Epistemological Implications of the Gradated Claims to Divine Authority in the Bahá’í Writings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Shoghi Effendi has stated that “the whole theory of Divine Revelation rests on the infallibility of the Prophet.” It is elsewhere explained (e.g., the Kitáb-i-Aqdas and Some Answered Questions) that the infallibility of the Manifestations is “essential” in that, among other things, They are “omniscient at will.” However, the Bahá’í teachings complete the theory of Divine Revelation with a (complementary) theory of the Bahá’í Covenant that clearly rests on the attribution of various gradated forms of infallibility to other Persons (‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi) and Institutions (the Guardianship and the Universal House of Justice). These forms of “conferred infallibility” are based upon the spiritual authority of Bahá’u’lláh as Manifestation. They endow the conferees with freedom from error without presuming them to possess the essentialist attribute of omniscience. This paper undertakes to examine the epistemological implications of these various forms of infallibility for the scientific study of the phenomenon of revelation in general, and of the Bahá’í Revelation in particular. We also examine the complementarity between those truths derived from systematic application of the scientific method of empirical verification, on one hand, and those derived from systematic exegesis of the texts of Bahá’u’lláh within the framework of the Covenant, on the other.
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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 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.074 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".