Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: what do you think about this one — June 7, 2024 · l7hyj9o | Ali Shukri Amin

1. Define the HCM

Wikipedia:

>Historical criticism began in the 17th century and gained popular recognition in the 19th and 20th centuries. The perspective of the early historical critic was influenced by the rejection of traditional interpretations that came about with the Protestant Reformation. With each passing century, historical criticism became refined into various methodologies used today: source criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism, tradition criticism, canonical criticism, and related methodologies.

I bring up Protestantism because the development of HCM is intrinsically linked to criticism of the Bible. It's three paragraphs into the Wikipedia page.

>Methods
>Historical-critical methods are the specific procedures used to examine the text's historical origins, such as the time and place in which the text was written, its sources, and the events, dates, persons, places, things, and customs that are mentioned or implied in the text.

The evidentiary and philosophical limitations that pertain to analyzing the past are relevant when we are engaging in a method that specifically suspends truth claims in order to "examine the tests historical origins."

2. List of Problems

A. Assuming secularism is an unbiased philosophical approach to begin with and starting from there. This is the issue with intellectual baggage

B. Being predicated on Hegelian epistemology, which is flawed. (suspending discussions of philosophical/metaphysical truth claims entirely) Refer to the Pensgard thesis

C. Being unable to stand up to most forms of serious philosophical skeptical deconstruction (I listed like 5 separate arguments here previously). Those are very specific to history, but I didn't even get into wider philosophical issues of the nature posed by Decartes for example.

D. Being the product of well-known, well-studied logical-psychological biases from the heuristics & biases tradition. Please refer to the work of Kahneman and Tversky.