Religious Conflict and Intellectual Agency: Robert Ingersoll's Contributions to American Thought and Culture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Robert Green Ingersoll, often called the Great Agnostic, was the most celebrated and the most reviled orator in America during the final decades of the nineteenth century. He attacked revealed religion, ridiculed the faith of millions, yet attracted massive audiences to his lectures in cities and towns across the country. In this essay I explore how Ingersoll was able to maintain his visibility and influence for over a quarter century while simultaneously assaulting what many of his listeners held sacred. I argue that Ingersoll’s lectures ultimately ascribed intellectual agency to individuals whose agency seemed in question, thereby empowering ordinary Americans as participants in the radical changes then shaping the world of thought. Importantly, this message of agency extended to believers and nonbelievers, which helps explain why both the religiously devout and skeptical agnostics flocked to Ingersoll’s lectures. In the end, Ingersoll’s lectures underscore the role of conflict and controversy in a healthy democratic society.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".