david@ssc-bee.UUCP (David Norris) (06/05/84)
[!] Here is an interesting excerpt from C. S. Lewis' God in the Dock": "The next thing I learned about the RAF was that the English Proletariat is sceptical about History to a degree which academically educated persons can hardly imagine. This, indeed, seems to me to be far the widest cleavage between the learned and unlearned. The educated man habitually, almost without noticing it, sees the present as something that grows out of a long perspective of centuries. In the minds of my RAF hearers this persepctive simply did not exist. It seemed to me that they did not really believe that we have any reliable knowledge of historic man. But this was often curiously combined with a conviction that we knew a great deal about Pre-Historic Man: doubtless because Pre-Historic Man is labelled 'Science' (which is reliable) whereas Napolean or Julius Caesar is labelled as 'History' (which is not). Thus a pseudo-scientific picture of the 'Cave-man' and a picture of 'the Present' filled almost the whole of their imaginations; between these, there lay only a shadowy and unimportant region in which the phantasmal shapes of Roman soldiers, stage-coaches, pirates, knights-in-armour, highwaymen, etc., moved in a mist. I had supposed that if my hearers disbelieved the Gospels, they would do so because the Gospels recorded miracles. But my impression is that they disbelieved them simply because they dealt with events that happened a long time ago; that they would be almost as incredulous of the Battle of Actium as of the Resurrection - and for the same reason. Sometimes this scepticism was defended by the argument that all books before the invention of printing must have been copied and re-copied till the text was changed beyong recognition. And here came another surprise. When their historical scepticism took that more rational form, it was sometimes easily allayed by the mere statement that there existed a 'science called textual criticism' which gave us a reasonable assurance that some ancient texts were accurate. This ready acceptance of the authority of specialists is significant, not only for its ingenuousness but also because it underlines a fact of which my experiences on the whole convinced me; i.e. that very little of the opposition we meet is inspired by malice or suspicion. It is based on genuine doubt, and often on doubt that is reasonable in the state of the doubter's knowledge." Personal comment: I think Lewis' earlier comments apply to some here on the net. Perhaps more so because History, to computer scientists, is considered a "fuzzy study" and was never given much emphasis in school. Lewis' later statement, though, may not be true. I don't myself think that many here think much of the authority of specialists. The tone of a great many articles here indicate quite plainly that they are inspired by malice or suspicion. This may indicate why there is a reluctance to discuss the historicity of the Bible or textual criticism. Granted, there have been a great number of the "prove it" genre of questions. These are almost always presented in a manipulative context by the questioner, which makes satisfactory answers impossible. I will be leaving the net in 2 weeks to accept employment elsewhere. I will be posting a few final articles between now and then, summarizing my beliefs and thoughts about the net. -- David Norris :-) -- uw-beaver!ssc-vax!david