Bibliographic record
Abstract
William Paley's Natural Theology has experienced a resurgence in popularity in recent decades with the continuing controversies over the teaching of evolution and the emergence of a new "intelligent design" movement. But while both the movement's supporters and detractors agree that Paley is an intellectual forefather of the present-day movement, this agreement is forged at the expense of historical accuracy. Paley's intelligent design has almost nothing in common with the present day movement and, in fact, suggests theological arguments against the type of reasoning used by the modern movement. Paley wrote in reaction to Hume and in response to the evolutionary theories of Buffon and Erasmus Darwin. In this light, the Natural Theology suggests a different reading than it is usually given. Paley's narrowly-argued theology relies upon the ability to detect the presence of "purpose" in nature without relying upon knowing what those purposes are. His empirically-argued theology leads him to a God who operates through natural law, not in its contravention, and his concern goes far beyond proving the existence of a deity to undertaking the theological project of determining the attributes and characteristics of the deity. Though not himself an evolutionist, Paley put forth a theological worldview consistent with evolution. In fact, given his arguments that the observation of great contrivance increases the testimony of nature to God's power, Paley's philosophy might be more consistent with a theistic Darwinian evolution than with special creation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".