Keeping History Safe

In the cold morning air with the sun not yet over the ridge, the place to begin preparation for summiting Mount Darwin is to ponder the reasonableness of miracles. Many Totalizers would like to ban miracles from university consideration and inquiry. Trouble is: human history is awash with credible people reporting miracles.

Modern academic tradition tends to try and maintain order. For historians it behooves us professionally to avoid accounts of alleged spiritual events. We find comfort in a little logical gymnastics that keeps history safe for us to wander in, a deceptively formulaic avoidance method that helps us avoid what people are telling us about extraordinary events in the past.

David Hume popularly articulated this logical gymnastics in an essay titled “Of Miracles” that was eventually printed in Enquires Concerning Human Understanding (1748). “I flatter myself,” Hume triumphantly proclaimed, “that I have discovered an argument . . . which, if just, will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion, and consequently, will be useful as long as the world endures.”

His everlasting check on superstition begins with a circular argument that because miracles can’t happen, a reasonable person should not even listen to reports of them. Hume taught that though the normal job of a historian was to listen to the testimony that comes down to us from the past, there is a point at which you can close your ears. Hume knew that historical testimony can get wild, so he came up with a way to domesticate the wildness, a way to make history a zoo rather than allow it to be a jungle. His “Of Miracles” has been tremendously influential in the discipline of human history over the last two hundred and fifty years, not because his ideas are strong, but because his ideas are useful. Get rid of “superstitious delusions,” and the discipline of history can be turned from a safari into a form of home economics. Hume’s domestication of history is seductively simple. Instead of following the Aristotelian tradition of linking the credibility of hard-to-believe testimony to the credibility of the testifier, Hume recommended disregarding the testifier and focusing only on the testimony. This effectively removed the persuasive power from hard-to-believe testimony. Miracles need the credibility of an eyewitness in order to have persuasive power. Hume cut the power source from the unwanted testimony.

Essentially, Hume adopted the modeling technique that Darwin later used and is best seen in Global Positioning System (GPS) units. Hume recommended gathering testimony from the past and every region to create a general model of what humans generally experience. Using this mass of information, one should generalize standards of common experience. Now if anyone reports a miracle, the alleged event can’t be true because it does not conform to the generalized standards of common experience. (Of course, Hume had already refused to allow that any reports of miracles could be used even to generalize common experience.) It’s tricky. Its logic is circular. But it works to weed out awkward, quirky information. It is as if a domineering GPS unit created a sphere to serve as an abstraction for the earth, then insisted that the earth can’t have wobbling poles and flattening in the upper latitudes because the sphere in the GPS shows it can’t be true. Given a useful and trustworthy GPS, don’t listen to a scientist who might tell you something different than what the GPS tells you.

The circularity of this argument has been noted ever since Hume first proposed it, but Hume was a good writer and said what a lot of people wanted to hear. Miracles are impossible so miracle reports can’t be true. Don’t even listen to reports of them.

Balancing Likelihoods

Also embedded in Hume’s essay is the awkward “rule of logic,” most often called “Balancing Likelihoods.” By combining math and logic in an odd way, Hume’s “Of Miracles “ offered another way for historians to avoid thinking about miracles. Balancing Likelihoods has many names but is probably best stated by David Hackett Fischer, in his Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, as “the rule of probability:”

“[A]ll inferences from empirical evidence are probabilistic. It is not, therefore, sufficient to demonstrate merely that A was possibly the case. A historian must determine, as best he can, the probability of A in relation to the probability of alternatives. In the same fashion he cannot disprove A by demonstrating that not-A was possible, but only by demonstrating that not-A was more probable than A. This is the rule of probability.”

This seems to be practical but is impossible. Balancing Likelihoods, in the way described by Fischer, cannot be used by historians in any normal practice. It is a talisman to keep history mentally safe from the wildness that is reported to exist. Logicians, especially mathematicians, have long criticized intellectual constructions like this. The “probability” that Fischer writes about is seemingly mathematical, but the math is simply implied to give a sense of strength to human feelings.

Before Hume wrote “Of Miracles” probabilistic logic had been advancing rapidly and there was a great hope that mathematical analogies would strengthen human thinking—even Christian apologetics. “Pascal’s Wager,” the most famous mathematical apologetic from the seventeenth century, equated eternal salvation with mathematical infinity and then applied it to a gambling formula. Antoine Arnauld, in The Port-Royal Logic (1662), and John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Discourse on Miracles (1706), carried probabilistic math and logic into the handling of reported miracles. A half-century later, however, Hume reacted against Arnauld and Locke’s teachings that mathematical analogies could help in the discussion of the credibility of miracles. Hume insisted that to handle a reported miracle, a historian had to create two separate ratios, pro and con, for believability. The ratios were then to be weighed against each other. This is Fischer’s “rule of probability” quoted above. In the language of Hume’s era, this was proclaimed as the “calculus of good sense.”

Lorraine Daston, in Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (1988), offers an excellent study of Hume and the many eighteenth-century mathematicians who wanted to help bring rigorous quantitative thinking to what today would be called the humanities. Daston writes that by the 1840s, mathematicians realized that “the ‘calculus of good sense’ had become antithetical to good sense,” and that today most of what these early probabilists were trying to do is considered “patently absurd.”

In 1901, one of America’s preeminent philosopher-mathematician-logicians, Charles Sanders Peirce, wrote three essays attacking the way historians had adopted Hume’s bad logic: “A Preliminary Chapter, Toward an Examination of Hume’s Argument Against Miracles, in its Logic and in its History,” “Hume’s Arguments Against Miracles, and the Idea of Natural Law,” and “On the Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents especially from Testimonies.” Peirce showed that historians are in error when they talk of judging testimony by balancing probabilities because “in a scientific sense, there are no ‘probabilities’ to be judged.”

Probability, Peirce wrote, “is the ratio of the frequency of occurrence of a specific event to a generic event.” A testimony “is neither a specific event, nor a generic event, but an individual event.” Peirce further pointed out that what people were justifying by claiming Balancing Likelihoods was really simply relating “what they prefer to do” to what they don’t prefer. “Likelihood is merely a reflection of our preconceived ideas.”

Historians like me who teach in universities about the reasonable credibility of Jesus’ resurrection need to be students of Peirce not Hume on the subject of assessing the credibility of reports that come down to us from ancient history. Dealing wisely with reports of events verging on the incredible is just part of the normal job of being grounded in the social study of our complex human past.

“Come to history as a doubter,” Richard Marius advises in a historical methods manual. “Skepticism is one of the historian’s finest qualities. Historians don’t trust their sources. . . . Nothing is quite so destructive to a historian’s reputation as to present conclusions that prove gullibility.”

But Marius is wrong. In practice, historians have to trust more than doubt. In practice, historians, especially ancient historians, can’t rely on doubting. Historians have to be close listeners, discerning listeners, wise listeners, who sometimes have to make harmonies and stretch for belief.

(I must add an immediate qualification to this brief history: Francis Collins did not work on this project after he moved to the NIH. As is often the case with co-authored works, the authors played different roles. Francis’s contribution was to get the whole FAQ project started and work closely with the original writers and editors on the first round of material, most of which ended up on The BioLogos Forum.)

The Language of Science and Faith shares and even embodies the very inspiration that launched BioLogos—the desire to help people find answers to “Genuine Questions” about relating scientific accounts of origins to their faith in God as creator. As our many visitors to this site know, the “pre-history” of BioLogos was Francis Collins’s publication of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief in 2007. The book went on to become a bestseller and even now, almost 4 years later the book continues to be near the top of the best-selling books in its area. As I write these words a few days after Christmas, it is #1 on the “science and religion” list at Amazon, a powerful testimony to both the importance of this topic and the winsome writing style and testimony of its author.

The Language of God told the story of how Francis found harmony between his science and his Christian faith. He is a world-class scientist—leading the Human Genome Project to a successful completion and going on to become the head of the National Institutes of Health, where he presently works. But he is also a committed believer. His story moved readers who were wrestling with questions of faith and science, and seeking the place of rest that Collins had found in his own journey.

Letters and emails poured in, asking Francis for wisdom and insight. Readers wanted to dig deeper. Many asked questions not addressed in The Language of God. Soon Francis was buried in a pile of “Frequently Asked Questions.” Addressing these questions individually was simply not possible, but many of them were passionate and came from people with real struggles. Ignoring them was not an option. BioLogos was Francis’s response to this felt need.

Not surprisingly, the BioLogos website launched with a series of FAQ’s in which various experts helped BioLogos staff writers address key issues in their fields—from biblical studies and theology to the history of science, from biology to physics, and everything in between. The experts included such leading thinkers as Denis Alexander, Jeff Schloss, Owen Gingerich, Darrel Falk, Alister McGrath, Ernest Lucas, Ron Numbers, and Ted Davis.

The FAQ format requires short, stand-alone answers to work well, and it became apparent that there would be value in a more systematic treatment of these issues. The mission of The Language of Science and Faith is to survey these same issues but in a more wide-ranging way that is only possible in a book. By rewriting all of the original material, adding fresh material where needed, and working with the editors at InterVarsity, I have tried to create a coherent and consistent style that will help readers stay with the themes as they unfold.

The book groups topics thematically, allowing a reader to get a global sense of the issues connected to each topic. Throughout the book, we built carefully on each topic, hoping to take the reader by the hand, so to speak, from one topic to the next in a way that would let them dig steadily deeper without feeling like they were getting in over their heads.

The book begins with the evidence for evolution and the great age of the earth. As readers of this blog know very well by now, this evidence is compelling and must be taken seriously. In fact, it is the strength of this very evidence that requires books like this and projects like BioLogos. If the evidence was weak and piecemeal, then we could simply withhold assent and maintain a more traditional view. But the evidence does not let us do that, and we make this case in the first two chapters.

Once we accept this evidence, the questions emerge and are the subject of the next two chapters, which look at ways to relate science and religion in general, and science and scripture in particular. Unless a harmony can be found, there can be no “coming to peace with science” as BioLogos president Darrel Falk titled his wonderful book on this topic. We believe, of course, that harmony can be found, and we lay out that case. But this leads to another question: If harmony can be found so readily, why is Darwin’s theory of evolution so controversial?

The controversy surrounding Darwin’s theory is a complex sociological and cultural problem, which we unfold in a chapter. From atheists who want evolution to be a weapon against religion, to biblical literalists who want the Bible to be a weapon against evolution, there is no shortage of people with agendas to create controversy.

The constant presence of controversy creates the impression that this discussion is an endless quarrel. This is far from true, and we include a chapter on the fine-tuning of the universe to make exactly that point. The many features of our universe that are fine-tuned for life do not explain themselves and, while we caution against leaping to the conclusion that “God is the explanation for fine-tuning,” we do suggest that the universe appears to have the sort of deeply rational, purposeful character that a Christian would expect, even before looking at it from the perspective of science.

The final chapter, titled “The Grand Narrative of Creation,” offers a speculative look at the scientific creation story through biblical and theological lenses. We suggest, tentatively, that the affirmations Christians want to make on behalf of Genesis resonate nicely with what science has discovered about origins.

The Language of Science and Faith does not seek to break new scholarly ground. Our target audience is the evangelical church—the tens of millions of Bible-believing Christians who are prepared to engage contemporary science, rather than simply reject it. We were thus quite thrilled when Dr. Joel C. Hunter -- pastor of the Northland Church in Longwood, Florida, an enthusiastic participant in our New York Workshops, and one of America’s religious leaders -- gave us this endorsement for the cover of the book:

"As a pastor, I am constantly searching for resources that will guide people to the fullness of God. I care that my congregation be attracted toward God's artistry, moved by his majesty and intellectually challenged by his sovereignty. This book is at the top of my recommendations both as an evaluation of theories of creation and as a devotional that prompts us to revere the Creator."

Over the course of the next few weeks, I will be offering reflections on the development of this book, some excerpts, as well as exploring some of the themes of the book in greater detail.

Be sure to bookmark the new landing page for The Language of Science and Faith to stay up to date with the latest news about the book!