between different genres in the Bible—e.g. Genesis is a poetic foundation myth, while the Gospels present the testimony of eyewitnesses—but I see that you already pointed that out! It’s essential to recognize that distinction. It’s why I think Christians are obliged to read the Gospels as literal history but not Genesis. That is where Ken Ham goes wrong. We can settle one thing: I agree with you that Ken Ham is wrong about the age of the Earth and the universe, and probably other things as well, and he’s wrong because he thinks Genesis is an authoritative literalistic description of how things happened. No argument from me there.

More on Bill Nye and Ken Ham — 'historical science' versus history

In the scenario you’ve set up—striking a flint one million times over nine years—if you want to know what happened the first time you struck it, nine years in the past, you will not be relying on ‘historical science’ at all, but on simple history. You were there and witnessed it (and so did others), so you know what happened.

This is precisely why Ken Ham relies on the Bible to explain the history of the universe: God *was there*, and has told us what happened, so we do not have to work only with extrapolations from present-day scientific observations—we have been given a history of the events by someone who witnessed them. That’s how Ken Ham reads Genesis, anyway, and although I don’t myself accept all of his conclusions, he’s right in principle that if you have credible historical testimony you should rely on it and should use it to check your extrapolations from science. For instance, if your scientific theory predicts an eclipse on 25 March A.D. 1405, and you find that the historical records reveal that no astronomer or anybody else recorded an eclipse that day, but they did record one on 25 December, when your theory said there would be none—then you would be wise to accept the testimony of witnesses and revise your scientific theory. I expect Bill Nye would agree and would use the same principle in his own work. Well, that is the principle Ken Ham is defending when he talks about ‘historical science’, he just includes the Bible on his book list.

Going back to your flint example, the point about historical vs observational science isn’t that you cannot extrapolate from the present to the past—when things follow a regular pattern, like the flint or the motion of the stars, you can. The point is that you can’t *check* your answers, because the past is inaccessible. If you make a claim about the behaviour of flint, you can verify it here and now. If you make a prediction about the position of the moon in ten years, you can verify it in ten years time. But if you make an extrapolation about the position of the moon ten thousand years ago, you cannot verify it. You have no way to do so, because you cannot go back and *look*. If all the witnesses to your flint striking were dead, you could safely assume that each time the flint was struck it sent out sparks. But if one day you found a living witness, who said that every second time you struck it, nothing happened, then, assuming the witness is credible, you would have to revise your theory.

The book of Genesis gives us a history of the universe. Ken Ham reads it as a strictly literal account, and it doesn’t agree with the extrapolations of mainstream science. If he’s right about how to read the Bible, then he’s absolutely correct to say ‘we know from reliable authority that the Earth is a few thousand years old; mainstream science says the Earth is billions of years old; therefore mainstream science must be going wrong somewhere, and we have to revise it.’ My only disagreement with Ken Ham is whether Christians are obliged to read Genesis as a strictly literal account of the way things happened. I don’t think we are, and so when scientific discoveries make it appear immensely improbable that the Earth is a few thousand years old, I accept that and say the Earth is probably *not* a few thousand years old. It doesn’t shake my faith in the book of Genesis either, because it is not in the same genre as scientific treatises, and so I don’t expect it to have the same application.

The relevance of all this to the Bill Nye — Ken Ham debate is that you cannot use what is less certain to disprove what is more certain. Extrapolations about the past may be, and often are, extremely probable, but their weakness is that they cannot be *checked* by testing, because we can’t get back to the past. In Ken Ham’s view, we have God’s absolutely reliable testimony about the history of the universe, and that trumps even seemingly probably extrapolations about the past. What’s ironic is that all of Bill Nye’s evidence about the age of the universe, the age of fossils, trees, and the rest, is utterly beside the point if he wanted to convince Ken Ham to change his mind. Because Ken Ham will always say, ‘you *think* it’s that old, but you’ve got it wrong, and we know because God told us how old the Earth is.’ The way to change Ken Ham’s mind would be either to argue with him about Biblical interpretation (which is what I would do) or show that his assumptions lead him to make mistakes about science *here and now*. The closest he came to that, I think, was asking Ken Ham to make *predictions* based on his Creation science. That would be a true test.

Answers to questions about the Christian faith

If there were undeniable proof given to you that debunked the bible, would you stop believing?

Your question is a fair one and it would take me a long time to answer it well, because I would have to address how I read the Bible, the significance of the Bible in the Catholic Church, and many other things. But, so that I don't appear to be evading the question, I'll give you the shortest answer I can.

The short answer is this: if you proved that Jesus did not rise from the dead, then you would have shown that the Church is a fraud and I would stop being a Christian. I expect I would become a Jew, or at least a gentile who believes in the Jewish religion.

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What would a find like life on Mars or another planet do to one's faith?

The discovery of life on Mars or any other planet, especially intelligent life, would be amazing. It would not alter my faith—in my view it would not be evidence for or against Christianity.

I’ll turn it around and point out that *both* possibilities have been used as arguments against the Christian faith. E.g. if there are no other intelligent beings in the universe, then isn’t it hard to believe that God cares about intelligent life like us, since through the whole universe it only exists for a short time on one backwater planet and all the rest is dead matter? On the other hand, if there *are* other intelligent beings, then isn’t it hard to believe that God thinks mankind is so special that he sent his Son to earth to save us? It seems like whatever we find, it will be used as an argument against the Christian faith.

The fact is, the Christian faith is very practical and is about local matters here on planet Earth. It tells us as much as we need for our own salvation, and not much more. On planet Earth, man is sinful and needs redemption, and the Christian faith tells us that Christ came to redeem us. It doesn’t tell us if there are other intelligent species out there, or what God’s relationship is with them. It doesn’t even tell us about God’s relationship with *animals* here on Earth.

Christians can and do speculate about these things, and try to see how they might fit into what the Christian faith does tell us. For instance, medieval scientists believed that the planets and stars were intelligent beings, who moved in their orbits by their own free will and power. They also believed there were non-human forms of intelligent life here on earth. I don’t think they would have been shocked if they discovered that there were intelligent beings living on other planets, once they understood what we know about astronomy.

C.S. Lewis wrote a series of science fiction novels about humans discovering life on Mars and on Venus. They’re great reads, and offer some insightful speculations about what we might expect life on other worlds to be like, if the Christian faith is true. Their titles are Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength.

On the Bill Nye — Ken Ham debate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6kgvhG3AkI

My wife and I have been watching it in chunks over meals. It's fun to watch, gets us talking. It's a curious debate for me because although I'm deeply invested in the topic, neither Bill Nye nor Ken Ham present my own view.

I don't think Christians are bound to a strictly literal interpretation of the Creation story in Genesis. Like Bill Nye I think the world is billions of years old, and for many of the reasons he presents. E.g. we can see stars that are billions of light years away -- if the universe was created 6000 years ago that light would not have reached us yet. Nevertheless I found myself constantly standing on Ken Ham's side in this debate. He and I agree on basically everything important, except how to read certain parts of the Bible -- and those not the most essential parts. He is a Christian, and that is the most important thing to get out of the Bible, as he points out: man is severed from God by sin, but God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son, that those who believe in Him should not die but should have eternal life...

Ken Ham made some very important points in this debate. To talk about them all would take too long, but there are two I thought were really key.

1) Ken Ham's distinction between observational and historical science is an important one, and although he might have put it too strongly, Bill Nye is just wrong to dismiss it the way he does. The fact is that there is an enormous difference between the level of certainty involved. Observational science, operating in the present, is about as certain as you can get (outside of the very rock-bottom foundations of knowledge, like that I exist). If you tell me "if you strike a flint on a rock, you'll make sparks," I can check it for myself right away, and *see* it happening.

But once you start talking about the past you can carry a much lighter burden of certainty. Because we have no direct access to the past. We simply cannot go and *look* the way we can with the flints today. So every claim about the past is based on a chain of reasoning. "I strike this flint today, and it made a spark, THEREFORE: it must have made a spark 100 years ago." It might be a very reasonable chain of reasoning, but it is simply less certain than the observational science, because people make mistakes in their reasoning. And once you start talking about things more complicated than striking flints, and building long chains of reasoning, and many different ones, and basing more chains of reasoning on those chains... there are lots of places you can go wrong. Now I'm not saying that means the world is 6000 years old, it doesn't -- I'm saying there *is* a distinction between observational science and historical science, and it's *true* that historical science is far less certain.

On that note it's interesting that people sometimes treat pieces of historical science as though they are more certain than their own observations of the world around them... I think Ken Ham's discussion of 'kinds' is a good example, where mainstream science has divided up species based on an idea of how evolution happened, which is the result of a long chain of reasoning, whereas the concept of dog-kind, cat-kind, etc. fits very well with what we presently observe and can all verify with our own eyes. Yet the latter, which is more certain, is rejected because it contradicts the former, which is less certain.

Anyway this has gone on longer than I thought so I'd better get to the really essential point:

2) For me the most essential point, and the one I would like everybody to grasp, is that naturalists have hijacked the word 'science' through a bait-and-switch with the meaning of the word. Science nowadays can mean two things:

A) Gaining knowledge through observing and experimenting on the world around us.

B) Disbelief in the supernatural;

or, at least, disbelief in the supernatural as a cause of things that happen in the world around us. We call this naturalism.

We're all agreed, including Ken Ham, that we want A, which we call science. But naturalists also call B with the name 'science.' And they use that double definition to confuse people into thinking you can't have A without B. It's not true! Anybody can do A, and do it well, if he is inquisitive, attentive, and honest. But anytime somebody attacks naturalism B, he is construed as attacking science A, which is exactly the move Bill Nye makes. He keeps harping on how America needs science and innovation or it'll fail, implicitly saying that if you reject B, as Ken Ham does, you are not doing science and cannot innovate.

I think most naturalists would say that they believe B on the basis of experiments performed by science A. But it's not true. It cannot possibly be true, because B is not the kind of thing that *can* be proved that way. Naturalism B is a philosophical belief which requires philosophical, not scientific, argument and proof. How could you prove 'there is no supernatural being' through science, which studies only the natural world? The whole meaning of the word 'supernatural' is that it is beyond the natural world, so you can't disprove its existence by investigations *in* the natural world.

But it's worse than that. Naturalism cannot be the *result* of scienctific study, because naturalism is the assumption *on the basis of which* naturalists *do* scientific study. They're always saying when you start doing science you have to rule out the supernatural. But if you're ruling out the supernatural when you *start* doing science, how can it then be the *result* of doing science? You've got it backwards.

Actually naturalism is just a metaphysical belief. You could call it the religion of non-religion. And the history of philosophy suggests that it was the people who were already naturalists who embraced Darwin so eagerly and elevated evolution to a dogma, *because* they thought Darwin gave them the key to eliminating God from the cosmos.

The point is that when you see debates on how to teach science to kids, you always hear the naturalists claiming, implicitly or explicitly, that you have to teach B in order to teach A. It's not true. And when a naturalist claims Christians aren't teaching science if they don't teach B, what it amounts to is the intolerant naturalist forcing his own religious beliefs onto everybody else. Which is what Ken Ham claims has happened in the last century, and I agree with him.