Readers:

Thanks to those of you who responded to my question last week about whether it would be helpful to reserve Mondays for lightly edited letters from undergraduate and graduate students.  I’ve decided to do so.  This young woman wrote to my alter ego Theophilus at the height of the Da Vinci Code craziness, but the problem she describes is still very much alive.

Actual Query:  I'm a senior at a secular state university, and as I've advanced in my coursework, I've come to know my fellow students more closely.  I have learned how to defend my Christian faith on many points, but one point continues to stump me.

Most of my fellow students accept without a shadow of a doubt the saying "history is nothing more than a lie agreed upon."  They think that no accurate historical account has ever existed or could ever exist, because history is "only written by the winners."  In their view, the only history that matters is each person's subjective experiences.

This view stymies me any time I try to discuss things like the events of Jesus' life.  How can I logically and reasonably defend the fact that some history can be known with confidence?  How can I make Christian scripture seem relevant to those who see all historical documents as biased texts written by "the winners"?

Reply:

Your problem with your classmates is ridiculously easy in one way, but terribly difficult in another.  Let's take the easy way first.  Their proposition is that no historical claim has ever been accurate, and that no historical claim can ever be made with reasonable confidence.  But wait! To say something about what has or hasn't "ever been" is to make a historical claim.  So their own claim is historical too! Now if it's true that no historical claim has ever been accurate, then their claim that no historical claim has ever been accurate is inaccurate too.  But in that case some historical claims may be accurate, which means that their view is wrong.  Their opinion is self-refuting.

Here's another way to refute it.  Their reason for thinking that no historical account can ever be trusted is that "history is written by the winners," and winners can never be trusted.  But if it's true that the majority of the students at your school accept this view, then for the time being, they are the winners there.  Their own premises prove that they can't be trusted.  Who's left?  Well, people like you, who say that reasonable confidence can be placed in some historical claims.

Still another way to demonstrate the absurdity of their position is to show that they don't believe it themselves.  If they did, they would never place confidence in any historical account whatsoever.  But they do.  How do we know that?  Because, as you said, they do place confidence in their own subjective accounts of the things that have happened.  According to them, no other histories "matter," but these histories do.  This is a good time to ask them what that means.  When they say that their subjective histories "matter," do they mean that these histories can be reasonably accepted as true?  If they answer "No," then they're claiming that it's reasonable to act on premises that it isn't reasonable to believe.  That doesn't make sense.  But if they answer "Yes," then they are admitting that we can place reasonable confidence in some historical claims after all.

The final way to undercut their position is more constructive.  A lot of history really is unreliable, and we might as well admit it.  But how did we find out that it was unreliable?  We found out by examining the historical evidence.  But if that's what we did, then not all historical reasoning is worthless after all.  One has to proceed with caution, of course, scrutinizing the evidence and keeping a lookout for distortions, but that's not the same as utter skepticism.  The moral of the story isn't that history is impossible, but that history is difficult.  That shouldn't surprise us, because everything worthwhile is difficult.  Patience is difficult, love is difficult, plumbing is difficult -- they all require sweat.

The same goes for talking with your classmates.  The arguments I've offered may seem pretty obvious, but as I said at the beginning, your problem is easy in one way, but fiendishly hard in another.  Since the view that reality can't be known refutes itself, no one can swallow it just by making a mistake; anyone sharp enough to understand it is sharp enough to see through it too.  But this implies that anyone who does swallow it must very badly want to swallow it.  Now ask yourself:  What sort of motive could be strong enough to make someone want to shut out the claims of reality?  I know of only two:  Suffering so extreme that it produces insanity, and sin so impenitent that it produces insane ideologies.  You're not just dealing with an intellectual problem, my dear.  You're dealing with a spiritual one.  So reason, reason, reason with your friends -- but pray, pray, pray for them as well.

One last thing.  (Why am I always saying "one last thing"?)  I'm glad that you want to evangelize, but I hope that isn't your only reason for defending the knowability of the past.  All truth belongs to God; it's worth knowing for that reason alone.

Professor Theophilus

“We often read nowadays of the valor or audacity with which some rebel attacks a hoary tyranny or an antiquated superstition.  There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother.  The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers.  The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past.”

-- G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With the World

So you thought metaphysics doesn’t influence politics?  Think again.

Once upon a time, false ideas about biology were used to keep certain people down.  In the name of liberation, some reformers decided that the body means nothing.  Yet in the name of science, others insist that the body means everything.  Considering this confusion, is it any surprise that no matter how often it is beaten down, biological determinism keeps coming back in new forms?

A case in point is a speaker at the publically-funded White Privilege Conference in Madison, Wisconsin a few months ago.  Never heard of it?  Maybe you should have.  The organizers claim that 1500 people attend every year from more than 35 states as well as Australia, Bermuda, Canada, and Germany.  The person I am quoting is a former high school English teacher and current doctoral candidate in something called “critical whiteness studies” at a public university in Canada.  Her name and the name of her school are not important; her metaphysics is.

The nineteenth-century physiologist Jacob Moleschott famously remarked that “The brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile.”  Apparently the speaker thinks white skin secretes racism in much the same way.  For one might suppose that racism is an attitude in the mind -- but no, she says, it is a characteristic of the body: 

“I came to higher ed to study.  What is this problem that I'm scared of?  I don't know what to do.  My principal is scared of this.  Where do I point?  Who's at fault?  My white body is at fault.”

“Being a white person who does anti-racist work is like being an alcoholic.  I will never be recovered by my alcoholism, to use the metaphor.  I have to everyday wake up and acknowledge that I am so deeply imbedded with racist thoughts and notions and actions in my body that I have to choose every day to do anti-racist work and think in an anti-racist way.”

“My partner, who is a man, can't tell you about feminism.  ... You need to learn what it is like to be a woman from a woman.  He can't teach that.  I can't teach students of color nearly as well as a person of color can.”

Sometimes people try to defend evils by drawing a false analogy with the natural sciences.

“Lots of things in science are counter-intuitive,” they may say.  “For example, you might think the sun is only a little higher than the clouds, but in reality it’s so far from us that its light takes more than eight minutes to get here.  Well, lots of things in ethics are counter-intuitive too.  You might think no one should ever have an abortion, but in reality it’s often a necessary evil.”

The flaw in the analogy is that propositions like “Never commit evil, even for the sake of some good” aren’t like sense impressions, which can be mistaken; they are self-evident first principles of reason, like “nothing can both be and not be in the same sense at the same time.”  They cannot be mistaken; in fact, they are the means by which we discover that other things are mistaken.  Anyone who tries to suggest that something can both be and not be has missed the point of what being is.  Anyone who supposes that evil may sometimes be done has failed to grasp what evil is.

By the way, I am not suggesting that nothing in ethics is counter-intuitive.  To a person habituated to vice, virtue itself seems counter-intuitive.  Something tells me that astronomy teachers don’t face that particular difficulty.

Some millions of years having passed since the creation of the world, when, in the beginning, God created heaven and earth; Some thousands of years from the salvation of man when the family of Noah survived the flood; About nineteen centuries after the promise was given to Abraham, the father of our faith; Many ages after Moses brought the people from bondage in Egypt; A thousand years from the anointing of David as King over the chosen people; In fulfillment of the times and years and months and days discerned by the vision of the prophets; In the course of secular history:  In the one hundred and ninety-third Olympiad; Seven and one half centuries from the founding of the city of Rome; In the twentieth year of the reign of the Emperor Octavian Augustus, while the whole world enjoyed a span of peace; In the sixth and final age of human achievement; Wishing to consecrate the whole world and all time by his blessed presence, Jesus Christ, eternal God, and Son of the eternal Father, conceived as man by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, after nine months of growth in the womb of his mother, Was born of the Virgin Mary and for our salvation became man in Bethlehem of Judah.  Now in our own times this marks the birthday of Our Lord Jesus Christ after the manner of all flesh.

Source:  Columba Kelly, O.S.B., “Proclamation of the Birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” St. Meinrad liturgical music.  Text and Music: © 1971, 1993 Saint Meinrad Archabbey; All Rights Reserved.  Quoted by permission.