If everything were completely unique, we would have no way of identifying them as to what they are. If everything were completely identical, or uniform, we would have no way of distinguishing them. We conclude that the world is somewhere in between: everything is a combination of the unique and the uniform. If all events […]
Ben Jeffares wrote a useful article “Testing times: regularities in the historical sciences” (http://www.ege.fcen.uba.ar/ecodes/Integrantes/Javier/cursos/PDFs/(02)%20Jeffares%202008.pdf): Abstract The historical sciences, such as geology, evolutionary biology, and archaeology, appear to have no means to test hypotheses. However, on closer examination, reasoning in the historical sciences relies upon regularities, regularities that can be tested. I outline the role of regularities
I keep coming back to the difference between history and science. It seems to me that creationists treat origins primarily as an historical matter and secondarily as a scientific matter, which I think is correct. This is one reason why Bible history is very relevant to origins. But our opponents treat origins as primarily a
Science and history should be complementary disciplines. Science should not dominate history but they should work together. Science focuses on what does not change – what is conserved, what repeats, what is invariant. History focuses on what does change – the small details that turn out to make a big difference, the unique people and
The Bible is diachronic but secular historical sciences are synchronic. Let me explain. The term “diachronic” arose in the study of the development of languages over a long time, which was the focus of linguistics in the 19th century. But to make linguistics more scientific in the 20th century this changed to study languages as systems during
The discipline of history investigates what actually happened in the past as far as that is known from records or other evidence. Scientific history is what could have happened in the past without being inconsistent with the data or laws of science. Note the difference: scientific history is about possibilities; real history is about actualities. Scientific history
