<i>C.S. Lewis and the Christian Worldview</i>. By Michael L. Peterson
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.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Can philosophical statements scattered across the writings of a non-philosopher represent a coherent philosophical system? This is the experiment that American philosopher Michael L. Peterson attempts in C.S. Lewis and the Christian Worldview. C.S. Lewis received an Oxford first-class honours in philosophy, tutored briefly, and wrote a cluster of philosophical essays and books on Christian themes, primarily during the Second World War. Lewis’ expertise, however, was literary history. There is some doubt as to whether his diverse popular project of Christian thought is philosophically credible. To make the experiment, Peterson aims ‘to translate Lewis’s response using more contemporary categories and evaluate its effectiveness’ (p. 111). Peterson systematises Lewis’ philosophical statements scattered throughout lectures, essays, and books of apologetics and fiction, putting them in dialogue with modern philosophy. This work of ‘translation’ results in a primer on Lewis’ Christian philosophical thought that demonstrates a somewhat surprising coherence and comprehensiveness. Peterson appropriately begins his study with a literary metaphor: ‘Mind, morality, and longing for the transcendent were “inscriptions” that Lewis sought for several decades to “interpret” philosophically’ (p. 4). Peterson helpfully uses the term ‘abduction’ to describe Lewis’ search for truth and meaning. This approach of ‘inference to the best explanation’ allowed Lewis to engage in a ‘comparative reasoning process regarding the explanatory power of different worldviews’ (p. 16). Peterson shows the abductive logic of each of Lewis’ steps from atheism to ‘the New Look’ and cosmic dualism, to idealism and pantheism, and ultimately to theism. Lewis was a searcher for a total explanation of existence and found it in what he called ‘mere Christianity’—what Peterson idiosyncratically calls ‘classical consensual orthodoxy’ (p. 79).
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 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) | 0.000 | 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 it