Bibliographic record
Abstract
Extract A few years ago, in Toronto, I shared a meal with students from Ryerson (now Toronto Metropolitan) University. About halfway through, one of the students asked me a question I had not encountered before. Did I have reasons for rejecting Christianity's classical teaching that addressed its claims directly and specifically rather than by inference from the alleged falsehood of theism? It seemed to me that I had many such reasons. But I also realized that I had not thought about them very carefully or systematically. I hope this book will provide a better answer than the one I came up with at the time. The question stayed with me. Now and then I thought about how an adequate response might be formulated. And what became clear was that it would have a lot to do with the theme of human development over time—specifically, with intellectual and moral development (though even on the moral side it is advances in how we think about morality that will be most relevant). Changes in how people see themselves and the world don't just stop after a new and influential worldview comes on the scene. And such changes sometimes add up to development. Now development—at least in my sense—is by definition a good thing. And sometimes it exposes new truths, which enlarge our understanding. Maybe the reigning worldview manages to avoid a clash with these revelations. But it could well be otherwise. Suppose it is. Now we have a problem. The problem will perhaps only gradually become apparent. Centuries may pass. But that there is a clash might at a certain point become undeniable. Suppose it does. Since what human development has deposited in the way of new truths is over time integrated into our thinking (and rightly so, if they are true), the emergence of a new and good reason to regard as false that influential set of claims about reality has now become undeniable too.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.656 | 0.477 |
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".