When the word testimony is brought up most people’s minds will immediately be brought to a courtroom scene. A witness in the box stands in front of the court and gives their eyewitness testimony as part of the evidence for either the prosecution or defense. Testimony is more than that though, testimony is the act of one person passing on information to another person through a speech act alone.
For example, something like, Person A telling their friend Person B what they had done the previous night like watched cinema. We then take them at their word and accept what they tell us a true and form a belief around that testimony.
How many times do we ask for evidence that said friend or relative actually went to the cinema or went to the restaurant? But we ask to see our friend’s cinema ticket in the case of our example. However, it would no longer be a testimony.This argument seems to entail that we can never be rationally justified in believing something until we have seen the evidence that a particular claim is correct.
People are, in general, truthful. People tell the truth most of the time and value the idea of truth. That is not to say that all people are truthful, nor is it to say that people are truthful all of the time. We know from experience that those kinds of general statements are not accurate statements. There are compulsive liars, there are people that lie when they have something to gain, there are people that lie in order to spare the feelings of others, among many other reasons. Society would not function properly if the majority population leaned towards being untruthful. If people were not honest most of the time, and people did not have an inclination towards truth, then we would not be able to pass on knowledge, we would not have formed bodies of knowledge, and we would never be able to truth what anyone was saying. Instead, what we find is that people tell the truth more often than not. When we ask some stranger the time, in the majority of instances we find the stranger giving us the correct time.
If we are only familiar with evolution through the works of others, and the experiences of others, and we have not performed all of the experiments ourselves, then we do not have sufficient warrant to call our acceptance of evolution rational. We are, after all, simply going off of the testimony of others, we have not experienced these things first-hand; and if their ability to be mistaken is sufficient to discard their testimony as justification for belief formation, then any beliefs formed from their testimony are unjustified, unwarranted, and irrational. One could argue here that those works that we learned evolution from are written by people who have performed the experiments, and have spent a lifetime studying those things. We also have the ability to perform those experiments if we wanted to, and therefore have a warrant to form a rational belief. However, if the ability to be wrong, or mistaken, is sufficient to discard a testimony, then those scientists being human means that they have the ability to be wrong, and that is sufficient to discard their testimony.
However, none of that is a defeater for all testimony, and none of that is a good reason to deny that some testimony is sufficient to warrant for rational belief. If one was to stop and think about how often they have used testimony to acquire beliefs that they consider rational, and not only rational but correct, then most people would probably be shocked. They would also be left in a position to discard a lot of their ‘rational beliefs’, or admit that there are times that testimony is sufficient to warrant a rational belief.
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