We will often hear someone discuss scientific consensus on our news channels. During these discussions, often someone will state, with a confident authority, “Science is not a matter of consensus; it is facts.” In historiography and other scientific disciples, the idea of “Brute Facts” gets bantered around. The Latin for the word ‘science’ simply means knowledge. To speak of brute facts we assume a number of things. First, that there are observers of said facts. Second, that we care to discuss those facts and to perhaps utilize them. Third, we appropriate or accept said fact as part of a knowledge base that contextualizes the fact and gives it both form and meaning. Saying that Jesus “came back to life” means little in terms of the Bible because many people were reported to come back to life. Jesus brought Lazarus back to life. There was a little child, Talitha, that Jesus also restored to life. We could name more in Scripture. The knowledge base that contextualizes Jesus’ coming back to life to give it form and meaning are the prophecies and Jesus’ teaching about the uniqueness of His coming back to life. This is why we say He was resurrected while all the others we simply say they came back to life–and these others had to die again at a later time.

Let us turn to geography for a moment to get at this. Is it a hard fact, a brute fact, that the Mississippi River is the western border of the state of Tennessee? To say yes is to already affirm the influence of other humans on the so-called brute fact. That this body of water is called the Mississippi River came from someone at some time. That there is a demarcated geographic location called Tennessee is again the result of human subjective influence. At some point, a tech company integrated its location in an app, and, before this, humans created representative maps of the area–all designed and influenced by humans. The more accurate the representation of the Mississippi River, the more accurate or scientific our knowledge base.

My point is that science is relative to humans, and speaking of facts is only meaningful to sentient, human life. To read of facts in a book is to read of an initial adventurer who first observed said fact. This would later get penned into the written word. The question of interest is what context to said fact was included or omitted? All human life and recording apparatuses are limited; my smart phone only has so much data in which I can store things. When I record a video on it, what context of my actual experience is left out? Brute Facts are only meaningful as subjective entailments. What I mean by this is that without subjective humans to contextualize, give form, and provide meaning to the notion of “brute facts,” the entire concept ceases to exist. Of course, on my theistic view, I might argue that God would still observe all things and so perhaps “brute facts” would endure, but this is far afield for my present purpose.

If brute facts can only exist in, with, and through subjective humans, then indeed the idea of scientific consensus is more accurate than just saying that science is facts. As soon as we speak of a human’s knowledge (i.e., what the word “science” means in Latin) we are already intimating that human’s subjectivity. Hence, the importance of the scientific method to try to get accuracy in observing the physical universe. The controlled experience of the scientific method still faces the same challenges of everything in the world: i.e., limitation. What conditions are allowed? Who–which scientist–decided on those conditions? What scientists were marginalized and disallowed from weighing in on the conditions? What was reported from the experiment and what was omitted? What order were the results of the experiment laid out? Was one result emphasized more than others? If so, why?

Dr. Scalise