From ResearchID.org

Historical sciences are scientific methodologies that adjudicate the best explanation among competing proposals by considering which proposal is more supported by currently known evidence. Evidence considered can be direct and indirect, and particular ways of reasoning about evidence are used. These methods are most often employed when the event in question has a very low likelihood of replication. While replication is still a hallmark of science, Charles Darwin did much to make a historical method more acceptable to the scientific community.

Stephen Meyer points out some distinctive features of historical sciences:

1. The historical interest or questions motivating their practitioners: Those in the historical sciences generally seek to answer questions of the form "What happened?" or "What caused this event or that natural feature to arise?" On the other hand, those in the nomological or inductive sciences generally address questions of the form "How does nature normally operate or function?"

2. The distinctively historical types of inference used: The historical sciences use inferences with a distinctive logical form. Unlike many nonhistorical disciplines, which typically attempt to infer generalizations or laws from particular facts, historical sciences make what C. S. Peirce has called "abductive inferences" in order to infer a past event from a present fact or clue. These inferences have also been called "retrodictive" because they are temporally asymmetric—that is, they seek to reconstruct past conditions or causes from present facts or clues. For example, detectives use abductive or retrodictive inferences to reconstruct the circumstances of a crime after the fact. In so doing they function as historical scientists. As Gould has put it, the historical scientist proceeds by "inferring history from its results."

3. The distinctively historical types of explanations used: In the historical sciences one finds causal explanations of particular events, not nomological descriptions or theories of general phenomena. In historical explanations, past causal events, not laws, do the primary explanatory work. The explanations cited earlier of the Himalayan orogeny and the beginning of World War I exemplify such historical explanations. ^[1]

In addition, the historical sciences share with many other types of science a fourth feature:

4. Indirect methods of testing such as inference to the best explanation: As discussed earlier, many disciplines cannot test theories by direct observation, prediction or repeated experiment. Instead, testing must be done indirectly through comparison of the explanatory power of competing theories.^[2]

Stephen Meyer explains one of the distinguishing features of historical sciences:

"Instead, many explanations of particular events or facts, especially in the historical sciences, depend primarily, even exclusively, upon the specification of past causal conditions and events rather than laws to do what might be called the "explanatory work." That is, citing past causal events often explains a particular event better than, and sometimes without reference to, a law or regularity in nature."^[3]

References and notes

External links

• The Scientific Status of Intelligent Design: The Methodological Equivalence of Naturalistic and Non-Naturalistic Origins Theories by Stephen C. Meyer, from Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe, Michael Behe, William Dembski & Stephen Meyer, 2000, ISBN 0898708095