Bias Is Just One Factor Among Others

The issue of bias came up in a recent thread. Being biased and being unreliable are different things. A biased source isn't equivalent to an unreliable source. We get a lot of our information about the Roman empire from Roman sources, Jewish history from Jewish sources, American history from American sources, etc. We do that sort of thing in many contexts, even the most ordinary contexts of our everyday lives. We trust what relatives tell us concerning subjects they're biased about, trust doctors who have various biases, trust banks who have financial biases, and so on. If somebody wants to sell us something, we don't just take his bias in favor of getting money into account. We also consider a lot of other factors: his conscience, his moral standards, his religious views, the history of his behavior in relevant contexts, the potential legal problems he would face if he defrauded us in some way, what would happen to his reputation, etc. There are checks and balances in life, and we take those into account. You can't just isolate the factors that would move a source in the direction of unreliability and ignore the factors that would move him in the other direction.

I doubt there are any skeptics who never believe what a skeptic tells them about issues closely related to Christianity, since skeptics are biased. Rather, atheists frequently trust what other atheists tell them in those contexts, Muslims frequently trust Muslims, etc. It's simplistic to isolate bias from every other factor and act as if we should decide whether to believe a source based solely on whether the source is biased.

Earlier this year, I wrote a post about the credibility of the witnesses in the Enfield Poltergeist case. The opening paragraphs address issues related to assessing witnesses in general, and much of what's said there is applicable here.

Though we don't need to cite non-Christian sources to substantiate conclusions that are favorable to Christianity, there are many non-Christian sources that can be cited. Here's a post I put together several years ago about non-Christian corroboration of the claims of the early Christians.

Much of the information we have on the relevant non-Christian sources is currently extant only in Christian sources (e.g., what Celsus wrote is extant in Origen's response to Celsus), but we have the same kind of situation in other historical contexts. Statements made by Roman emperors are currently extant only in sources other than the writings of those emperors, something said by Tacitus is only extant in another source who preserved what he said, something a murder victim said prior to his death is preserved by a court witness who heard him say it, etc. Even when the source who preserved the material in question is biased in some relevant way, we don't dismiss what he's reported just because he's biased, for the reasons I've explained above.

Christians aren't the only people who follow the reasoning I'm outlining here. Rather, these are principles widely accepted by historians, scientists, atheists, Muslims, Hindus, etc., not just Christians.