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Record W1990141882 · doi:10.1017/s0034412509990515

How to be an atheist and a sceptic too: response to McCreary

2010· article· en· W1990141882 on OpenAlexaff
J. L. Schellenberg

Bibliographic record

VenueReligious Studies · 2010
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicTheology and Philosophy of Evil
Canadian institutionsMount Saint Vincent University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSkepticismAtheismTheismArgument (complex analysis)PhilosophyEpistemologyAgnosticismContext (archaeology)HistoryChemistry

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Mark McCreary has argued that I cannot consistently advance both the hiddenness argument and certain arguments for religious scepticism found in my book The Wisdom to Doubt (WD). This reaction was expected, and in WD I explained its shortsightedness in that context. First, I noted how in Part III of WD, where theism is addressed, my principal aim is not to prove atheism but to show theists that they are not immune from the scepticism defended in Parts I and II. To the success of this aim, McCreary's arguments are not so much as relevant, for a thoroughgoing scepticism embracing even the hiddenness argument is quite compatible with its success. But I also explained how someone convinced that the hiddenness argument does prove atheism escapes the grip of religious scepticism because of that argument's reliance on apparent conceptual truths. McCreary's critique obscures this point but does not defuse it.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.020
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.067
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Commentary · Consensus signal: Commentary
Teacher disagreement score0.042
Threshold uncertainty score0.108

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0200.067
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0110.036
Scholarly communication0.0120.016
Open science0.0040.007
Research integrity0.0330.060
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.002

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.

Opus teacher head0.050
GPT teacher head0.284
Teacher spread0.234 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreCommentary

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".

Quick stats

Citations4
Published2010
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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