God, Value, and Ontological Gratitude: On the Axiological Foundations of Worship
Bibliographic record
Abstract
[Figure: see text] What kind of God is most worthy of worship? This question is historically significant to open, relational, and process theological traditions. In considering this question anew, I advocate a particular axiological approach in light of the deeper question of divine necessity: What is the nature of divine necessity? What reasons or explains God’s existence? Why do God and a world exist at all? Different responses confront us: (1) reasonless brute fact, (2) unrelenting divine power, (3) logical necessity, and (4) utter mystery. Each of these responses fails to ground a God worthy of worship. They also fail to illuminate what worship is. Through resonant insights of John Leslie, Keith Ward, A.C. Ewing, A.N. Whitehead, and Nicolas Rescher, I argue for a fifth response: (5) axiological necessity. Worthiness of worship is only to be assigned to that God whose reason for being is found in the creative supremacy of its own Value. Value thus also reasons the existence of the world, human beings, and human purpose as worshipful beings. The axiological foundations of God and the world constitute worship as “ontological gratitude”—a gratefulness for existence—which manifests itself in a value-creative life.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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 teacher head, 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".