Yes, that can’t be right: I can see the Sun revolving round the Earth every 24 hours. That’s the fact, confirmed by direct observation!
Holocaust deniers?
My wife is a music historian working on the middle ages and she runs into questions like this all the time. With much of her material there are no historical chronicles describing the lives of composers or performance practices or even how the notation should be interpreted. Much of the “history” of medieval music is reconstructed using bits and scraps found here and there. For example, a picture in an illuminated manuscript may show some musicians in the background that gives us a clue as to what instruments were played together. It’s a process very similar to paleontology, with many of the same epistomological pitfalls.
Who killed JFK?
Did we really land on the moon?
Who was responsible for 9/11?
Who invented peanut butter?
Where was the Garden of Eden?
Where is Noah’s Ark?
There are lots of such questions wherein one can find some sort of debate about whether a historical event happened, or whether it happend in the way traditionally believed.
Historical sciences (e.g., evolutionary biology, astronomy, cosmology) are sciences wherein one tries not so much to determine how things are now (that we can determine through observation), but why they are the way they are now. But it’s all necessarily based on theory because no historical event can be replicated exactly, whether it’s JFK’s assassination, whether and how the French Revolution occured, or how life came to be.
The trick, however, is that if one can determine a plausible explanation for an event or phenomenon, then it is no longer necessary to appeal to supernatural or other “out there” causes. If we can replicate life in the here and now, while that doesn’t prove that that’s how it happened billions of years ago, it shows that it can be done without an appeal to the supernatural (of course, we can’t prove that God didn’t influence the experiment, either, but down that road lies solipsism). We can’t prove how galaxies form, but we can get an idea from observing galaxies at various stages of formation in the here and now (relatively speaking. Cosmology and astronomy are strange animals because we never really know what things are like now, what with the vast distances involved and the speed of light and all…).
In the historical sciences (and history studies in general), a “theory” deals with a plausible pathway or sequence of events, while in the “hard” sciences, theories deal with plausible mechanisms. The latter can be replicated while the former cannot. Evolutionary mechanisms can be directly tested in the lab; evolutionary pathways cannot. But we can get a pretty good idea of how a historical event happened, to the point of treating it as we would a lab-tested-and-verified theory.
Oops. That was supposed to be “rotates around its axis”. :smack: