This is very interesting, and makes me all the more painfully aware that my religious beliefs (including belief in the Resurrection) are held on premises very different to my 'beliefs' in science, historical events, etc. And there's a lot to think about philosophically there, but instead of doing that, just two points where I think I can say something relatively meaningful:
1) to someone who is used to mathematical proofs and experimental evidence, standards of 'proof' that are accepted in the field of history are generally pretty weak
I guess this is true in an abstract way, but a historian might take issue because the aims of the discipline of history are so very different to the aims of the sciences. Disclaimer: I'm not a historian, I'm a classical linguist (so my ways of 'proving' things come a bit closer to scientific principles, while my data simply can't be tested in a scientific way), but I did study history as a major part of my Classics degree for three years, so I have some reasonably informed ideas about it.
So, the aims of history are very often represented as a quest to find out the 'truth' of the past, to be able to say that such and such an event happened at such and such a time in such and such a place. But actually if that's all history did then it would only be half a discipline, because it's not really very difficult to work out when and where things happened, and we either have evidence for it or we don't. Even for the very earliest historians, that wasn't the aim of their discipline - it was to tell the story of the past and its people, to find out people opinions about historical events, to show different versions of historical narratives, to try to understand historical events by assessing the biases of the people who tell us about them, and so on. Those are the things that historians really have to think hard about. A minority of historical research might aim to work out from an assortment of obscure sources when and where (and whether) X happened, but the majority of it is about interpreting sources, understanding people and their motives, and so on. NB this is probably vastly oversimplified.
When you understand history as a discipline that looks at much more complex phenomena than events, you realise (or at least this is what I came to realise while studying) that 'historical evidence' isn't even remotely similar to scientific proof, and in fact history isn't really about proof at all. As a historian, I think what you do is gather historical evidence and make a judgement about whether it's plausible that X happened, and consider how people at the time might have thought about X. In the end, admittedly, that's a judgement pretty similar to the sorts of judgements you make when deciding whether you believe in particular religious phenomena!
ETA: So yes, the point of that was that evidence and proof are different things. I seem to have meandered away from that a bit.
As a postscript, I have historical evidence for Daleks in the 2nd millennium BC Mediterranean. And I can show you the evidence, but I don't really expect you to believe they existed :)
2) On 'truth' generally as a concept, and the quest for knowledge and particularly knowledge about historical/religious/occult things, I still think that Indiana Jones has taught me more about how to think about it than years of study. OK, in Indy it turns out that phenomena such as the power of the Ark of the Covenant are demonstrably 'true', so it isn't the best thing to set your standards by (plus it's fictional). But there's something about Indy's insistence that archaeology is about a search for 'facts' (which comes from work in the library and studying human remains and so on according to him), while the search for truth belongs in the discipline of philosophy, that has always resonated with me. I think it's relatively meaningful that Indy's standards vary depending on whether he's teaching in a classroom or out being an adventurer - because when he's adventuring, it's all about believing what he sees, and that isn't really historical or archaeological. Anyway, this point was more of a digression than a point :)
no subject
1) to someone who is used to mathematical proofs and experimental evidence, standards of 'proof' that are accepted in the field of history are generally pretty weak
I guess this is true in an abstract way, but a historian might take issue because the aims of the discipline of history are so very different to the aims of the sciences. Disclaimer: I'm not a historian, I'm a classical linguist (so my ways of 'proving' things come a bit closer to scientific principles, while my data simply can't be tested in a scientific way), but I did study history as a major part of my Classics degree for three years, so I have some reasonably informed ideas about it.
So, the aims of history are very often represented as a quest to find out the 'truth' of the past, to be able to say that such and such an event happened at such and such a time in such and such a place. But actually if that's all history did then it would only be half a discipline, because it's not really very difficult to work out when and where things happened, and we either have evidence for it or we don't. Even for the very earliest historians, that wasn't the aim of their discipline - it was to tell the story of the past and its people, to find out people opinions about historical events, to show different versions of historical narratives, to try to understand historical events by assessing the biases of the people who tell us about them, and so on. Those are the things that historians really have to think hard about. A minority of historical research might aim to work out from an assortment of obscure sources when and where (and whether) X happened, but the majority of it is about interpreting sources, understanding people and their motives, and so on. NB this is probably vastly oversimplified.
When you understand history as a discipline that looks at much more complex phenomena than events, you realise (or at least this is what I came to realise while studying) that 'historical evidence' isn't even remotely similar to scientific proof, and in fact history isn't really about proof at all. As a historian, I think what you do is gather historical evidence and make a judgement about whether it's plausible that X happened, and consider how people at the time might have thought about X. In the end, admittedly, that's a judgement pretty similar to the sorts of judgements you make when deciding whether you believe in particular religious phenomena!
ETA: So yes, the point of that was that evidence and proof are different things. I seem to have meandered away from that a bit.
As a postscript, I have historical evidence for Daleks in the 2nd millennium BC Mediterranean. And I can show you the evidence, but I don't really expect you to believe they existed :)
2) On 'truth' generally as a concept, and the quest for knowledge and particularly knowledge about historical/religious/occult things, I still think that Indiana Jones has taught me more about how to think about it than years of study. OK, in Indy it turns out that phenomena such as the power of the Ark of the Covenant are demonstrably 'true', so it isn't the best thing to set your standards by (plus it's fictional). But there's something about Indy's insistence that archaeology is about a search for 'facts' (which comes from work in the library and studying human remains and so on according to him), while the search for truth belongs in the discipline of philosophy, that has always resonated with me. I think it's relatively meaningful that Indy's standards vary depending on whether he's teaching in a classroom or out being an adventurer - because when he's adventuring, it's all about believing what he sees, and that isn't really historical or archaeological. Anyway, this point was more of a digression than a point :)