lisa@phs.UUCP (Jeff Gillette) (11/09/84)
<> Some excellent articles have recently appeared on the subject of Christian evidence and the scientific method. Being a scientist neither by training nor by profession, I would like to stick my neck on the chopping block and offer a few thoughts of my own on the subject. 1. Scientific method and Christianity It seems that the purpose of scientific inquiry is the establishment of causal relationships. Empirical evidence demonstrates a that certain phenomenon exists. The scientist asks under what circumstances it exists, and what causes bring it about. In Aristotelean categories, there is more than one type of causation. The scientific method is often able to answer the question of material cause (e.g. two elements coming together cause a reaction), formal cause (e.g. the equation that describes the chemical reaction), and efficient cause (e.g. the scientist in the lab that brings the elements together). Scientific inquiry often has less success dealing with questions of final causality (e.g. why do these two elements react this way instead of in some other manner). The only real answer is that reactions just happen that way (perhaps with some reference to some other scientific theory, like electron binding, that raises the same issues all over). The point is that the scientific method, as I understand it, is based on description. A hypothesis that predicts or explains certain phenomena is scientific only insofar as it can be tested in a repeatable and controlled setting, and insofar as it deals with generalized classes of phenomena (good scientific standards rarely accept a single iteration of an experiment because a unique individual event may reflect an unusual chance or an uncontrolled factor). Note what I have not said: that the scientific method is *objective*. That, it seems to me, is the purpose of a hypothesis's generalizability. The myth of objective science has gone the way of the myth of objective history. But, as a hypothesis is expanded to include different types of experiments in different types of controlled settings, the presumption is that falacious subjectivity will be uncovered and discarded. How does this apply to history, particularly the history of a religious movement such as Christianity in the early centuries of this age? To start, the Christians' claim that their religion is based upon the resurrection of Jesus from the dead does not lend itself to scientific inquiry. It is by definition unique and not repeatable. It is also not controllable (how does one "control" the presence of divine forces in a laboratory setting?). Because there is no generalizable hypothesis here (even the hypothesis that gods rise from the dead is invalidated by the Christian claim of monotheism), thus there is also no clear method to identify the possibility of falacious subjectivity. Defined in a "looser" way, the scientific method can be used to trace questions of history. The analogy of the American Revolution has been suggested. The historian can formulate a hypothesis and put questions to a variety of historical texts because the Revolution affected thousands of people, many of whom recorded their observations in written form. The best analogy in the history of early Christianity is, not the life of Jesus and his first followers, but the church in the second half of the Second Century, where we have a variety of documents (Clement and Origen in Alexandria, Irenaeus in Lyons, Justin in Rome, Cyprian and Tertulian in Carthage, some of the Nag Hamaddi texts in the Egyptian desert, etc.). Even so, the extant documents from that time, whether because of the society or because of intervening years, hardly produced enough evidence to conduct any type of scientifically quantitative study! When it comes to the First Century, and especially the first generation of Christians, our evidence is just plain slim - the writings of Paul and the traditions about Jesus, primarily preserved in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and, perhaps, in parts of the Gospel of Thomas. In this sense Mike Huybensz is probably right: a great deal of the differences between myself and Yirmiyahu BenDavid stems from the paucity of the evidence. It's just difficult to design varied and controlled questions that will point up the falacious elements in either (or both) of our subjective approaches. This conclusion leaves us with two possibilities: we can put off questions about Jesus and his first followers (especially the question of the resurrection), because they cannot be verified using quantifiable methods, or we can attempt to carry on some type of discussion anyway. But, this brings us to the question of evidence. In what sense may the New Testament function as evidence of the history of Jesus and his early followers. This question I will address in the second portion of this article. Jeff Gillette ...!duke!phs!lisa The Divinity School Duke University