April and the Fiction of Universal Bias

I am often amused when I see the reaction to one of April's posts - like this one, for instance. April blogs a lot about this subject and the responses are often very interesting and telling. But there is one common response that I feel compelled to comment on myself. It often happens that someone in these exchanges will start talking about "biases." The general argument seems to start something like this: everyone has a point of view, no point of view is completely objective, methods and systems are created by individuals who cannot be objective, and so no one can be completely objective and neither can any method or system. Therefore all methods and individuals are biased in some way.

I don't really have too much of a problem with that. But then it seems to be taken one step further and the assumption seems to be made that individuals and methods are equally biased. As if bias is some sort of binary system - on or off, biased or not biased and everyone is on the "biased on" switch. But this is simply not true as we know from everyday experience. I am a lawyer and we have to pick juries sometimes. While it may be true that everyone is biased in some way, that doesn't stop us from trying to pick the most objective, unbiased jury we can. If I am trying a robbery case I know that I cannot get a jury in which no one has any biases whatsoever, but I am certainly not going to put the spouse of the defendant or the brother of the victim on the jury!

April was writing about the differences in what she called "confessional" Biblical scholarship and "historical-critical" scholarship. And while folks may be right when they say that no scholar is free of bias it seems hard to me to argue that these two points of view are equally biased. Clearly what April is talking about with respect to a "confessional" scholar is one who views something like the virgin birth, or the physical resurrection, as a dogma providing a data point and has to do her or his work around that dogma. Now such a scholar will not (if he or she is smart) come right out and say that, but it does seem implicit in some scholar's work.

Some insinuate that the historical-critical type scholar that April is (and defends) just has a different "dogma" - one in which the virgin birth is precluded. That is simply not the case, however. It simply seems that way sometimes because the historical-critical scholar treats virgin births like it would any other historical claim. And under the criteria that historian scholars in other fields use on a regular basis the claim of the virgin birth is simply not credible. This is because, historians and scientists deal with claims of fact in a holistic manner - they are judged on the basis of everything we know about the world - yes, eyewitness testimony, but no, not just on whether the eyewitnesses are credible. They are judged on the strength of the evidence and on everything we know about the physical laws and order the universe seems to operate under. And when everything is weighed in there is no way that anyone could come to the conclusion that Jesus did not have a human father unless one started from that conclusion due to a religious dogma.

What April has said in this post seems uncontroversial and even inescapable to me. Maybe the "confessional" scholar and the "historical-critical" scholar both operate under some biases. But the "historical-critical" scholar is making judgments and evaluating Biblical events and claims in the same manner we evaluate all other types of claims - the "confessional" scholar is singling out Biblical claims and making arguments for them that would never be accepted in any other academic (or even professional) field. Maybe they are both biased, but one certainly sounds a lot more biased to me.

Of course, I, being married to April, might be a bit ... biased?