For over seven years now I have used History for Atheists to debunk bad historical arguments, historical myths, pseudo history and fringe historical claims used by many of my fellow atheists. Long before I began this site and its attendant video channel and podcast, I have found myself debunking bad history and fringe claims used by ideologues of various stripes: Christians, Muslims, nationalists, fascists, socialists, New Agers and contrarians. After well over three decades of this (admittedly rather odd) pastime, I have come to understand that while a fixed ideology is often the reason these people argue for these bad ideas, the reason many of them come to accept these myths and nonsense in the first place is a fundamental misunderstanding of historiography. Essentially, they do not understand how history is done, so they cannot recognise bad historical claims.

Many years ago, when I was a first year undergraduate, I had a conversation over breakfast with someone at my residential college. She was a Medicine student, so a highly intelligent person who had done very well at high school and been accepted to a multi-year degree to become a doctor. I mentioned that I wanted to go on to postgraduate study in either English Literature or History. She replied, “I’ve never been able to work out how someone could do a doctorate in History. I mean, how do you do original research on history?” Puzzled, I asked her what she meant. She replied, “Well, what would you write in your thesis? It’s just a matter of looking up what happened in a book. That’s not original research.” So I had to ask what “book” these things would be “looked up” in. She looked at me as though I were stupid and said “A history book, of course”.

So here was an intelligent and well-educated medical student who seriously thought that studying and analysing history was simply a matter of looking things up in “a history book”.

It took me some time to get her to understand that those “history books” were written by historians after finding relevant source material, analysing the information in them, assessing and evaluating conflicting information, filling in gaps and generally … doing what historians do. It was astonishing to me then that someone could genuinely not understand how history was studied or what historians do.

It is less astonishing to me now, given that over the years I have come across many people like my Med student friend. I suppose it is not too surprising, given the way history is often taught at high school level. There it often is just a matter of “looking it up in a history book” and then memorizing facts and dates. And given her academic specialisation, it is unlikely my explanation of how historians work was ever something she needed to remember.

But her level of naïve historiographical illiteracy is more of a problem when people who genuinely do not understand how history is studied and analysed decide to make forays into historical topics and even try to argue against mainstream historical consensus. Here, unfortunately, we find far too many of my fellow atheists. Over many years of online discussions and debates on the subjects I cover here on History for Atheists, I find that too many outspoken atheists are not only ignorant of history, but accept bad historical arguments substantially because they cannot see how or why they are bad. This is because they genuinely do not understand how history is done and so cannot tell bad history from good.

History and Science

I have often found that this confusion about how the study of history works can stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of how history as a discipline differs from the hard sciences. After all many people (though certainly not all) come to an atheistic position from their study of science. Science seems very certain compared to history.  You can make hypotheses and test them in science – or at least you can in the hard sciences.  You can actually prove things, as far as anything is provable.  Scientific propositions are, by definition, falsifiable.  If I claim light travels in a vacuum at 299,792,458 metres per second, someone can potentially come along and show, empirically, that I’m wrong. Compared to this kind of science, history can seem like so much hand-waving, where anyone can pretty much argue anything they like and all claims are equally valid. So when some atheists say “you can’t PROVE Jesus existed” they often think this means the claim he didn’t exist is somehow equivalent to the claim he did and that there is no way to determine which is more likely than the other. In its more extreme naïve form, this misconception can lead to atheists who seem to think that no valid claims about the past can be made at all and that the whole enterprise of history is worthless and can simply be dismissed.

In fact, history is very much a rigorous academic discipline, which has its own rules and methodology much as the hard sciences do. This does not mean it IS a science. It is sometimes referred to as one, especially in Europe, but this is only in the broader sense of the word; as in “a systematic way of ordering and analysing knowledge”. But before looking at how the historical method works, it might be useful to look at how the sciences differ from it.

The hard sciences are founded on the principle of probabilistic induction.  A scientist uses an inductive or “bottom up” approach to work from observing specific particulars (“mice injected with this drug put on less fat”) to general propositions (“the drug is reducing their appetite”).  These propositions are falsifiable via empirical testing to rule out other explanations of the particulars (“the drug is increasing their metabolism” or “those mice are more stressed by being stuck with syringes”) and so can be tested.

This is all possible in the hard sciences because of some well-established laws of cause and effect that form a basis for this kind of induction. If something is affecting the mice in my examples above today, it will affect them in the same way tomorrow, all things being equal. Done properly, this allows a scientist to work from induction to make an assessment of probable causation via empirical assessment and do so with a high degree of confidence. And their assessment can be confirmed by others because the empirical measures are controlled and repeatable.

Unfortunately, none of this works for the study of the past. Events, large and small, occur and then are gone. A historian can only assess information about them from traces they may, if we are lucky, leave behind. But unlike a researcher from the hard sciences, a historian cannot run the fall of the Western Roman Empire through a series of controlled lab experiments. They cannot even observe the events, as a zoologist might observe the behaviour of a gorilla band, and draw conclusions. And there are no well-defined laws and principles at work (apart from in a very broad and subjective sense) that allow our historian to, say, accurately measure or even postulate the effects of the rise of the printing press or decide on the exact course of the downfall of Napoleon in the way a theoretical physicist can with the composition of a distant galaxy or the formation of a long dead star.

All this leads some atheists, who have fallen into the fallacy of scientism and reject anything that cannot be definitively “proven”, to dismiss the idea of any degree of certainty about the past. This is an extreme position and it is rarely a consistent one. As I have noted to some who have claimed this level of historical scepticism, I find it hard to believe they maintain this position when they read the newspaper, even though they should be just as sceptical about being able to know about a car accident yesterday as they are about knowing about a revolution 400 years ago.

Of course, all these are generalisations and the definitions of what is or is not scientific are actually much fuzzier than many in the sciences appreciate. We also have the fact that there are some disciplines in science which are actually a bit closer to the way history works, like geology or palaeontology. Finally, we have archaeology, which in many ways can be said to sit somewhere between history and the sciences. On the whole, however, history is a humanities discipline rather than a scientific one because it can rely far less on measurements, experiment and empiricism and has to depend much more on structured but subjective appraisals of likelihood.

The Historical Method

Just because history is not a hard science does not mean it cannot tell us about the past or cannot do so with a degree of certainty. Early historians like Herodotus established the beginnings of the methods used by modern historical researchers, though historians only began to develop a systematic methodology based on agreed principles from the later eighteenth century onwards, using the techniques of Barthold Niebuhr (1776-1831) and Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886).

The Historical Method is based on three fundamental steps, each of which has its own techniques:

1. Heuristic – This is the identification of relevant material to use as sources of information. These can range from the obvious, such as a historian of the time’s account of events he witnessed personally, to the much less obvious, like a medieval manor’s account book detailing purchases for the estate. Everything from archaeological finds to coins to heraldry can be relevant here. The key word here is “relevant“, and there is a high degree of skill and required training in working out which sources of information are genuinely pertinent to the subject in question. A great deal of innovation in history comes from a historian who brings a new source or category of sources to the analysis of a given question or issue.

2. Criticism – This is the process of appraisal of the source material in the light of the question being answered or subject being examined. It involves such things as determining the level of “authenticity” of a source (Is it what is seems to be?), its “integrity” (Can its account be trusted?  What are its biases?), its context (What genre is it?  Is it responding or reacting to another source?  Is it using literary tropes that need to be treated with scepticism?) Material evidence, such are archaeology, architecture, art, coins etc. needs to be firmly put into context to be understood. Documentary sources also need careful contextualisation – the social conditions of their production, their polemical intent (if any), their reason for production (more important for a political speech than a birth certificate, for example), their intended audience and the background and biases of their writer (if known or discernible) all have to be taken into account.

3.  Synthesis and Exposition – This is the formal statement of the findings from steps 1 and 2, which each finding supported by reference to the relevant evidence.  

The main difference between this method and those used in the hard sciences is that the researcher lays all this material, its analysis and their conclusions out systematically, but the conclusions are a subjective assessment of likelihood rather than an objective statement of probabilistic induction. This subjectivity is what many trained in the sciences find alien about history and lead them to reject history as insubstantial.  

But the key thing to understand here is that the historian is not working toward an absolute statement about what definitely happened in the past, since that is generally impossible except on trivial points (e.g. there is no doubt that Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889).  A historian instead works to present what is called “the argument to the best explanation“.  In other words, the argument that best accounts for the largest amount of relevant evidence with the least number of suppositions.  This means that the Principle of Parsimony, also known as Occam’s Razor, is a key tool in historical analysis; historians always favour the most parsimonious interpretation that takes account of the most available evidence.  

For example, regarding the existence of Jesus, it is far more parsimonious to conclude that Christianity’s  figure of “Jesus Christ” evolved out of the ideas of the followers of a historical Jewish preacher, since all of our earliest information tells us that this “Jesus Christ” was a historical Jewish preacher who had been executed circa 30 CE.  People have tried to propose alternative origins for the figure of “Jesus Christ”, positing an earlier Jewish sect that believed in a purely celestial figure who became “historicised” into an earthly, historical Jesus later.  But there is no evidence of any such proto-Christian sect and no reason such a sect would exist and then vanish without leaving any trace in the historical record.  And there is some evidence that this hypothesis cannot account for without convoluted and often highly fanciful interpretations that are simply too convoluted to be compelling. This is why historians find these “Jesus Myth” hypotheses unconvincing – they are not the most parsimonious way of looking at the evidence and require us to imagine ad hoc, “what if” style suppositions to keep them from collapsing. 

Ways Atheists (Sometimes) Get History Wrong

Managing this process of systematic historical analysis requires training, practice and a degree of skill. Without these, it is very easy to do something that looks a bit like historical analysis but arrive at flawed conclusions.

Take the initial heuristic process, for example. I have come across many atheists who don’t accept that a historical Jesus existed on the grounds that “there are no contemporary references to him and all references to him are later hearsay” or even that “there are no eyewitness accounts of his career”. So they rule out any evidence we do have referring to him on the basis that it is not contemporary and/or from eyewitnesses. But if we ruled out any reference to an ancient, medieval or pre-modern person or event on these grounds, we would effectively have to abandon the study of most pre-modern history: we do not have contemporary evidence for most people and events in the ancient world, so this would make almost all of our sources invalid, which is clearly absurd. Given that we have no eyewitness or contemporary sources for far more prominent figures, such as Hannibal, expecting them for a peasant preacher like Jesus is clearly ridiculous. No historian of the ancient world would regard this as a valid historical heuristic (see Jesus Mythicism 3: “No Contemporary References to Jesus” for more detail on why this is a flawed line of argument).

A more extreme and absurd error in heuristics is the idea that unless we can be sure a pre-printing source has not been changed, added to or tampered with (which we almost never can), we have to assume that it was and so reject it. So some try to claim that any ancient source that seems to contradict a point being argued can be ignored “because its manuscripts may have been tampered with by the medieval Church”. This is another absurd heuristic and not the way historians work with sources. Unless there is some indication a text has been tampered with or added to, historians work from the assumption the source can be trusted as it is. The assumption that all such texts have been adulterated is not a genuine heuristic and it really just a convenient tactic for dismissing inconvenient evidence.

Atheists can often make similar elementary errors in the criticism of sources as well. There is no shortage of lurid material on the horrors of the Inquisition, with whole books detailing vile tortures and giving accounts of hundreds of thousands of wretched victims being consigned to the flames by the Catholic Church. In the past, eighteenth and nineteenth century writers took these sources at face value and until the early twentieth century this was essentially the story of the Inquisition to be found in textbooks, especially in the English-speaking (i.e. substantially Protestant) sphere.

But much of this was based on sources that had severe biases – mainly sixteenth and seventeenth century Protestant polemical material, usually produced in England which, as a political, religious and economic enemy of Spain, was hardly going to produce unbiased accounts of the Spanish church and crown’s use of the Inquisition. Uncritical use of this material gives a warped, enemy’s-eye-view of the Inquisition that has been substantially overturned by more careful modern analysis of the source material and the Inquisition’s own records. The result is that it is now known that in the 300 years of its operation in Spain, the Inquisition resulted in 3,000-5,000 executions, not the hundreds of thousands alleged by less critical nineteenth century writers. Basing an argument on the earlier, uncritical accounts of the Inquisition may suit many atheists’ agendas (and so can be found in remarks in the books of Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens), but it would be bad history nonetheless.

Finally, historical synthesis and exposition requires at least an attempt at a degree of objectivity. An analyst of the past may have personal beliefs with the potential to bias their analysis and incline them towards certain conclusions. Worse, these beliefs could make them begin with assumptions about the past and so make them select only the evidence that supports this a priori idea. Historians strive to avoid both and examine the evidence on its merits, though polemicists usually do not bother with this objective approach. All too often many atheists can be polemicists when dealing with the past, only crediting information or analysis that fits an argument against religion they are trying to make while downplaying, dismissing or ignoring evidence or analysis that does not fit their agenda.  Again, this is bad history and rarely serves any function other than preaching to the converted – see Catherine Nixey’s popular but heavily criticised book The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World for an example of polemical pseuodo history based on carefully selected evidence.

In another example, until the early twentieth century the history of science was popularly seen as a centuries-long conflict between forward thinking scientific minds trying to advance knowledge and human progress but constantly being persecuted and suppressed by retrograde religious forces determined to retard scientific progress. Again, in the mid-twentieth century historians of science reassessed this general idea and rejected what is now referred to as the “Conflict Thesis“, presenting a far more complex, nuanced and well-founded analysis of the development of science that shows that while there were occasional conflicts, which were rarely as simple as “science versus religion”, religion was usually neutral on the rational analysis of the physical world and often actively supportive of it. Overt conflicts, such as the Galileo Affair, were exceptions rather than the rule and, in that case as in many others, more complicated than simply “religion” repressing “science”. The older Conflict Thesis view lends itself better to anti-religious polemic, so many atheists cling to it (or are not even aware historians have rejected it) and resist the more nuanced but less rhetorically useful modern perspective. But if we put aside polemics and look rationally at the evidence, the Conflict Thesis simply does not stack up as sound historical analysis.

The tendency of many atheist writers to show little interest in history per se, but rather to just use it as a quarry in which to mine examples (real or imagined) of religion’s faults and crimes leads to a highly distorted, usually skewed and often quaintly out of date picture of history. This is what historian Nathan Johnstone refers to as many atheist activists as “hunter-gatherers” of history, where historians are “explorers” (see Johnstone, The New Atheism: Myth and History, Palgrave, 2108). Explorers are interested in mapping and understanding the whole unknown territory of history. Hunter-gatherers simply range across it, looking for things that seem useful to their particular purpose. Historians seek to understand, to delineate nuance, to see things from multiple perspectives. Atheist polemicists begin with the point they want to make and will uncritically accept anything from history (or their imagined version of it) that seems to help them make it. This is why the way history is studied and the way atheist polemics are argued are often completely at odds.

History as Rationalism

We atheists and freethinkers regularly deride believers for their irrational thinking, lack of critical analysis and tendency to cling to ideas out of faith even when confronted by contrary evidence. Unfortunately, it is a lot easier to talk about being rational, and criticise others for not being so, than it is to practice what we preach. Everyone has their biases and “confirmation bias” – the tendency to favour information that confirms our prior beliefs – is an innate psychological propensity that is hard to counter, even when we are aware of it. This means that atheists can, in many cases, be as bad as believers in accepting appealing ideas without checking their facts, holding to common misconceptions in the face of contrary evidence and liking neat, simple stories over messy, complex and more detailed alternatives that happen to be more solidly supported by the evidence.

The idea that the medieval Church taught the earth was flat, that Columbus bravely defied their primitive Biblical superstition and proved they were wrong by sailing to America is a great story. Unfortunately, it is historical nonsense – a fable with zero basis in reality.  It is bad enough that I have had the experience of intelligent and educated atheists repeating this story as an example of the Church holding back progress without bothering to check if it is true.  What is worse is that I have also experienced atheists who have been shown extensive, clear evidence that the medieval Church taught the earth was round and that the myth of medieval Flat Earth belief was invented by the novelist Washington Irving in 1828, and they have simply refused to believe that the myth could be wrong.

Neat historical fables such as the ones about Christians burning down the Great Library of Alexandria (they didn’t) or murdering Hypatia because of their hatred of her learning and science (ditto) are appealing parables. Which means some atheists fight tooth and nail to preserve them even when confronted with clear evidence that they are pseudo historical fairy tales. Fundamentalists are not the only ones who can be dogmatic about their myths. One of the main reasons for studying history is to get a better understanding of why things today are as they are by grasping what has gone before. But this only works with a good grasp of how we can know about the past, the methods of analysis used and the relevant material our understanding should be based on. It also only works if we strive to put aside what we may like to be true along with any preconceptions (since they are often wrong) and look at the material objectively. Atheists who attempt to use history in their arguments who do not do these things can not only end up getting things badly wrong, but can also wind up looking as stupid or even as dogmatic as fundamentalists. And that is not a good look.

Further Reading

For a good introduction to the application of the Historical Method and how to avoid historiographical fallacies and pitfalls in analysis see Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier, From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods (Cornell, 2002)

A classic study on what historians are doing when they study and analyse history is E.H. Carr, What is History? (1961, revised edition, Palgrave, 2001). Carr’s approach was critically analysed by Sir Geoffrey Elton in his The Practice of History (1967, 2nd edition Wiley-Blackwell, 1991), while acknowledging the importance of Carr’s historiography. A more recent analysis of how history is studied, with reference to approaches and perspectives that Carr and Elton would probably not have recognised as significant or even useful, is John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford, 2004). Similarly, Richard J. Evans In Defense of History (Norton, 2000) responds to what he sees as an undermining of the study of history by late twentieth century postmodernism by examining the basis for what and how we can understand the past.

(Note that the article above is a revised version of one I published in 2013 on my former Armarium Magnum blog)