Symmachus,
thanks for the summary, "So, yeah, we need a sophisticated approach in examining magical papyri containing the name "Abraham" or variations of it in Old Coptic from the Greco-Roman period, an approach that contextualizes these texts in their ritual setting."
Until now I had no idea what the essay was supposed to be about. What has drawn me to it over the years is the "Egyptology has not experienced the Kuhnian revolution" stuff that you also mention.
Our new friend Manetho disagrees about the revolution, but my interest is the interest Gee and other apologists have (had?) in Kuhnian revolutions. In 2012 the Maxwell Institute experienced the Kuhnian revolution and how is that going for these guys?
More from Manetho:
Manetho wrote:The newer style of thinking about Egyptian religion that began in the late 20th century, which attempts to look at it from the Egyptians' point of view as much as possible, has actually been called postmodernist
DCP, a huge fan of Alan Sokal, has been far more cautious in what he's wished for. The way he puts it, apologetics merely makes a different starting assumption than "secular" academics, but proceeds with evidential rigor. I think his generic stance of fallibilism is what most of the apologists really want from Kuhn.
Here are the dots, and the dots connect to form one and only one picture, and that picture has a definite meaning, but the number of dots the spade has uncovered might leave the picture underdetermined, and so we might have two pictures or three, and even some disagreements on what the pictures actually mean, but at the end of the day, if we were to root out human fallibility and if we have enough dots, we would have the truth. Both believers an non-believers can draw compelling pictures, and positivists/critics are wrong for denying believers their equally scholarly evidential approach.
But if Kuhn is right, then the picture is
necessarily underdetermined, there are no ultimate meanings to the pictures, and even what a "dot" is can be disputed. My less sure impression is that Novick, who DCP plugs from time to time, also does not leave much hope for a simple, evidence based TBM narrative of the universe to win out in the end.
Apologists approach Egyptology precisely as it is approached in the Stargate franchise -- assuming like me, you and Manetho are both fans. Ra, an alien of the race of Goa'uld came down and did a really bad thing, and it's a bit of a mystery why. But hold on, here is an ancient scroll, and it depicts Ra doing the bad thing, and it explains why, and also reveals his next step. With some help from the Asgard spaceship, Ra is caught red-handed doing exactly what the scroll said. With enough dead hits reading Egyptian manuscripts this way, Daniel, from the series, would be deferred to by every Egyptologist in the world if taken along on his adventures. The same will hold for Egyptologists in the real world when they stand at the judgment bar and shown a woman literally called Egyptus founding Egypt and Abraham in Egypt writing the manuscripts. But how can Daniel convince his peers without violating the terms of the NDA with the government?
What he really needs is a revolution, but it's not a Kuhnian revolution, but more along the lines of a revolution W. F. Albright imagined where the dots simply line up and prove the TBM story. Short of that, idiosyncratic parallels can be called out along with any work that erodes confidence in the order of things. Kuhn doesn't help, but how about narrative theology, or something like it?
Manetho wrote:People like Kurt Sethe and his student Alan Gardiner (whom Gee mentions) tried to explain the many inconsistencies in Egyptian religious belief by assuming they all resulted from awkward compromises between religious factions. It seems to have been the only way they could wrap their heads around Egyptian religion.
How would this help Gee or any apologist? Beyond undermining a positivist approach, there is nothing here that theoretically aligns with any work any apologist does. For the new MI religious studies crowd, substitute "Egyptian" with "Mormon" and there are a bunch of papers that go the narrative theology route.
But I think we need some clarity on that last quote from Manetho. Narrative theology, if that is what the quote points to, attempts to look at the world from the internal logic of the worldview or religion. Perhaps the worldview is arcane, but we'd need to be careful about resting the powers of modern description and lo, now we have a better description. To draw an analogy from Thomas Nagel's
What's it like to be a bat: like the Egyptian or Mormon religion, we can't get our heads around the internal world of the bat, but after reading Nagel's article, we are drawn to bat phenomenology and perhaps we get somewhere with it, but we can't say from here that we have a better description of the internal world of the bat, otherwise, we're simply showing a contingent failure of positivism in practice, and one that's a correction in progress in what ultimately is just a deeper form of positivism. In other words, its useless for the project of an apologist who wants to show his interpretation is the right one.
I have some thoughts on why Bokovoy is better positioned, as thoroughly positivist in his training (guessing here), for Mormon Studies and also why it is unlikely that apologetics will ever have credibility thanks to Novick and Kuhn. for another post.