I am currently grading assignments that asked how the Israelites came to be in the land of Canaan, specifying that I am expecting historical answers and not merely a retelling of the Biblical narrative. Students often equate the existence of debate or the suggestion of uncertainty with a situation in which nothing is certain. I am still trying to find ways to communicate the actual state of affairs more clearly, and would welcome comments and suggestions on how to do this.
When it comes to archaeology and Israelite origins, we do not know for certain whether the Israelites ever lived outside the land, and whether any armed conquests were involved in the very early stages. But we do know some things for certain. We know that at least many of the individuals who made up later Israel were not of a distinct people, with distinguishable genetic lines, from the Canaanite population. We know that the story told in Joshua is not purely factual, even though there are a number of possible conclusions one might draw about it (it could be a story that compresses events that took place over many centuries into a single narrative; it could also be a story that was based on earlier legends and ruins existing in the author’s time). We know for certain that the cities said to have been conquered by Joshua were not destroyed all in the same period, and that some are also said to have been conquered at other times in the Book of Judges. We know that no Egyptian source mentions the Exodus (unless it was a very different event than the Bible suggests). We know that Ramses II did not drown in the Red Sea, and that his eldest son did not die from a plague. We know, in other words, that Biblical inerrancy is false. There is plenty to debate over specific details. But there is also much we know. It is not the case that everything is uncertain.
The same holds true for evolution. There is certainly room for debate about the pace of evolution, whether it at times acts “sporadically” from a geological perspective (i.e. punctuated equilibrium). There is room for debate about the relative importance of various mechanisms. But there is no doubt about the approximate age of the earth, or that all living things are related, or that evolution has occurred and continued to occur. A favorite strategy of the anti-science crowd is to point at individual uncertainties and then declare victory for their side. This is dishonest -it is like saying that because a batter missed the ball, the game is over and the other side won. There is plenty of room for us to learn more – that is why biology is such an exciting field – but there is a great deal that we know for certain.
This means the news is good all around. On the one hand, we do know a great deal. On the other hand, there are lots of exciting opportunities for further research and discovery. The only people likely to treat this as bad news are people who think that books written a long time ago and in many cases long after the events they claim to describe should be treated as factual even when there is overwhelming solid evidence from genes, fossils, artifacts, archaeology, and countless other sources.
My students often say that this is where “faith” comes in. Certainly I agree if they mean that this is the point at which it is appropriate to rely on God in the midst of unsettling uncertainty. But if they mean that by strongly wanting something to be factual, “faith” allows one to bypass questions of historical evidence, then I cannot go along with that. Hebrews 11:1 says that faith is the evidence of things not seen – not that it is evidence that the things seen don’t really exist. Affirming the genocide depicted in Joshua, or denying the genocide carried out by Hitler, are both equally examples of people being willing to deny more than sufficient evidence on the basis of ideology and wishful thinking. I do not think that the content of such beliefs matters, because if one can be persuaded to believe one thing in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, then one may next time be persuaded to believe something else, something far more insidious.
Strongly wanting something to be true is never a sound basis for rewriting history. There is certainly a lot we don’t know, and a lot that is at best probable. But that is the way history works, and some of the things mentioned above as “certain”, while only certain in the sense of “proven beyond reasonable doubt”, are as certain as anything in historical study can be. To deny them would be to throw out history and science altogether.
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