The metaphysics of historical criticism
I, the historical critic, exist.
That is to say, my mind exists.
My mind is not deceived by a demon.
My mind is not self-deceived.
My mind has access to external reality.
External reality exists.
External reality is apt to be known by a mind like mine (and by other rational beings, should they exist).
I am a rational being, in virtue of my mind’s existence and capacity to know external reality.
My mind’s access to external reality via my rational nature is epistemically reliable.
Natural languages are, likewise, a reliable vehicle of rational pursuit of knowledge of external reality.
Natural languages are a reliable vehicle of communication between rational beings.
At least, that is, between rational beings of a shared nature.
There are rational beings of a shared nature; other minds exist besides my own.
(I can know this—I am in a position to know it, with something like certainty or at least confidence—just as I can know the foregoing propositions and many others like them.)
Mental life is linguistic and vice versa; human minds, or rational persons, communicate through natural languages.
I can (come to) know what other persons think, believe, intend, hope, or love.
I can (come to) know such things through many means, one of which is the use of a natural language.
Natural languages can be translated without substantial loss of meaning.
Rational users of natural languages are capable of mastering more than one such language.
Such mastery is possible not only of living languages but of dead languages.
Such mastery is possible not only through speaking but also through reading and writing.
Written language is not different in kind than spoken language.
The living word can be written down and understood through the eyes alone, without use of the ears or of spoken language.
The written word offers reliable access to the life—norms, beliefs, hopes, fears, behaviors, expectations, habits, virtues, vices, and more—of a culture or civilization.
This truth obtains for ancient, or long dead, cultures as for living, or contemporary, ones.
(“Truth” is a meaningful category.)
(Truth is objective, knowable, and not reducible merely to the perspective of a particular person’s mind or thought.)
(There are truths that both antedate my mind’s existence and exist independently of it.)
(The principle of non-contradiction is itself true.)
(The prior four propositions are true irrespective of any one individual’s affirmation or awareness of them, including my own.)
Records of ancient peoples’ and regions’ artifacts offer a limited but nevertheless reliable window onto their respective cultures.
Through accumulation, comparison, and interpretation of evidence, probabilities of likelihood regarding both historical events and certain cultural beliefs and practices can be reliably achieved.
The space-time continuum in which ancient peoples lived (“then and there”) is one and the same as mine (“here and now”).
The sort of events, experiences, and happenings that mark my life or the life of my culture (“here and now”) likewise marked theirs (“then and there”).
These include occurrences commonly labeled “religious” or “spiritual” or “numinous.”
Such occurrences, however labeled, are knowable and thus (re)describable without remainder in wholly natural terms.
They can be so described because religion is, without remainder, a natural phenomenon.
That is to say, as an artifact of human social life, religion is “natural” inasmuch as it is a thing that humans do, just as dancing, gambling, and wrestling are natural, inasmuch as they are things humans do.
In a second sense, too, religion is “natural”: it is a thing wholly constructed by human beings and thus without “reference” beyond the human lives that give rise to it.
There are, in a word, no gods; God does not exist.
Neither are there spirits, angels, demons, ghosts, jinn, souls, astral beings, or any other entities, living or dead, beyond this universe or however many universes there may be.
Accordingly, there are no interactions with or experiences of such beings, divine or celestial or otherwise.
Accordingly, such “beings” do not act in the world at all, for what does not exist cannot act; a nonexistent cause has nonexistent effects.
Accordingly, miracles, signs, and wonders are a figment of human imagination or an error of human memory and experience.
What happens, happens in accordance with the laws of nature recognized and tested by contemporary scientific methods and experiments.
Claims to the contrary are knowable as false in advance, prior to investigation; they are rightly ruled out without discussion.
There are always, therefore, alternative explanations in natural terms.
This principle applies to every other form of mystical or transcendent experience, whether dreams or visions or foreknowledge or prophecy or glossolalia.
The fact that many contemporary people continue both to believe in religious/spiritual realities and to claim to experience them is immaterial.
Any attempt to undertake any form of epistemic inquiry based on any other set of principles besides the foregoing ones is ipso facto unserious, unscientific, irrational, and to be dismissed with prejudice as unnecessarily metaphysical, unduly influenced by philosophical commitments, biased by metaphysics, prejudiced by religious belief, and ultimately built on unprovable assumptions rather than common sense, natural reason, and truths self-evident to all.
