Disputed Statements

Receptionism, Beliefs & Restrictions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Scholarly Note

Currently States Where Cranmer himself stood is argued rather than settled

Three readings of Cranmer are defended from his own successive revisions of the rite: as a receptionist, as a virtualist holding that the elements convey the power of Christ's body, and as holding the Reformed doctrine of a spiritual presence. No camp claims that the evidence is decisive, and the revisions themselves do not all point one way.

Source The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Jaroslav Pelikan tier 1

Reconquista, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Displaced (High Estimate)

Currently States 3000000.000000

The source states two separate displacement figures rather than one aggregate: about 200,000 Jews expelled under the 1492 Alhambra Decree (recorded here as displaced-min) and, separately, about three million Muslims who emigrated or were driven out of Spain between 1492 and 1610 (recorded here as displaced-max); the two waves affected different populations over different decades and are not additive into one total.

Source Reconquista (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Rectification of Names, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historical Origin

Currently States Western sinology has argued that the rectification of names doctrine may have originated earlier with Mozi rather than with Confucius.

Western sinologists dispute whether the doctrine began with Confucius, Mozi (c. 470-391 BC), or later with Shen Buhai; the term zhengming appears only once in the Analects.

Source Rectification of names (Wikipedia)

Red, Colors

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 1666

According To Newtonian optics: the seven-colour spectrum

Isaac Newton's own account in Opticks (London, 1704) describes how he arrived at seven spectral colours: his earliest prism observations distinguished five bands, and he settled on seven, adding orange and indigo, by explicit analogy with the seven intervals of the musical octave, a numerological choice rather than a further optical finding. Reading Newton's own text against the continuous gradient a prism actually produces shows the seven-fold division is an interpretive choice about where to draw lines in that continuum, not a count nature supplies; observers from Newton's own time onward have disputed whether indigo is visually distinct from blue and violet at all. Any scheme in this atlas that treats seven colours as given inherits Newton's seventeenth-century analogy to the octave rather than an independent observation.

Source Opticks: or, a Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light, Isaac Newton tier 1

Red, Colors

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period End Year

Currently States 1704

According To Newtonian optics: the seven-colour spectrum

Isaac Newton's own account in Opticks (London, 1704) describes how he arrived at seven spectral colours: his earliest prism observations distinguished five bands, and he settled on seven, adding orange and indigo, by explicit analogy with the seven intervals of the musical octave, a numerological choice rather than a further optical finding. Reading Newton's own text against the continuous gradient a prism actually produces shows the seven-fold division is an interpretive choice about where to draw lines in that continuum, not a count nature supplies; observers from Newton's own time onward have disputed whether indigo is visually distinct from blue and violet at all. Any scheme in this atlas that treats seven colours as given inherits Newton's seventeenth-century analogy to the octave rather than an independent observation.

Source Opticks: or, a Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light, Isaac Newton tier 1

Red Sea, Bodies of Water

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Region

Currently States Between Africa and Arabia. Which water the biblical yam suph, sea of reeds, actually names is unsettled: the Greek translation gave the Red Sea, while the reed of the Hebrew points to the lake and marsh country of the eastern Nile delta, and no crossing route has been fixed on the ground

The traditional identification with the Red Sea, the delta lakes reading argued from the philology, and Finkelstein and Silberman's position that no migration of the kind described is archaeologically visible are three current and named positions.

Source Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, Israel Finkelstein, Neil Asher Silberman tier 2

Redemption, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Genuinely disputed within this tradition

The Encyclopedia of Religion (Macmillan Reference, 2005) traces how Jewish usage keeps redemption's biblical root sense of a public, historical deliverance, paradigmatically the exodus from slavery in Egypt, the rescue of a people rather than of an individual soul, while Christian usage narrowed the term toward the individual and toward sin, taking the price paid to be the death of Christ rather than the release from Egypt, a genuine change of referent rather than a mistranslation. The metaphor of a price paid then generates a question Christian theology has never settled, who receives it: the patristic answer that it was paid to the devil was abandoned by the medieval church as absurd, and the alternative that it was paid to God raises the difficulty that God is also the one paying, which is why the encyclopedia records the mechanism as argued rather than fixed.

Source Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.) tier 1

Reggae Carries Rastafari To Britain, Spread Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1980

The Reggae article gives this only as "late 1970s" and "early 1980s," never an exact year; 1980 is this atlas's representative year within that named range, not a settled date the source itself states.

Source Reggae (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Reginald Scot, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1538

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

Source The Discoverie of Witchcraft, Reginald Scot tier 1

Reginald Scot, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 1599

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

Source The Discoverie of Witchcraft, Reginald Scot tier 1

Regulative Principle of Worship, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Its application has never been settled among Reformed Christians themselves. Exclusive psalmody, the use of musical instruments and the wording of public prayer have all been argued on regulative-principle grounds by people reading the same rule differently.

Source The Westminster Confession of Faith, Westminster Assembly tier 1

Reincarnation Research, Psi Phenomena

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Replication Status

Currently States No mainstream scientific body accepts the case collection as evidence for reincarnation; it is generally treated as suggestive anecdotal fieldwork limited by contamination and confirmation-bias risks rather than controlled evidence.

Ian Stevenson personally investigated more than two thousand reported cases of children's statements suggestive of a previous life across four decades, publishing Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation in 1966, work continued today at the University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies under Jim Tucker. Champe Ransom, a research assistant who had worked directly on Stevenson's case files, and psychologist James Alcock separately argued that most investigated cases involved families with prior contact or existing community ties, undermining the independence Stevenson's cross-checking method assumed, and identified leading questions in interview records taken with young children. The method on both sides is documentary case analysis, examining the same investigation files and interview transcripts for prior contact and interview technique. Stevenson's fieldwork is nonetheless considered unusually thorough for anecdotal case collection compared with other paranormal case-collection efforts, which is why the debate over its methodology remains an active scholarly disagreement rather than one side having closed the question.

Source Criticisms of Reincarnation Case Studies, Psi Encyclopedia (Society for Psychical Research) tier 2

Reinhold Niebuhr, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States The Serenity Prayer is generally ascribed to Niebuhr, who taught Christian ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York from 1928 until his retirement in 1960, and he himself accepted the ascription; the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (3rd revised edition, Cross and Livingstone, eds., Oxford University Press, 2005) notes that earlier parallels to the prayer's wording have kept its authorship under discussion.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition, F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.) tier 1

Religious Anti-Zionism, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Earliest Formulation

Currently States The Three Oaths passage in the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Ketubot 111a, is the text the religious case is chiefly argued from.

The Babylonian Talmud, tractate Ketubot 111a (Anonymous, multiple authors, 1935 Soncino edition), the text the religious anti-Zionist case is chiefly argued from, sets out the Three Oaths passage: that Israel swore not to ascend the wall by mass return by force, not to rebel against the nations, and that the nations swore not to oppress Israel excessively. Whether the passage is halakhically binding is disputed among rabbinic authorities examining the same aggadic text; religious Zionist writers have answered that it is aggadic rather than legal, that the conditions have lapsed, or that the third oath binding the nations was broken first, while religious anti-Zionist readers take it as a live prohibition. Both readings work from the same passage.

Source The Babylonian Talmud, Anonymous (multiple authors) tier 1

Religious Experience, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Steven Katz's constructivist argument, that a tradition's concepts shape the mystical experience itself rather than being applied only afterward, is debated against a perennialist view of a shared experiential core differently interpreted across traditions.

Source Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.) tier 1

Religious Experience, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Genuinely disputed within this tradition

The Encyclopedia of Religion (Macmillan Reference, 2005) records Steven Katz's constructivist argument, developed through comparative analysis of mystical testimony across traditions, that a tradition's concepts shape the mystical experience itself rather than being applied only afterward in describing it. This is debated against a perennialist view, associated with Walter Stace, of a shared experiential core differently interpreted across traditions after the fact.

Source Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.) tier 1

Religious Zionism, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Used, but its validity as a comparative category is disputed

Aviezer Ravitzky's Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism (University of Chicago Press, 1996) traces both a messianic reading of Zionism and a non-messianic religious reading to the same body of rabbinic and Zionist texts, and shows through close textual and historical analysis that the messianic reading became dominant only after Israel's 1967 territorial gains, not from the movement's religious Zionist origins. The atlas records the disagreement without endorsing either reading or applying it to any present question.

Source Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism, Aviezer Ravitzky tier 1

Remote Viewing, Psi Phenomena

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Key Experiment

Currently States The 1972-1995 SAIC/Star Gate program, roughly 20 million dollars in U.S. government funding across 22 years, tested remote viewing for intelligence applications.

The American Institutes for Research's 1995 evaluation, An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications, examined the government-funded remote viewing programme originating in Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ's Stanford Research Institute protocol of the 1970s. Both evaluators on the review, Jessica Utts and Ray Hyman of the University of Oregon, agreed the programme's output had no confirmed operational intelligence value and recommended termination, which the sponsoring agencies carried out in 1995. Where they disagreed, having examined the identical laboratory statistics underlying the operational programme, was whether those statistics showed a genuine anomalous effect worth further scientific study, Utts holding they did and Hyman holding methodological weaknesses in the underlying experiments were sufficient to explain them. The method for both conclusions was statistical and documentary review of the same body of records rather than a new experiment. Because the operational and scientific questions came apart, a shared recommendation to end the programme alongside an unresolved disagreement about the underlying science, the key experiment is recorded as debated on the scientific question even though the programme itself is closed.

Source An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications, American Institutes for Research tier 2

Remote Viewing, Psi Phenomena

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Replication Status

Currently States Jessica Utts and Raymond Hyman reviewed the same Star Gate data in 1995 and reached opposite conclusions, Utts finding the statistics persuasive of an anomalous effect and Hyman finding them inconclusive; the program was closed regardless as operationally useless.

Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ developed the remote viewing protocol at the Stanford Research Institute from 1972 and published it openly in 1976. The American Institutes for Research's 1995 An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications paired Jessica Utts, who concluded a statistical anomaly was real and worth further study, with Raymond Hyman of the University of Oregon, who concluded the same anomalies had not been shown to be psychic in origin and could plausibly result from methodological weaknesses in the underlying experiments. The method on both sides was statistical review of the same published experimental record rather than a new experiment, and both reviewers had access to identical data. Because two qualified specialist reviewers examined the same evidence side by side and reached opposite conclusions in reports both published without reconciliation, the AIR review stands as a rare, fully documented case of expert disagreement over one shared body of evidence rather than a result either side's own reading has settled.

Source An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications, American Institutes for Research tier 2

Ren (Benevolence), Virtues

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States The Five Constants as a formally fixed set of five, correlated with the five phases, wu xing, is credited to the Han dynasty scholar Dong Zhongshu; the individual virtues are independently attested earlier in the Analects and Mencius.

Source Sources of Chinese Tradition, Volume 1, Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom (eds) tier 2