Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Across the Western world, churches are emptying out and closing their doors, and more and more people are rejecting organized religion. This book addresses the causes of this decline in belief and participation in religious activities by examining two rival explanations. The first is the Enlightenment myth, which states that religious belief becomes less tenable as it is gradually replaced by a scientific worldview. This is the view promoted by a group of intellectuals known as the “new atheists” (represented most famously by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins), who in the early 2000s captured the imagination of young skeptics and ignited a movement for secularism by arguing that religion is the source of most of our social ills. Their view of religion as the antithesis of modern science is closely connected to ideological theories of social progress that work to justify social inequalities. After critiquing this ideological take on religion, a better alternative is presented: the sociological theory of secularization, which states that religious decline is a result of socioeconomic development that has produced greater overall well-being and equality and shifting moral values that lead people to view religious ethics as a relic of a bygone era. The evidence on secularization suggests that only by working to achieve greater security and equality for all can we counter power and influence of organized religion.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.003 |
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".