From: Keener, C. S. (2011). Miracles: 1. (ch. 6) http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/985103802
The author is discussing whether or not miracle reports can be accepted for study as history or not (arguing in the affirmative). I'm having trouble understanding his analogy with physics in the quoted sentence. Is the point here that physics doesn't tell historians what to study? If that's the point, this seems a rather odd/obtuse/weak way to say it. Other ideas?
The paragraph:
Even conceding these points, the boundaries themselves [what is/isn't proper subject matter for historians] reflect a particular line of historical development, namely a particular Western Enlightenment tradition in our discipline; there is no transcultural or transhistorical assent to these boundaries, and some disciplines have already moved beyond them. We cannot appeal to some cosmic “rules of our discipline” to prevent exploration of these issues; those rules evolved in a particular historical context, and as the guild we are allowed to rethink and revise them if needed. That is, we cannot blame the discipline as we have inherited it; we are responsible for what we do with the inheritance. Freedom to reengage old questions from new perspectives is part of what it means to think critically. From a theistic perspective, the exclusion of superhuman causes is arbitrary or even apologetically motivated against theism; from a neutral perspective, it is at best a suspension of the question for the sake of dialoguing based on agreed-on assumptions, not a metaphysical conclusion. However we define the rules of the discipline, historiography no more excludes the possibility of knowledge outside its conventional methods than historians would grant that physics does. Historians who choose to ask the questions may ask them with the same academic rigor employed when inferring human causation in events where such causation is debated. In a postmodern context, for better or for worse (or some of each), historiography’s rules are shifting.
He's trying to say that historical method cannot disprove the possibility of miracles happening in the past. This is something most historians would agree with. Keener seems to think always preferring natural explanations to supernatural explanations is biased against theism, which it is and which it has to be in the same way that it has to be biased against vampires or minotaurs. All supernatural hypotheses are equally possible and there are an infinite number of supernatural hypotheses for any given question. To have to consider every supernatural possibility would paralyze the process. You could never draw a conclusion aout anything. Therefore, you go with what is most probable, but it would be wrong to mistake this as ever meaning to a historian as meaning definitely true. The method is always open to, even hungry for, new data, new evidence, new information. As a practical method, it has deal in probabilities, but it does not try or claim to deal in absolutes.
I believe he's alluding to the fact that the methods of academic history are implicitly based on a scientific view of the world that crystallized in Western society in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Specifically, these methods are built on the understanding that historically knowledge must be arrived at empirically: to prove a claim about the past, one must cite sources. Documents and other pieces of evidence, from this point of view, fulfill much the same role as experiments do in the hard sciences; they are a means of verifying or disproving a hypothesis.
Historical modes of explanation, furthermore, must be naturalistic, meaning that the causes of past events must be found in human agency rather than the intervention of supernatural forces. Just as a physicist would explain the falling of an apple in terms of the law of gravity, a historian would explain the causes of the French Revolution as lying in Enlightenment thought, rather than the will of God.
This way of approaching history is far from universal. For example, many other societies believe that knowledge of the past might come from divine revelation - e.g., creation stories. Others might see supernatural forces as playing an important role in historical events - e.g., Homeric epics, in which the gods are constantly playing games with human affairs.
So I think he's saying that the rules of academic history are by no means universal - even though the scientific/historical method always claims a certain universality - so that in the post-modern, post-colonial era, these rules are in some ways parochial.