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Record W2314168658 · doi:10.3138/jrpc.19.1.005

Taking off the Gloves: Dawkins and the Root of All Evil?

2008· article· en· W2314168658 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Curtis D. Carbonell

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Religion and Popular Culture · 2008
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicRhetoric and Communication Studies
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsEnlightenmentSecularismFaithRoot (linguistics)RhetoricNarrativePostmodernismPhilosophyAdversaryAtheismAestheticsReligious studiesSociologyEpistemologyTheologyIslam

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Richard Dawkins holds Oxford’s Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science. In his move from ethologist to evolutionary theorist, he has entered the public sphere as a vocal opponent of irrationalism. With his Channel Four (UK) television documentary The Root of All Evil? and his accompanying book The God Delusion he pulls no punches in lambasting people of faith as not only dippy thinkers but also as abusers of children’s trusting minds. This article sees Dawkins’s overt rhetoric designed to achieve a cultural goal: to reinvigorate aspects of the Enlightenment Project he finds worthwhile—in particular, a secularism founded on reason highly suspicious of religious meta-narratives. The article asks if his heavy-handed approach is the most viable in winning the religious/secular culture war and suggests that the more centrist position of the historian and philosopher of science, Michael Ruse, might be more productive, if less provocative.

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)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.006
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Commentary · Consensus signal: Commentary
Teacher disagreement score0.009
Threshold uncertainty score0.028

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.006
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0070.018
Scholarly communication0.0060.008
Open science0.0010.002
Research integrity0.0030.005
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.001

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 head0.046
GPT teacher head0.266
Teacher spread0.220 · 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 designTheoretical or conceptual
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

Citations0
Published2008
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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