Interbane wrote:RT: "You misunderstand. Precession results in the earth spinning like a top with one wobble per 26000 years. A good scientific diagram is here. My argument is that central Christian concepts, notably Logos and the Age, are intrinsically built into this temporal structure. I claim this cyclic structure resonates with daily and annual cycles to produce real millennial periods."
Actually, I think I understand quite well, but not with any of the depth in which you understand it. My problem is with some of your phrasings. For example, you say "My argument is that central Christian concepts, notably Logos and the Age, are intrinsically built into this temporal structure." Logos and the Age aren't built into this structure, they are explanatory models helpful to our understanding of the mechanics of this structure.
Thanks Interbane, this is the sort of discussion I have looked for in vain for twenty five years. Earlier, Tom Hood teased out of me the symbolic archetypes for the twelve signs, providing the predictive content for the structure of the Ages. This predictive content indicates that we are now ending the age of belief and nearing the start of the age of knowledge, and in about 2300 years we will enter the age of use, followed by the ages of vision and desire. You can find a table at the essay I linked above. This mythic narrative for our planet pulls together the main cyclic structures of our cosmos and is what I understand as the real content of Logos – original connecting connectedness. My postulate is that this narrative framework has the same level of reality as the laws of evolution and gravity. It provides an elegant explanation for Christian ideas of the end of the world, indicating that belief-based approaches are sending the world towards destruction and need to be replaced by knowledge-based approaches.
Regarding how the Age is “built into” this cosmic cycle, my argument, re the gas giants, starts from the observation that the JSN cyclic period is 1/144th of earth’s precessional Great Year. Hence the Zodiacal Age, 2147 years, twelve JSN cycles, is the square root of the Great Year period considering the JSN period as the unit, so the Age is a sort of mechanistic hinge linking these two major stable cyclic patterns in which our planet is imbedded.
RT: "Use of such cosmic findings is a way of searching for an explanation of how our world ultimately connects to the cosmos."
This presumes our world does ultimately connect to the cosmos in some metaphysical way. Earth is a part of the heavens, and interacts in measurable ways, but this is explained mechanistically. When you say that you're searching for further explanation, I take you to mean that you believe there's some connection above and beyond the mechanistic. Could you be more precise in what this connection is?
Actually, I am suggesting a mechanistic metaphysics. I know this looks like a contradiction, but humanity is so complex that identifying deep cultural trends – the strange attractors of chaotic cultural fractals – inevitably opens questions in the domain of metaphysics, eg to what extent our society is built upon belief or knowledge. As I said before, I wish to exclude all supernaturalism from religion, so I don’t really have what is traditionally seen as metaphysical beliefs. Yet, archetypal myths of belief, for example the Easter Passion, are often immensely valuable and meaningful, so are very useful as an explanatory framework. My claim is that deep spiritual writers have a prophetic intuition of cultural fractals, providing the cosmic connection that seems to go beyond the mechanistic. However, like Marx’s idea of economic base and superstructure, spiritual ideas have a cosmic mechanistic explanation, grounded in the remorseless Laplacian clockwork of precession.
RT: "If we take this cosmic identity as the primary meaning of the Christ myth, in line with Biblical ideas such as Colossians 1:17 “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” together with the Logos imagery of John 1 “in the beginning was the Word”, I simply cannot see how we can find a rational underpinning other than interpreting Christ as a symbol of the precessional structure of time.”
If you present a vague enough prophecy, it's bound to come true. "He is before all things, and in him all things hold together" is like saying "all reality is begotten from my spirit"(I just made that up, but I'm sure there's a similar phrase somewhere). You take such a general statement and use it as evidence that Christ is a symbol of the precessional structure of time! This is subjective validation, a cognitive bias. You stretch vague and general scripture to support a rational underpinning, but what exactly is a rational underpinning in the first place? A rational way to pin together your religious blues clues so that your theological worldview doesn't come crashing down?
As I noted above in claiming the Logos is built in to precession, the ‘connectedness’ of our cosmos involves real cycles. There is no other way in which “all things hold together” and this way of explaining it makes sense as a way to understand the past and predict the future. These cycles are present at each level, so the structure of the Great Year is a fractal mirror of the annual structure of the earth’s seasons, with the twelve-fold symbolism of the signs. The Cosmic Christ symbolises the entire cycle, so for the last 2000 years has been interpreted in the manifestation of belief and for the next 2000 years will be interpreted in the manifestation of knowledge.
RT: "This cycle provides the long term structure of time for our planet, and is what the ancients pointed at in numerous obscure coded references."
I wouldn't argue that the ancients discovered some of the mechanical workings of our solar system. When you say 'structure of time', you don't mean the cycle is fundamental to the workings of time, correct? It might be better to say that the precession is temporally repeating, therefore useful to us as a framework to measure longer lengths of time than a year.
The phrase ‘fundamental to the workings of time’ is complex. Yes, the lunisolar precessional wobble of the earth is as fundamental to terrestrial time as the wobble of a top would be to hypothetical creatures living on a top, but thankfully earth’s wobble is very stable. To the question ‘what is time?’ I would say time is the actual cyclic structures of the cosmos, whereas the dominant scientific view sees time as an overlay of measurement imposed by the human mind.
RT: "Your 'footprints in the sand' comment is ambiguous regarding what is 'objectively real' and what is 'metaphysical'. These are slippery concepts."
They are so much fun to ponder for that reason! The ambiguity comes from the inability of the human brain to divorce its methods of understanding reality from reality itself. We cannot know reality without our cognitive framework. When considering footprints in the sand, the only thing objectively real about them are the footprints themselves. We as deliberators can read into that pattern and reason that a creature made them. We could also be mistaken, since there are other ways footprints could be in the sand. There are two things to take from the example. One is that the footprints are distinctly separate with no objectively real connection (again, this is difficult to grasp as it requires divorcing 'understanding' from 'reality'), and the other is that the explanation for the pattern can easily be false.
It depends on the evidentiary basis. If you make footprints yourself you know you are an objectively real connection between them. There is an evidentiary forensic continuum all the way down to dubious Bigfoot prints. I am arguing that precession as a temporal structure is much higher on the evidentiary continuum than has been hitherto recognised.
RT: "I am arguing that the Logos, which the ancients identified with Christ, is objectively real and is displayed in the precessional structure of time, and that this hypothesis is a scientific argument."
Is the Logos a concept open to critical examination? Is the Logos as Christ a connection that's open to critical examination? When you say that it's 'displayed', you don't mean visually, so what do you mean?
Great questions. Yes, logos is very much open to critical examination, providing the underpinning of what we mean by reason, language and logic. The challenge here, with the claim that Christ is the logic of the cosmos, is to view the cosmos in four dimensions, with time having regular deep cyclic patterns that structure the local cosmic spatial environment. The Logos is dynamic, and freeze-frames such as Jesus on the Cross need to be located in a cosmic drama, on millennial time frames, to understand them. This is what Plato meant by describing time as the moving image of eternity – and what Colossians meant by describing Jesus as the image of the invisible God.
RT: "Your simple dogmatic assertion that it is untestable is not based on real examination, but rather on an agenda that the past errors of Christianity invalidate any effort to make religion and science compatible."
I've criticized your inclusion of religion a couple of times, but I'd like to think most of the time I've taken to critically examine what you've posted. I probe deeper, but you still have yet to offer a hypothesis directly representing what you propose that's also testable:
I appreciate your discussion of these issues Interbane, this was just noting the semantic point that if you say something
is untestable, that is a much stronger (and more dogmatic) claim than to say it
seems untestable. This is new territory, exploring analytical tools to explain religion in ways that have not been used before. With this point I am simply pointing to the risk of consigning ideas before they are understood. I think the claim that the world has gradually shifted from a belief-based framework to a knowledge-based framework mirrors the prediction of this model in testable ways.
RT: "Testing it is primarily a matter of systematically analysing history and the Bible against this framework."
You would discover correlations between findings in the ancient world and the workings of the solar system, but as a hypothesis this does nothing other than to show that our ancestors were able to read the stars as we are.
It does more than that by providing a path to develop a predictive explanatory model for world history.