I've heard that some people that study the Bible are called theologians. Scientific research is no stranger to theory. Are the opening statements in Genesis a part of a theory proposing that the Spirit of God is the Sun?

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A theologian is not someone who studies the Bible. That’s just a Christian, or a scholar if they’re not doing it for religious reasons. A theologian is not someone who interprets the Bible. That’s everyone who reads the thing. A theologian is not someone who writes the Bible. That’s an apostle.

A theologian is someone who is interested in creating meaning at the juncture between reality and spirituality. Notice that the Bible doesn’t come into play here. You can’t base everything off the Bible. You can find Biblical support for whatever statement you’re trying to make about ultimate reality. But ultimately God made this world, and everyone in it, so you don’t have to consult the Bible in order to make statements about God.

The product of a scientist’s meaning-generation process is science, a particular way of seeing the world that is ordered around proof and rationality. The scientific method is philosophical. Both concepts were invented by the Greeks, who were amazing enough to be able to tease out the principles of empiricism from the way everybody else used to do it at the time.

Science bases its understanding of the world, its fabric of meaning, off of the principles of science. Similarly, there are principles of theology. They used to be more well-known but it’s possible to study them, and the best way I’ve found to do that is to look at ancient Egypt, which was long in the tooth at the time when the Greeks were just figuring out how to sail ships.

The concepts revolve around the creation and maintenance of transcendent concepts. A transcendent context cuts across lots of different domains. While science is effective at understanding the outer world of atoms and photons and such, theology is well-suited to the creation of ideas for how you should deploy your technology.

The Bible was written by the Hebrews, who were quite aware of the Greeks, and undoubtedly took some inspiration from them, even if they didn’t mention that inspiration by name. The amount of that inspiration is uncertain, as only fragments of writings from that time period survive, other than the Bible of course.

So when you ask about theory, which is a concept that the Greeks invented, well, if you just mean theory in the speculative sense, the sense in which I might say I have a theory that the sun orbits the Earth rather than the other way around, then the proper word for that is a suspicion. When you say something is theory in the scientific sense, you’re making a claim that whatever ideas you have might not just be true, but that they’re also scientific.

The ancient theological process was highly speculative. Nobody really knew at the time whether God created Adam by sculpting him out of clay or just willing him into existence. I’m not saying they didn’t care about the truth either. What I’m saying is that they didn’t have the logical tools needed to separate out claims to reality into the scientific and the unscientific.

If you sent a time traveler back to ancient Judea, explained evolution to them through a series of university courses or whatever, they still wouldn’t have the logical tools needed to distinguish your claims as scientific rather than simply theological.

So what they would have done with your courses is to use them to inform their theological process. God created Adam by evolving him. Which is exactly how Christians today believe.