This is a question I’ve been putting out there time to time as I advance the fact that becoming unbiased is impossible. It is no more possible to evade bias than it is to evade being a limited human. If you’ve never thought about it, humans are defined by their limitations: whether it be running, power, thinking, height, knowledge, etc. It other words, to be human is to be restricted. This idea goes further though: to be anything in the cosmos is to have some restrictions on it. Even the cosmos itself has some energy restrictions on it: energy cannot be created or destroyed and the energy that exists is moving into greater disorder every day (entropy is increasing). At one point in my audio, I stated that even God has a point of view, which may suggest that I think God is biased.

Scripture gives a profound and heavily agenda-oriented report of events that are discussed in it pages. Any human reporting in this fashion we would say has their bias controlling them or are totally into their confirmation bias. I will not deny any of this. There is an a priori question about the nature of Scripture, one that cannot be discerned by the scientific method. Why not?

As Richard Dawkins has opined in various contexts, and I am paraphrasing, “If God is, it is a scientific question even if science has no methods to resolve the question.”

I’ll grant there are ways to a posteriori determine the divine origination of Scripture at least in an abductive logic manner. Abduction is the logical process of “inferring from the data to the best explanation.” Doing historiography and archeology from the pages of Scripture is one way to discern if events in Scripture describe historical events accurately. Still, the intangibility and, presumably, the ‘stuff’ of the Divine, of God, is not something creaturely discerned or naturally produced, and as such, obscures and perpetually frustrates merely naturalistic ways of investigation. If these events are truthful, then by extrapolation, the associated theocentric (focused on God narrative) point of view on the event may be assigned some measure of truth-value.

Moving on: I will assume the Judeo-Christian worldview is true as are its formative Scriptures (the Bible), and I mean ‘true’ in the sense that they accurately describe the cosmos and point to its Author as the Constitutor of truth. This means that God is a maximally great Entity, and, for our purposes here, has the properties of omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, and immensity (or magnitude).  He is all knowing, all powerful, everywhere, and fully able to attend to all information, knowledge, data without any diminishment in His capacity to comprehend, synthesize, and “know” the best point of view on this data. We might also note the fact that His Mind abilities should not be strictly governed by time-sequence. Why is this importance: if you have access to all intel, data, info, at all times and places, if God had to work through this in any sequence that implied time, we might wonder if the info would ever be worked through. Simply put, this would imply a restriction on God; the maximally great God would be infinite, and such time restrictions would be unbecoming – and might inadvertently make time more supreme than God Himself.

We are now ready to address the question of whether God is biased.

Next to that, we will also ask does God have a point of view. The answer is that God is not biased but God has a robust and extremely agenda-oriented point of view.

How can this be? Humanity has their biases built out of their limitations – where were you born, what language did you speak, what were the cultural norms, the mores of that group, traditions, demographics, etc.? These biases are inescapably part of who you are. Don’t mishear me. I am not saying that you cannot limit or rid yourself of a bias. You can. You cannot rid yourself of all biases though without gaining divine capacities – because humans are, as is the cosmos itself, defined by its/their limitations. Humans thus are ‘boundary defined’ in what they think. Again, this does not mean you can’t break out of the boundaries in some ways – hence the importance of imagination and self-transcendence = narratives and story telling – but it does mean that some limitations or boundaries will define and control what you think. God, on the other hand, as a maximally great Entity, does not have His point of view formed in this way, like humans or like creations. He has access to all intel at all time, in all places, without diminution to his attentiveness to that intel, with the needed power to comprehend it. His point of view, then, is born from objective reality as His mind constitutes it. It is not that He sees the objective truth of the cosmos, and whatever particular event in the cosmos as it should be understood; it is that His mind is constitutive of how the cosmos really is. The notions of absolute “best interpretations” of an event already assumes that a mind is involved. In this case, it is the Mind, and this maximally great mind sees all intel in a way that grounds the entire notion of objective truth or knowledge.

The crux of the matter resides in the fact that God’s understanding of events is formed from a maximally great set of data, beyond which cannot be conceived, while humans’ understanding of events is always born from limitations. Ergo, God can have a point of view while not being biased because bias assumes limitation, of which God has none. When we read the Bible and it seems to us an entirely too agenda driven narrative, we need only remind ourselves that the humans that masquerade as neutral interpreters are the real deceivers. All humans working within the naturalist framework have biases implicitly or explicitly. Even the scientific method, concerning which I love, must make a decision, a pre-experiment decision, about the contours of the experiment – the limitations both in the experiment and the humans doing it are already implied. This is no assault on the scientific method; it is a naturalist method, and as such should be limited as its method requires. It is the context of the manifold interpreters, of limited humans, that complicates the situation. Don’t think God missed this issue either. It may well be the case that God has massive interest in preserving the freewill of humanity, and as such provides reasonable grounds for rejecting Him. I don’t know for sure. In conclusion, God has a point of view, but how He informs it makes it categorically different than a bias. Is the journey done? No, not at all. Part of the intrigue of theism, or believing in God, is that it provides a run-way that does not end in death, in the heat deprivation of the universe. Discovery becomes its ethos, morality its means, and its Author the framework that makes it all possible.

Dr. Scalise