Response to Kelly James Clark and Justin T. Winslett, "The Evolutionary Psychology of Chinese Religion: Pre-Qin High Gods as Punishers and Rewarders" 79/4: 928-960
Bibliographic record
Abstract
FROM THE LATE nineteenth century, some scholars applied the concept of ur-monotheism to early Chinese civilization. By contrast, in the early twentieth century, humanistic scholars understood early Chinese intellectuals to be nontheistic. Those who did not universalize these Western understandings and understood China to have always been polytheistic had lesser influence on religious studies. Kelly Clark and Justin Winslett seek to prove that early China was not atheistic, and to that end, I am sympathetic. I have argued, for example, that those lines in the Analects of Confucius taken to indicate agnosticism were mistranslated. Nonetheless, I take exception to the underlying premise of these authors which posits a Hebrew Bible-type deity at the core of early Chinese religion. They assume that any superior numinous entity must be an anthropomorphic punitive deity: “a high, moralizing god with strategic knowledge who exercises a kind of moral providence” (930). The authors criticize sinologists (Chün-fang Yu, Jacques Gernet, and Marcel Granet) who correctly point out that, in the main, early Chinese deities are not transcendent and are imminent (929). The authors further assume that the new cognitive approaches to religion demand an understanding of a singular anthropomorphic deity (933), and refer to two major scholars of early Chinese religion (David Keightly and Robert Eno) as supporting their view, when these scholars view Chinese theism quite differently (934).
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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 | 0.002 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.018 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.026 | 0.014 |
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".