The high fence between the laboratory and the library

Science · Published 20 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: While modern science and historical criticism both shattered traditional religious authority, they did so on opposite sides of a high fence. They were parallel revolutions—one seeking natural laws, the other seeking human origins—moving independently to dismantle the idea of divine dictation in favor of human history.

Historical criticism, often called "higher criticism," emerged as a method to treat sacred scriptures like any other ancient literary document. Instead of seeking a "plain" spiritual meaning or allegorical truth, it sought to uncover the "world behind the text." This involved asking rigorous questions: Who wrote these books? When were they composed? What were the authors' original intentions? Scholars began to prioritize internal analysis and external records of ancient times over the assumption of direct divine inspiration.

The movement gained momentum after the Renaissance and Reformation. Key figures like Thomas Hobbes (1651) and Baruch Spinoza (1670) began identifying literary incoherencies and chronological contradictions in the Pentateuch. Richard Simon, often cited as a founder of the field, noted double accounts of events and suggested the Old Testament reached its present form only after the Babylonian Exile. This shift was distinct from the rise of modern science; while science provided natural explanations for the physical world, historical criticism provided human explanations for the literary world.

The two fields were parallel but not intertwined. For instance, when James Ussher popularized a 4004 B.C.E. creation date, the scientific shift toward uniformitarianism (led by James Hutton and Charles Lyell) was easier to accommodate by simply reinterpreting the "days" of Genesis. Conversely, historical criticism raised deeper questions about the reliability of the Old Testament's chronology itself. The culmination of this literary analysis arrived in the late 19th century with the Graf-Wellhausen theory, which identified the JEDP documentary sources, effectively mapping the Bible as a complex tapestry of human composition rather than a single, monolithic revelation.

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