Program / Course 13: Foundations of Apologetics / Lesson 4.2
What you will learn
- Describe four kinds of evidence used in religious and historical argument.
- State questions that test the reliability of testimony and of documents.
- Explain how religious experience is used as evidence and the main objections to its use.
- Explain how background knowledge shapes the way evidence is weighed.
The big idea
Evidence is anything that counts for or against a claim. Four kinds are especially important in arguments about Christianity: testimony, which is what witnesses report; documents, which preserve testimony over time; experience, including religious experience; and background knowledge, the web of what is already known, which shapes how everything else is weighed. Each kind has its own strengths and its own ways of going wrong. Learning to ask the right questions of each is the beginning of using evidence responsibly.
Key terms
- Evidence
- Facts, reports or experiences that make a claim more or less likely to be true.
- Testimony
- A statement by a witness about what the witness saw, heard or experienced.
- Corroboration
- Support for a report from independent sources that agree with it.
- Provenance
- The origin and history of a document: who made it, when, where and how it was handed down.
- Textual criticism
- The study of ancient manuscripts to work out, as closely as possible, the original wording of a text.
- Religious experience
- An experience that the person having it takes to be an encounter with God or with the divine.
- Background knowledge
- What a person already knows or reasonably believes, which affects how new evidence is understood.
- Defeater
- A further fact that weakens or removes the support that evidence would otherwise give.
Background
Almost everything a person knows about the past, or about places never visited, comes from the testimony of others. The same is true of Christianity: its claims about Jesus rest on reports handed down in writing. A student therefore needs to know how to weigh testimony and the documents that carry it.
Evidence is never weighed in a vacuum. A report of a rare event will be judged very differently by one who already holds that such events are impossible and by one who does not. For this reason the fourth kind of evidence, background knowledge, is placed alongside the others. Later lessons discuss how conclusions are drawn from evidence.
Step-by-step explanation
Step 1: Testimony
Testimony is a report from someone who was there. It is the most common kind of evidence in daily life and in law. Courts and historians ask similar questions of a witness. Was the witness in a position to know? Is the witness honest? Does the report agree with what other witnesses and known facts say? Does the witness have a motive to deceive or a bias that would distort what was seen?
The Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid argued that human beings naturally trust what others tell them, and that this trust is reasonable unless there is reason to doubt. David Hume was more cautious, especially about reports of miracles. Philosophers still debate how much weight testimony should carry. Luke opens his Gospel by saying that he relied on those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning (Luke 1:2), and Paul names living witnesses of the resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:6). Both appeal to testimony.
Step 2: Documents
Documents preserve testimony. Evaluating one means asking who wrote it, when, for what purpose and for what audience; how it was copied and kept; and whether its content fits what is known from other sources. Scholars call this attention to origins provenance. For ancient texts, the field of textual criticism compares the surviving manuscripts to determine what the original most likely said.
The New Testament has far more early manuscripts than most works of the ancient world, though they contain many small variations. Scholars of all persuasions agree on this. They disagree on how much the Gospels reflect eyewitness memory and how much they reflect later shaping by the communities that used them. The student should learn to separate the question of whether the text has been preserved well from the question of whether what it reports is true. They are related but distinct.
Step 3: Experience
Experience is evidence for the person who has it. Religious experience may include a sense of presence, an answered prayer, a feeling of forgiveness or a dramatic encounter. Many Christians treat such experience as one reason for their faith. The philosopher Richard Swinburne argues for a principle of credulity: if it seems to a person that something is present, then in the absence of reasons to doubt, it probably is.
Critics respond that experiences of this sort are hard to check, differ from person to person and from religion to religion, and can be explained by psychology or brain activity. Freud treated religion as a wish. Believers answer that explaining how an experience happens does not show that it is false, and that the same objection would undo ordinary perception. This is an active debate. Experience is strongest as evidence for the one who has it and weaker as evidence for others.
Step 4: Background knowledge
Everyone approaches evidence with what they already know or believe. A report of a person walking on water is weighed differently by those who think nature is a closed system and by those who believe in a God who acts. This is not necessarily a fault. Background knowledge allows people to judge what is plausible, and without it, no report could be assessed. The difficulty is that background beliefs can also hide bias.
A practical remedy is to state the background assumptions that affect the judgment, and to ask whether a person with different assumptions would reasonably judge differently. If so, the disagreement is partly about background, and it may be more profitable to discuss that than to trade evidence. The next lesson on inference returns to this.
Step 5: Questions for each kind
A short set of questions can be kept for each type. For testimony: who said it, were they in a position to know, are they honest, and is there agreement? For documents: who wrote it, when, how was it handed down, and what was its aim? For experience: what exactly was experienced, what else might explain it, and can anything check it? For background: what is being assumed, and would the conclusion change if the assumption were different?
These questions are not meant to produce doubt about everything. They are meant to make confidence proportionate. A claim supported by several kinds of evidence, each tested, deserves more confidence than one that rests on a single, unchecked report.
- What questions would you ask of a witness to an event?
- Why do historians care about who wrote a document and when?
- What are strengths and weaknesses of religious experience as evidence?
- What is meant by saying that evidence is weighed against background knowledge?
- How can you tell whether disagreement over evidence is really disagreement over background beliefs?
- Which kind of evidence do you rely on most in your own beliefs?
Examples
Testimony tested
Three people tell a magistrate that they saw a stranger leave a house at noon. One is the owner’s friend, one is a passerby and one is a child. The magistrate asks whether each was close enough to see, whether each had reason to lie and whether the accounts agree on the details. Convergence of independent accounts increases confidence, while identical wording may suggest copying.
A document and its copies
A letter from the second century survives in five medieval copies, which differ in a few words. Scholars compare the copies, note which readings appear in the oldest ones and judge which wording is most likely original. The method gives a reasoned estimate and does not claim certainty about every word.
Two readers, two backgrounds
Two readers study an ancient account of a healing. One holds that only natural causes occur and concludes that the account is a legend or a misunderstanding. The other holds that God sometimes heals and concludes the account is probably true. Both have examined the evidence, but their backgrounds guide their judgments. This is a constructed example.
Different perspectives
Evangelical and conservative scholars
Scholars such as Richard Bauckham argue that the Gospels preserve eyewitness testimony and that early Christian communities carefully guarded what was handed down. Others in this tradition emphasize the large number of early manuscripts as a sign of reliable transmission.
Critical scholars within and outside the church
Many biblical scholars, including believers, hold that the Gospels were shaped by the communities that used them and that careful methods are needed to separate earlier from later material. They accept that early belief in Jesus’ resurrection can be shown, and differ over what it implies.
Eastern Orthodox
Orthodox teaching places the Scriptures within the Tradition of the Church, which received and interpreted them. Testimony is understood as living witness handed down in worship, the lives of the saints and the councils, as well as in text.
Roman Catholic
Catholic teaching holds that Scripture and Tradition together communicate revelation, and values historical study of the texts. Religious experience is respected, with a long tradition of mystical writing, but the Church also teaches discernment and tests experiences against doctrine.
Skeptical and naturalist views
Skeptics note that eyewitness reports can be mistaken, that ancient writers had different standards from modern historians, and that religious experiences occur in many incompatible traditions. They conclude that such evidence cannot support the specific claims of Christianity.
Why it matters
Evidence is the material of argument, and different kinds behave differently. A student who treats a feeling as if it were a documented fact, or a late and doubtful report as if it were an early and firm one, will reach weak conclusions. Naming the kinds of evidence and asking the right questions of each makes a student a fairer judge of arguments on every side, and a more honest user of evidence in his or her own.
Common misunderstandings
Misunderstanding: Testimony is not real evidence.
Correction: Most of what anyone knows rests on testimony. It can be weighed well or badly, but it is evidence.
Misunderstanding: An old document must be reliable, or an old document must be unreliable.
Correction: Age alone proves little. Reliability depends on authorship, closeness to events, purpose and corroboration.
Misunderstanding: If experience can be explained by psychology, it is not evidence of God.
Correction: Explaining how an experience happens does not by itself settle whether it is true. The same would hold for all perception. The question is whether there is reason to think the experience is deceptive.
Misunderstanding: A person with no background beliefs judges evidence best.
Correction: No one lacks them. The better course is to state them and test them.
Knowledge check
What are four kinds of evidence discussed in this lesson?
They are testimony, which is what witnesses report; documents, which preserve testimony; experience, including religious experience; and background knowledge, the existing beliefs that shape how evidence is weighed. Each is useful and each is open to particular kinds of error.
Name three questions to ask about testimony.
Was the witness in a position to know? Is the witness honest, and free from motive to deceive? Does the report agree with independent accounts and with known facts? Other questions concern bias and whether the witness could have been mistaken.
What does textual criticism do?
It compares the surviving manuscripts of an ancient work to work out, as closely as possible, what the original text said. It does not by itself show whether the content is true, only how well the wording has been preserved.
Why is religious experience debated as evidence?
Defenders such as Swinburne say that if something seems to be present, it probably is unless there are reasons to doubt. Critics say that such experiences differ across religions, cannot easily be checked and may have psychological explanations. The debate is active.
How does background knowledge affect the weighing of evidence?
What a person already believes shapes what seems plausible. A report of a miracle will be weighed differently by those who accept and those who deny that God acts. Stating such assumptions openly helps people see where their real disagreement lies.
Think it through
- What beliefs do you hold only because someone you trust told you?
- Which of your own experiences would you offer as evidence to another person, and which only to yourself?
- What background beliefs make some claims seem unthinkable to you?
- How would you tell the difference between a good witness and a convincing one?
Independent assignment
Audit a body of evidence
In your own notebook, write 500 to 700 words. Pick one historical claim (for example, that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon) and one religious claim of your choice. For each, list what evidence of each of the four kinds is available, and write the questions you would ask of each. Then compare how strong the two cases are and say why. Keep this for yourself.
Further study
- Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses A scholarly argument about testimony behind the Gospels. Read the introduction.
- Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration Read the opening chapters on the manuscripts.
- F. F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? A short older defense of the New Testament as historical documents.
- David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss An Orthodox view of the human experience of being and of God.
- Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion Read the opening chapters to meet a major challenge to religious experience.
- Luke 1:2 Read the opening of Luke as a statement about the use of testimony.