You’re right, but just to rephrase:
- The natural sciences aren’t in the business of saying whether or not a given person existed.
- If you think of history as a social science, then there may be “scientific” methodologies that determine whether or not a given person existed, but that’s not what’s generally though of as “scientifically proven”
dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 days ago
Right, I’m not trying to indirectly make a point about Christ not being likely to have existed or anything, just making a point about the language: Christ’s existence hasn’t been scientifically proven, it’s just that historians agree that it’s a reasonable guess based on the texts that were left behind and mentioned him.
Archaeologists might use scientific methodologies, e.g. carbon dating, to estimate how old a text is, for example, but I wouldn’t consider this scientific proof that someone existed.