MrMacSon wrote:science & theology are different categories, even if theology, through 'astrotheology'
Your statement places theology outside natural science. While correct for the way theology is usually practiced with supernatural assumptions, it is possible to excise the supernatural from theology and approach it as a natural science. That is what I am trying to do.
MrMacSon wrote:
I cannot agree such a hypothesis is 'scientific'. I'd contend it is a theological hypothesis, or even a mixed-category hypothesis involving anthropology, history, & theology (& possibly other aspects of ancient history).
Thank you. Your comment opens epistemic questions about the relations and boundaries between science and theology. My interest, as a goal, is to understand and explain how religious ideas and institutions actually arose.
So for example early on I was interested in the Hegelian scholar Ludwig Feuerbach’s thesis that God is a psychological projection of human imagination. Feuerbach largely expressed this idea in evidentiary or scientific terms, whereas Marx adopted it as an ideological tool in a political struggle against religion. That cultural process gives strong reason to be suspicious of any claim regarding a scientific analysis of religion. We see such claims also in modern atheism, but often closely linked to value claims about the social worth of religion.
Which reminds me of another writer on related topics whom I much admire, David Hume. I agree with Hume’s fact=value distinction as a philosophical heuristic. Science is about the discovery of facts, whereas religion is about determining what facts are important.
All the scholarly disciplines have as much science in them as they have factual content. So history, anthropology and even theology can restrict their methods to pure discovery and analysis of evidence, and thereby maintain scientific objectivity. However, as soon as the researcher’s own values determine writings, we see a shift away from science, into political and religious ideation.
So, my inquiry into whether the loaves and fishes miracle arose as allegory for the movement of the equinox is a purely scientific inquiry. I am asking what was the actual cause and process for the evolution of the texts as we have them. I do support value propositions arising from this factual analysis, but it is possible to separate the value judgments from the empirical findings.
The central Biblical idea from The Lord’s Prayer, ‘thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ indicates a prima facie case that we should explore how the writers actually used this principle to present allegories for what they could see in heaven. So they could see the movement of the stars in heaven, and used this objective visual observation as the template for their ideal story about what was happening on the earth, in the myth of Jesus Christ.
For this hypothesis about the actual natural relation between heaven and earth to be possible requires that it was transmitted orally within secret mystery schools in the ancient world, and was targeted as an unacceptable idea by what one writer called the powers and principalities of the present darkness. As such, our reading from an antique land sees in the desert a shattered visage of the king of kings. However, it is not correct that nothing beside remains apart from the face with its vast and trunkless legs of stone and pedestal text. If we ask who actually is the king of kings, the answer is time, more powerful than any temporal entity, and stretching to eternity as seen in the ordered patterns of the cosmos.
The analysis of time can explore how this ‘king’ is embedded in the understanding. Modern science, and especially astronomy, geology and biology, provides abundant excellent accurate information about the real nature of time. The ancients only had partial knowledge compared to today, but a scientific reconstruction of what they did know can explore how this knowledge influenced their ideas.
MrMacSon wrote:I can see how "This theory has abundant corroboration"
There are very many other examples in the bible of how natural observation of the structure of time was used as the framework for theological allegory. At
viewtopic.php?p=7687#p7687 I provided the following examples:
There is abundant evidence that the evangelists were aware of precession, which is not just “some” star clock of history but is the actual long term structure of time, correctly defined by Copernicus as the third motion of the earth, visible in various ancient uses of the precessional number 4320, and known explicitly in Greek astronomy more than a century before Christ.
Norman Lockyer, discoverer of helium and founder of the journal Nature, intensively studied Egyptian astronomy and concluded that “the effects of precession were familiar to the Egyptians.” For the evangelists, we find the star clock of precession appearing in the 'first and last' archetype of Christ, the law-grace covenant motif, the fish symbolism, the man with the water jug showing the way to the upper room, the loaves and fishes, and the concept of the age as the basis of eschatology.
The Apocalypse is the abundantly precessional text of the Bible, for example with the alpha-omega motif, the moon at the foot of the woman, the holy city, the king of the ages, and the bear-lion-leopard as marking precession of the North Celestial Pole.