God's eye view

God's eye view is a name for a point of view where the speaker or writer assumes they have knowledge only God would have. It appears several ways:

In religion, when an institution claims to speak for a divine being.

In writing, when a writer leaves the point of view of the main actor to start writing about things they could not know if the story were in real life.

In science, when a scientist ignores the way a subject-object problem affects statistics or an observer effect affects experiment.

In medicine when a doctor makes a claim that The Gaze they use on a patient, actually sees the problem, rather than making a guess at a problem.

In ethics when a statement is made about who or what is right, without an honest attempt to make the process of deciding this consider all points of view.

A special case of the last is in a wiki with a GodKing.  Often this person can get others to believe what they say about what is right, without making any special effort to be fair to other views.

Many people think René Descartes took a God's eye view when he said cogito ergo sum.  George Berkeley argued that optics from Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler also had this problem.

Category:Social sciences