A G K Y R A

In an interesting interview with James Crossley at biblioblogs.com, Professor Crossley at one point expresses the following opinion:

[T]here is something problematic going on when certain scholars can talk of doing good history, accuse opponents of doing bad history, and then tell us that someone’s mother was a virgin, people really did bodily rise from the dead, and that God’s hand is working in history. If you believe those latter points and want to argue for them, fine. But it isn’t what historians would call good history so perhaps it is time, at the very least, to acknowledge that the rhetoric is inconsistent. I can’t imagine too many professionals working in history departments coming up with arguments in favour of the miraculous or the divine hand in history.

His view is not uncommon. It’s easy to understand and appreciate. It does, however, involve certain philosophical problems relevant to other issues I have discussed on this blog. Chief among them is his implied assumption that the only “good history” is history that proceeds on a naturalistic metaphysic and so would be acceptable to other historians who happen personally to believe that. If a historian’s goal is to understand better the past, then it’s an open question whether the naturalist or the supernaturalist is the better historian when it comes to supernatural historical claims, such as that Jesus lived after he died. It depends on what really happened. To presume that the only valid explanations are naturalistic ones, and so to rule out the supernatural a priori, is to beg the question, of course.

Historians are not philosophers, and I expect that few have training in philosophy of history (analytic or otherwise) or even general metaphysics and epistemology, just as most working scientists I am acquainted with have no training in the corresponding philosophy that governs their work. They work the way they were trained, just like good accountants and cooks do. Naturalistic historical explanations are only good history if what really happened in the past has exclusively “natural” causes. In other words, only if naturalism makes for good metaphysics does naturalistic history make for good history–and how many historians have come to an informed judgment about that? I’ve got news for you: professional philosophers don’t have consensus on that, so how could professional historians be critically entitled to hold naturalism as an axiom of good history? Moreover, if biblical scholars should be controlled–at least in the realm of rhetoric, as Crossley suggests–by the sensibilities of other professional historians, then shouldn’t those historians, in turn, be controlled in their rhetoric by the guidance they receive from the guild of philosophers? If they are, they will soon find that they cannot get away with trying to foist naturalism on others as a necessary precondition to good historical reasoning.

Metaphysical naturalism is not a result of historical research. For its believers, it is at best an assumption and probably in many cases a presumption. And why should any individual biblical scholar’s work and rhetoric be controlled by the philosophical convictions of his fellow amateur philosophers such as naturalistic historians? To identify only naturalistic history as good history would be to prejudge many questions, close off important lines of inquiry, and divest many outstanding scholars of a certain amount of credibility.

Good history is good or bad independently of the historian’s prior metaphysical beliefs. In other words, both a naturalist and a supernaturalist can be good historians (or bad!), even though they reach contrary conclusions on the same question. Their goodness or badness depends on their work given their prior philosophical commitments. Rather than label a supernaturalistic understanding of the virgin birth as bad history, it would be more appropriate to claim it as an example of bad philosophy. Of course in that case, we would rightly and eagerly await philosophical arguments to support that claim, which, if successful, would be sufficient to dispel the supernatural understanding as an example of “bad history.” It might not be reasonable to expect a historian to make such arguments–after all, that’s not his area of competency. I would like to suggest, though, that if a historian isn’t able to articulate such philosophical arguments, he is in no way entitled to assume their conclusion and dismiss other viewpoints without a contest. (I’m speaking here about historians in general, not Professor Crossley personally.)

To put it as broadly as possible, good history is the historical reasoning and writing that best captures what really happened. If something supernatural really did happen in the past (e.g., someone’s mother was a virgin or someone rose bodily from the dead), then a historian whose personal philosophical commitments prevent him from recognizing that is, in fact, not as good a historian as the one whose don’t. And it won’t matter in that case if all his historian friends pat him on the back, take him out for a pint at the end of the day, and tell him what a great historian he is. What matters is what really happened.

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… is being filmed on my street corner tonight.