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Record W2498075598 · doi:10.1093/0195140125.001.0001

God and Other Spirits

2004· book· en· W2498075598 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typebook
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicReligious Studies and Spiritual Practices
Canadian institutionsTrinity Western University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsEpistemologyArgumentation theoryUnobservablePossession (linguistics)Natural (archaeology)ScrutinyPhilosophyHistory

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract This book advances three central propositions: (a) Claims about what is real, including a transcendent reality, if it exists, cannot be achieved by short, snappy proofs, but by the hard work of examining phenomena closely, conjecturing about how they might explained, and critically scrutinizing the explanations that are suggested by the phenomena; (b) The methodology that is needed in a critical scrutiny of religion is neither deductive nor inductive argumentation, both of which have been prominent in philosophy of religion, but abductive argumentation, in which unobservable objects are tentatively postulated to exist, in an effort to determine how well they explain otherwise inexplicable phenomena; and (c) The phenomena that ought to be made central to the study of religion are the varied experiences that people have reported and continue to report, especially those that suggest to educated and articulate adults that an order of reality might exist that transcends the known natural one. Empirical grounds for advancing the existence of spirits are examined in several chapters, such as the phenomena of (alleged) demonic possession and exorcism, as well as other phenomena in biblical history and in contemporary life that suggest the existence of holy beings. These phenomena are used to reconstruct the theory of spirits in a critical realist way, according to which the postulated entities are contextually defined by the causal roles these entities are deemed to play. The abductive argumentation to unobservable objects that is advocated is perhaps best known from atomism, but it has also been vital to evolutionary theory, genetic theory, psychoanalysis, and to other well known fields of scientific inquiry. Various objections are examined against the thesis of the book, including the view that the concepts of religion are mythopoeic, the claim that naturalism as it is presently known is adequate to explain all phenomena, and the position that Christian theism is incoherent. The plausibility of contextual realism is defended according to which separate domains of critical inquiry have epistemic independence from one another, so that ontological reduction is neither routinely imposed on religious claims nor deemed to be impossible. The competing claims that theism is properly basic and that probabilistic argument affords the best approach toward theism are resisted. The author calls for “naturalizing epistemology” of religion, following W. V. O. Quine, which requires paying more attention than classical empiricism has given to the circumstances in which educated and articulate adults adopt beliefs, including beliefs that accommodate God and other spirits.

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.

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: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.581
Threshold uncertainty score0.994

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 studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0070.001

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 head0.042
GPT teacher head0.241
Teacher spread0.198 · 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

Quick stats

Citations33
Published2004
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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