MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort

God, the Best, and Evil - Bruce Langtry

2010· article· en· W2024551125 on OpenAlexaff
Klaas J. Kraay, Luke Gelinas

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Philosophical Quarterly · 2010
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicTheology and Philosophy of Evil
Canadian institutionsToronto Metropolitan UniversityUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsTheismEpistemologyPhilosophyDeterminismTheodicyDoctrineDialecticProblem of evilPhilosophy of religionTheology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Bruce Langtry has written a rigorous book that makes important contributions primarily to two debates in contemporary philosophy of religion, over whether the hypothesis of ‘no best world’ poses a problem for theists, and the more traditional problem(s) of evil. In addition, the book has interesting and original things to say about the relationship between possible worlds and value, the correct understanding of the divine attributes, and the question of how different theistic models of divine providence hold up in different dialectical contexts. Langtry's careful attention to how one's choice of model bears on the success of objections to theism is especially helpful and deserving of emulation. Ch. 1 is stage‐setting: Langtry distinguishes three leading theistic models (Molinism, theological determinism, and open theism), and while remaining neutral between them, draws out consequences of each which are relevant for his project. Defenders of each view might well have concerns about Langtry's presentation, but this need not detain us here. Ch. 1 also contains his understanding of the fundamental theistic doctrine that God is the creator of the world. Langtry takes this to mean that God chooses a possible world, and then causes it to be actual by exercising tight providential control over (nearly) every contingent state of affairs it contains. Langtry is of course free to stipulate the definition of terms for his project. But one unfortunate implication of his definition of ‘create’ is that theists who do not think that God exercises tight providential control over the creation (open theists in particular) cannot say that God creates a world, something many of them would no doubt be surprised to learn.

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 distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.517
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.002
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.001

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 head0.025
GPT teacher head0.232
Teacher spread0.207 · 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 teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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

Citations0
Published2010
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueThe Philosophical QuarterlySame topicTheology and Philosophy of EvilFrench-language works237,207