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Record W2606633751 · doi:10.12978/jat.v5i1.157

How Modern Biological Taxonomy Sheds Light on the Incarnation

2017· article· en· W2606633751 on OpenAlexaff
Travis Dumsday

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Analytic Theology · 2017
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicTheology and Philosophy of Evil
Canadian institutionsConcordia University of Edmonton
Fundersnot available
KeywordsIncarnationSoulPhilosophyChristologyEpistemologyTheologyTaxonomy (biology)BiologyZoology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

One question asked repeatedly in the history of Christology is the following: given that the incarnation was God’s chosen method of redeeming us, why did God become human by the cooperation of the Blessed Virgin Mary? Why not just create a human body and soul ex nihilo and simultaneously with that creation have God the Son assume this new instance of human nature? In answer, Augustine for instance (De Trinitate, bk. 13, ch. 18) argues that the latter option would have been a legitimate means of incarnation, but that it was not as fitting as the method actually employed. Aquinas agrees (Summa Theologica IIIa, q. 4, art. 6). By contrast, John of Damascus (De Fide Orthodoxa, bk. 3, ch. 12) seems to think that the ex nihilo option would not have constituted a genuine assumption of human nature, such that redemption required the cooperation of the Theotokos. I argue that insights provided by contemporary biology support St. John’s perspective, insofar as modern biological taxonomy suggests that lineal descent is a necessary condition for belonging to a species. As such, to take on a genuinely human nature God had to enter into the existing human lineage; creating a new ‘human’body and soul ex nihilo would not have sufficed.

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)0.011
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.010
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: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.011
Threshold uncertainty score0.056

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0110.010
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0040.003
Science and technology studies0.0050.069
Scholarly communication0.0100.025
Open science0.0020.004
Research integrity0.0040.008
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.002

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.

Opus teacher head0.100
GPT teacher head0.251
Teacher spread0.151 · 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
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

Citations1
Published2017
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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