Certainty, Distance, and the Point Where Explanation Changes Category
Exploring scientific limits and the Christian Hypothesis
Science is strongest where observation is direct and experiments are repeatable. That isn’t a criticism. It’s the reason science works. Repeatability collapses uncertainty. Signal overwhelms noise. Confidence compounds.
But the further we move from the present into the past, the epistemic situation changes. Not gradually, but structurally.
From a statistical standpoint, certainty about the past decays as informational distance from the source event increases. Each inferential step multiplies conditional probabilities. Physical traces degrade. Noise accumulates. Sampling narrows. Models thicken. Eventually, assumptions carry more explanatory weight than surviving data. That decay is exponential, not rhetorical.
This does not mean science becomes useless. Constraints remain powerful. Physics still limits what could have happened. Chemistry still forbids certain pathways. Order can often be established even when mechanism cannot. But constraint is not narration. Eliminating impossibilities is not the same thing as reconstructing a unique history.
This is why science quietly divides into two domains. Experimental science gains strength with time because evidence is refreshed through repetition. Historical science loses strength with time because it cannot be. It works by inference, not reenactment. That difference matters.
As the signal weakens, presuppositions rise. Everyone leans into the story that best fits their prior commitments. What kinds of causes are allowed. Whether purpose is real or illusory. Whether explanation must bottom out in brute facts. Whether mind is fundamental or emergent. Once the data underdetermines the explanation, the worldview does the selecting.
That alone explains why origins debates never “settle” the way experimental questions do. The evidence plateaus. The arguments persist. The disagreement moves beneath the surface.
Physical constraints still matter, but they are conditional, not metaphysical absolutes. A constraint rules out explanations relative to a given mechanism set. Introduce a genuinely plausible mechanism that operates within the laws, and the constraint shifts. That is ordinary scientific progress.
But there is another kind of shift that people resist naming. Some explanations move not within the laws, but above them.
Physics constrains what can actualize once laws exist. It does not explain why laws exist at all. Gravity does not explain gravity. Conservation laws do not explain why there is something to conserve. No law applies to its own origin.
This is where certain questions function like pressure points.
Why is there something physical rather than nothing. Why is there not everything all the time. Why is the universe fine tuned to a razor’s edge. Why does biology look coded rather than merely complicated. Why does human consciousness transcend every attempt to mechanize it. Why does morality extend beyond survival.
The pattern is consistent. Start with any of these questions and follow the explanatory chain until it terminates. What you find is not a gap in current knowledge that future discoveries might fill. You find a category boundary.
Physics presupposes existence. “Nothing” has no properties, no instability, no probability distribution. So nothing cannot transition into something. Appeals to vacuum fluctuations or quantum fields already assume a physical substrate. That is not something from nothing. It is something renamed.
The universe is not unconstrained chaos. It is highly selective. These constants. These particles. These structures. Laws describe constraint, but they do not explain why this constraint set exists rather than infinite disorder. Declaring the laws brute facts ends explanation by definition.
Fine tuning is not about improbability alone. It is about sensitivity. Tiny deviations erase complexity entirely. Multiverse proposals do not eliminate the problem. They relocate it to the generator, the landscape, or the selection rule. The focal point remains.
Biology does not merely look complex. It looks symbolic. Codes are not patterns. They are mappings between sign and function. Arbitrary correspondences. Error correction. Translation. Semantics. Chemistry describes substrates. It does not generate meaning. Calling this “emergent” names the problem without solving it.
Consciousness is even more resistant. Not the physical substrate of neurons firing. The subjective experience itself. What it is like to see red, to feel pain, to grasp a concept, to know that you know. No amount of third-person description captures first-person reality. You can map every neural correlate of consciousness and still not explain why there is something it is like to be the system doing the mapping.
Functionalism says consciousness is what the brain does. But doing and experiencing are not the same category. A calculator performs functions. It does not experience performing them. Adding complexity does not cross the gap. A trillion non-conscious processes do not sum to one conscious experience. Calling this “emergence” names the mystery without explaining how subjective awareness arises from objective mechanism.
The harder problem is reflexivity. Every explanation of consciousness presupposes consciousness. The mind examining the brain is using the very thing it claims to reduce. When neuroscience declares “consciousness is neurons,” a conscious agent is making that declaration, relying on rational inference, subjective certainty, and the intelligibility of concepts. None of which are explained by neurons. The tool cannot account for the hand wielding it.
And then there is morality. Not social preference. Not evolutionary advantage. Morality as binding obligation. The kind that reaches beyond survival calculus and condemns actions that would benefit the tribe. Genocide is wrong even when it secures resources. Torture is wrong even when it extracts information. Betrayal is wrong even when no one finds out.
Evolutionary psychology can describe how moral intuitions might enhance group fitness. It cannot explain why those intuitions carry normative weight. “This behavior was selected for” does not entail “this behavior is right.” The gap between “is” and “ought” is not a problem to be solved by better neuroscience. It is a category distinction.
We experience moral obligation as real, binding, and independent of personal preference or cultural consensus. When we say an act is wrong, we do not mean “my tribe dislikes it” or “evolution penalized it.” We mean it violates something that transcends both. That experience is either veridical or a universal cognitive illusion with no explanation for why the illusion would be universal, coherent, and epistemically productive.
Reductive accounts do not dissolve the problem. They relocate it. Why would physics generate minds that experience binding oughts if oughts are not real? Why would selection pressure produce the conviction that some things are wrong regardless of consequences if morality is just game theory? The harder you press on morality as mere adaptation, the more it looks like evidence of something adaptation cannot account for.
In each case, the explanatory narrative narrows until physical mechanisms run out of currency. Not because science failed, but because science reached its jurisdictional boundary.
And our attempt to extend naturalistic explanations past that boundary leads to wild speculation and ontological bloat. Infinite branching multiverses. Unobservable universes with every possible configuration. Reality-generating mechanisms that themselves require fine-tuning. Consciousness as a fundamental property of matter with no explanation for why matter would have it. Morality as collective illusion that somehow produces objective-seeming binding force across all cultures and epochs.
These are not parsimonious extensions of established science. They are metaphysical rescue operations, multiplying entities and assumptions to avoid one conclusion: that physical closure is not ultimate.
At that point, only two options remain.
One is to declare the focal point a brute fact. No reason. No grounding. Reality just is. That move is permitted, but it terminates explanation precisely where the pressure is greatest.
The other is to allow a grounding explanation that is not constrained by the system it grounds. One capable of accounting for existence, constraint, order, rational structure, and information without borrowing them first. That move does not compete with science in its own domain. Instead, it provides the metaphysical foundation that makes scientific inquiry possible in the first place. Laws, logic, intelligibility, the reliability of rational inference: these are not outputs of physics. They are preconditions for doing physics at all.
Once you step there, science is no longer the right tool. History is.
Origins are not repeatable events. They are singular. When explanation reaches that level, the rational question becomes whether there is a historically reliable source that speaks to those origins, not in abstraction, but in claims anchored to time, place, and public events.
And here the conversation changes completely.
If testimony and documentary evidence can establish knowledge about singular past events (and they must, or we know nothing of antiquity), then truth is not confined to laboratory repetition. Knowledge can be grounded in testimony, memory, and public claims about what actually happened. We apply standards: multiple attestation, early sources, hostile corroboration, explanatory power, consistency with known context. This is how we assess any historical claim. The method does not change when the claim becomes theologically significant.
If that kind of knowledge is legitimate, then a historically grounded claim about the source of reality is not disqualified simply because it cannot be rerun.
The Christian claim is that such a source exists, that rational order is not impersonal, and that this source acted in history in a way meant to be examined, challenged, and either accepted or rejected.
The Bible does not begin as abstract metaphysics. It begins with the claim that Logos precedes matter, that information is not downstream of chaos, and that reality is intelligible because it is grounded in a rational mind. Then it does something no other worldview does. It stakes everything on history.
And it is remarkable how this event pivots at a very specific point between historical uncertainty and the availability of the total written record of antiquity. Christianity emerges precisely when the ancient world transitions from oral tradition and fragmentary documentation to comprehensive written records. Late enough that we have extensive historical context, cross-referencing sources, and the full apparatus of Greco-Roman historiography. Early enough that eyewitnesses are still alive, that hostile testimony can be gathered, that the claims can be investigated by contemporaries with every incentive to disprove them.
This is not the Bronze Age, where events vanish into legend within generations. This is the Roman Empire at the height of its administrative and literary culture. We have more documentation for first-century Judea than for any comparable time and place in antiquity. The New Testament documents appear within the lifetimes of people who were there. Paul’s letters circulate while the apostles are still alive to dispute them if fraudulent. The Gospels emerge while hostile witnesses, Roman records, and Jewish leadership could contest the narrative if it were fabricated.
The timing is not incidental. If the claim had come earlier, it would lack the historical scaffolding for verification. If later, it would lack direct witnesses and contemporary challenge. It arrives exactly when history is maximally knowable.
It centers that claim on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Named locations. Known rulers. Early sources. Multiple witnesses. A claim explicitly framed as falsifiable. If it did not happen, the entire system collapses.
That is not how myths behave. That is how truth claims behave.
If that history is reliable, then God is no longer a hypothesis added to explain gaps. He becomes part of the data set. The grounding of logic, order, information, and meaning is no longer inferred only backward from structure, but confirmed forward by action.
And that changes everything.
Science remains science. Physics remains physics. But they are no longer floating on unexplained foundations. They are grounded in a rational source who explains why there is something rather than nothing, why there is order rather than chaos, why the universe is intelligible, and why minds can know it.
If history is reliable, Christianity is not an escape from reason. It is reason completed.
And if it is not reliable, Christianity collapses by its own admission.
That starkness is the point. Everything hangs on history.
Which is why this question is not a side issue at all and why our approach to the answer changes everything.