Review of 'Webs of Reality: Social Perspectives on Science and Religion' by William A. Stahl, Robert A. Campbell, Yvonne Petry and Gary Diver
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The authors seek here to present a more holistic view of the science/religion enterprise-one that will reveal 'a seamless web' tying together science, technology, religion and ethics.Essential to achieving this aim, they argue, is to bring the social sciences into the discussion, for only then, they insist, will we be able to see the social causes that lie behind the science/religion dialogue itself (p.13), and, consequently, be able also to provide the foundation for a view of science that combines both mystery and objectivity (ix).The framework within which the authors present their views is, in a sense, Weberian, in that they use Weber's categories of soteriology, saintliness, magical causation, theodicy, and mystery as religious lenses through which to interpret 'the tension between objectivity and mystery' (p.20) in our understanding of science.They devote a section of the book to each of the five categories.Two chapters are devoted to the category of soteriology: one to the history of the development of science (chapter 2), which they see as a 'history of progress and victory over superstition' until the end of the nineteenth century but a more humble relationship to religion over the past century, and one (chapter 1) to 'scientism'that is, to the mythic view of science that, when compared to religion, reveals it to be 'no more or less a human practice than is religion' (p.32).Combined, the two chapters intend to provide the grounds on which to proceed with a demythologisation of science (p.36).Under the category of saintliness the authors review 'The Iconography of Science' (chapter 2) and 'The Newtonian Revolution' (chapter 4), and argue that scientists have gained the standing of secular saints (with Newton as foremost among them) which, in their view, lends an inappropriate authority to science.With a social scientific analysis of this process of secularisation, they continue, it becomes clear that 'sainthood' and 'authority' are gained only at the price of the suppression of the fact that both religion and magic played a major role in the life and work of the founding figures of the modern scientific disciplines.Consequently, they argue, science is not superior to religion in regard to its relationship to magical thinking.In chapter 5 (Magicians, Reformers, and Scientists), chapter 6 (As If By Magic) and chapter 7 (Technology as Magic), the authors continue this argument, insisting that the boundaries between natural and magical causes is not as great as it has been taken to be.They argue, that is, that whether viewed from a substantive, functional,
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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 | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
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.
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".