Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: what do you think about this one — June 6, 2024 · l7ewdsf | Ali Shukri Amin

Most of the conclusions we arrive at by looking at the historical record are arrived at not because of their truth, but because of their plausibility. The plausibility of a theory and the amount of records indicating it do not constitute evidence in any statistical or philosophical sense, because of the problem of induction. A single hitherto unobserved piece of evidence could render all of those other ones false. It's usually easier to determine what we do not know than what we can actually establish. This is the problem of epiphenomena.

When we use the "historical record" to make our conclusions about what happened without taking into account randomness in the events of history, randomness about the documents that have survived, randomness in the contents of the documents, and the possibility of hitherto undiscovered contradictory documents - we are engaging in psuedoscience. Since you can't verify these historical claims in a controlled experiment, they are subject to a wide variety of psychological and cultural biases, with no way to validate their truth value.

There's so much that can be said about this, but the Historical Critical Method, if truly evaluated from a critical philosophical and statistical perspective, totally collapses. In fact, there is little defense in all of Western academia currently against attacks on Hegelian epistemology or the problem of induction. Just being well-equipped on these two arguments can undermine almost all of the fields that people are studying, in terms of their ability to arrive at any meaningful absolute "truth." It's even more problematic that continental and analytical philosophers, pretty much the only two schools studied with any prominence in Western academy, essentially ignore these problems because they predicate their worldview on Hegel.

These problems were heavily discussed, debated, and considered by Islamic philosophers starting in the 4th century AH. Islamic philosophical thought is much more robust in this regard and nowhere near as fragile. As a result, the idea that, "oh traditionalists just assume Islamic philosophy to be true" is a misnomer. Western secular academics also assume their philosophical edifice to be true, otherwise they wouldn't try to derive truth claims with the assumption that they are fundamentally incapable of deriving the truth.

The more fundamental question is not one of methodology, it's: which worldview actually deals with these problems in a more convincing and efficient manner? When you deal with that, then you can start approaching other studies, like Qur'anic studies, with the right assumptions. If you end up having no assumptions, then you just fall into Pyrrhonian skepticism and become a dysfunctional human being (but that's another discussion).