Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: some presumptions of historicalcritical — February 18, 2025 · mdetdcg | Ali Shukri Amin

I'm not going to focus on the math and statistics points at length. I think u/oar335 has articulated that better than I can.

I noticed that you tend to be dismissive when someone challenges the assumptions underlying something you posit without fully grasping the challenge.

1. Your argument: Uniformitarianism applies to history – you compared natural science's assumption, like in physics, that natural laws are consistent over time and space to human behavior. This is the essence of what Sinai said. Disregarding that this is not even the start of problems with the HCM, even this thesis that we should assume that human behavior in the past was similar to what we see today can be questioned.

1a. The assumption: human behavior and history follow stable/predictable patterns that we can extrapolate backwards – This assumes that history behaves in a way that allows past events to be inferred from present ones or vice versa. We can know truths about history by backwards inference.

1b. The problem: Unlike physics, which deals with laws that remain constant such as gravity, history and human societies are shaped by unpredictable events, innovations, and outliers (wars, revolutions, technological leaps). Human behavior at a sociological level is far more complicated than physical systems.

Many important historical events are not repeated in modern times. Many modern occurrences are not seen in history. Most important historical events only occur once: the rise and fall of empires or religious movements. Human cultures evolve in unpredictable ways. We have no reliable way to model it and just assuming analogy is a lazy heuristic that can't be assumed to lead to truth.

2. The argument: prior probability guides historical conclusions. If something has never been observed in modern times, then it is highly unlikely to have happened in the past.

2a. The assumption: We can rely on statistical methods to determine historical probabilities. There has to be a typical incidence of the occurrences we expect or don't expect. This assumes that probability distributions (like normal distributions) apply to history and social sciences the same way they apply to physics.

2b. The problem: History is dominated by extreme, rare events (the Black Death, World War II, the invention of the internet). History is not dominated by gradual and predictable trends. This is better described by power law distributions or fat tail events.

This means that assuming a typical "average" human behavior across history is misleading. Extreme, unexpected, outlier, events shape history more than "normal" events.

3. The argument: scientific success confirms truth. Science’s ability to make accurate predictions proves that its assumptions and methods lead to true conclusions.

3a. Assumption: Scientific efficacy equals truth. This assumes that if a model is consistently useful, it must be an accurate reflection of reality.

3b. Problem: Science is effective, but effectiveness does not guarantee absolute truth. There are many examples of this in medicine where a particular treatment is effective but the reason why is totally misunderstood for a long time or it has longer term unforeseen consequences that nullify the initial positive effect.

Many scientific theories work well for specific conditions but fail outside of them. An example I gave was quantitive financial models that work until a market crash.

This means we should be skeptical of using "scientific success" as proof of universal truth.

4. Your argument: consilience supports reliability – When multiple independent investigations support the same conclusion, we should trust that conclusion as highly reliable.

4b. Assumption: Independent confirmation always increases reliability. This assumes that if many experts or disciplines agree on something, it must be correct.

4c. Problem: consilience does not always mean correctness. All of those sciences can be based on flawed models and assumptions.

Many disciplines can be wrong together if they share the same flawed assumptions. This is one of the main critiques I have been making for over a year on this sub. I am sure we can agree that phrenologists and eugenicists agreeing doesn't prove anything.

If multiple researchers assume human history is predictable, their agreement does not prove history actually follows predictable patterns.

The fact that multiple studies reach the same conclusion does not always mean the conclusion is correct. It may ONLY PROVE that the studies used the same framework.

If a mufassir, muhadith, and mutakallim all agree on a conclusion - does that make it objectively true?