The task of history is to understand the past, and if the past is to be understood it must be given full respect in its own right. And unless it is properly understood, any use of it in the present must be suspect and can be dangerous.p. 47.
A long one which is interesting in the difference between ‘natural’ science and history:
As a matter of fact, in a very real sense the study of history is concerned with a subject matter more objective and more independent than that of the natural sciences. The common argument that, unlike the scientist, the historian cannot verify his reconstruction by repeating the experiment at will can be turned round to give him greater assurance of objectivity...All scientific experiments are essentially constructs, and this applies to both the physical and the biological sciences...Of course, he obtains his problem by asking questions of nature--of something outside himself--but his method enables him to treat nature willfully and to compose for himself the argument which he wishes to resolve...scientific experiments are...artificial; theses things would not have happened but for a deliberate act of will on the part of the experimenter; the matter studies may be taken from nature, but before it is studied it is transformed for the purposes of the investigation. It is not going too far to assert that nearly all scientific study deals with specially prepared artificial derivatives from what naturally occurs.pp. 52-3.
The historian’s case is different...he cannot invent his experiment; the subject of his investigation is outside his control. When the problem of truth is under consideration, his essential difference from the natural scientist works in his favour...the matter he investigates has a dead reality independent of the enquiry.
When it comes to views of Genesis 1 that see it not as an account of time-space events in the sequence given, but a sort of meta-historical account that abstracts from events to convey some inferred ‘truth’ that lies beneath them, I can’t but help think that such views consider God to be a historical relativist: a position that has to be argued and demonstrated, rather than asserted glibly and taken for granted as though there are no alternative positions:
Interpretation, or general acceptance of a thesis, has nothing whatever to do with its independent existence...others who think that history is what historians write, not what happened, come dangerously close to suggesting either that it does not much matter what one says because (interpretation being everything) there are always several reasonably convincing interpretations of any given set of events, or that history is altogether unknowable, being merely what happens to be said by a historian at a given moment.p. 56.
...but that men cannot ever eliminate themselves from the search for truth is non-sense, and pernicious nonsense at that, because it once again favours the purely relativist concept of history, the opinion that it is all simply in the historian's mind and becomes whatever he likes to make of it.p. 57.
So those who think that Genesis 1 is a late Jewish ‘interpretation’ of what they think happened, against the conceptions of the day as to origins, have succumbed to the notion that it is interpretation (the ancients’ or theirs) that matters and not the facts. But this is a perspective, not itself a self-evident fact, and it is what actually happened that is important, because this is reflective of who God is and what we are in relation to him, in every aspect and dimension of our being. To think that the interpretation is more significant than the events is to express a view that the cosmos and its ‘reality’ is something other than what is from God’s hand, somehow independent of God and that principles and mechanisms have an independent existence to which God in his creation tale also makes reference. But this undercuts the whole notion of a meaningful creation account and leaves us knowing nothing about ourselves or our world, subject to the changing whims of contemporary ideas: currently, of course these are materialist.
