Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Atheism and Theism 55
veracity. Thus in some cases the argument can become circular. Of course
many people believe without argument.
The higher criticism of the New Testament is essentially a matter of
looking at the documents and other evidence (for example, archaeological
evidence) as a good historian would do in any other field of history. It is true
that there are good, even outstandingly excellent, historians who do not carry
over their normal methodologies to the evaluation of the New Testament.
This need not be an all or nothing affair. A historian may make place for the
supernatural when he or she evaluates the New Testament even though he or
she would not do this when writing on, say, the Wars of the Roses or the first
Reform Bill. Nor need there be any brash abandonment of reverential language.
Thus Dennis Nineham in a fine commentary on St Mark’s Gospel 94
regularly refers to Jesus as ‘our Lord’, and yet his arguments are in many
ways quite sceptical. There is a variety of positions between supernaturalist
and totally naturalist opinions about the historical Jesus and where a commentator
comes down here must depend to a great degree on his or her
implicit or explicit notions of the metaphysical possibilities.
This was the theme of F.H. Bradley’s first publication, The Presuppositions
of Critical History (1874). 95 Bradley was stimulated to write this work on the
philosophy of history as a result of the new critical work on the New Testament
and the beginnings of Christianity by F.C. Baur, D.F. Strauss and
C. Holsten. His arguments are sometimes a bit like those of Hume on
miracles, but while Hume as an empiricist spoke of the unusual or what is
contrary to experience, Bradley was rightly more coherentist about warranted
assertability, stressing the way our experience is laden with theory and other
background beliefs, whether scientific or metaphysical. He refers to Paley’s
protest against ‘prejudication’ and states on the contrary that all history must
rest in part on prejudications. 96 His idea is that our historical conclusions
come from inference, which is ‘never a fragmentary isolated act of our mind,
but is essentially connected with, and in entire dependence, on the character
of our general consciousness’. 97 Stripped of his idealist language I think that
Bradley’s talk here is much the same as Quine’s talk of ‘a web of belief ’,
which I have adopted earlier in this essay. It should be noted that in his essay
Bradley is concerning himself purely with testimony and documents. Historians
also make use of archaeological evidence, but in the present context
I shall neglect this complication.
Bradley recognizes that historical testimony that may not be accepted at
one time because it did not fit into a web of belief may become accepted later
because the web has been expanded and modified. He mentions Herodotus’s
disbelief in the Phoenicians’ story of their circumnavigation of Africa because
they said that they had seen the sun to their north. Modern geographical and
astronomical knowledge fits this fact about the sun beautifully into our web of