[We've all been there. A thought strikes you at a moment, but it's fleeting fast. Get it down somewhere fast or you'll lose it. I grew so tired of this happening to me that I began making a point to stop whatever I was doing and record it. I usually record it on a BlackBerry Storm. I noticed that I had a little collection of random thoughts piling up and thought I'd post them here on occasion. Sometimes these thought will be half-baked. You'll notice that the development of these thoughts come in varying degrees. Sometimes you might think, "I think that one should've sat in the hopper a little longer..." If so, tell me. No bother, these ideas are in development. What follows is one of those ideas that I put down as it came to me.]
It is often supposed that the scholarship of believing scholars is less credible because they have a vested interest in their own claims and thus are not in a neutral position to assess historical data. As the old adage goes: if the Pope says there is a God he’s just doing his job but if August Comte says this he may be on to something. Granted, believing scholars have a vested interest and that they are not neutral, but it is not true that their claims are less credible. It is no more possible for the unbelieving scholar to assess historical data from a neutral position. The claims of Christianity are the kind of claims about which one cannot possibly be neutral. They are life-governing claims that if true demand one way of perceiving the world and if not true demand other ways of perceiving the world. It is impossible then that even a skeptic should occupy a neutral position on looking at the biblical data and assessing its truth since she makes his assessment on the judgment of a worldview that is either Christian or non-Christian. She may be agnostic with regard to his conclusion about the accuracy of the biblical data, but she is not neutral in the means by which he assesses the truth of it since she is not agnostic or neutral to her methods of evaluation. Agnosticism and neutrality are not methods of evaluation. They are at best attitudes about the outcome of evaluation. Thus it is not possible to evaluate agnostically or neutrally. People can only do any evaluation because they have principles and convictions on which they must stand in order to make an assessment.
