Why is there no divine feminine in Christianity?

This is modified from a comment I just posted in challenging_god.

Elaine Pagels, in The Gnostic Gospels, argued that there was at one time talk of divine femininity in Christianity, but that early-on it became associated with the schools of thought later known as Gnosticism. The Gnostics did have many things to say about divine femininity. As Gnosticism was cut from the Christian community, so too was the idea of the divine feminine.

In Pagels's analysis, the theological debate was intertwined with a political debate about the role of women in the church. A vivid account of this debate was recorded in the Gospel of Mary Magdalene.

Some remnants of divine femininity can be found in the Bible, primarily pieces and bits of the Jewish Sophia tradition (from Hellenic Alexandria): Proverbs 8 contains a monologue from the viewpoint of Sophia, and the books "Wisdom of Solomon" and "Wisdom of Jesus Son of Baruch" (both in the Catholic Bible) contain bits about Sophia as well. In this scripture, Sophia (Wisdom) is portrayed as a goddess-figure who played a role in the creation of the cosmos.

(no subject)

This discussion in real_philosophy about quantum physics and freewill has me thinking again about a few concepts prevalent in the modern philosophy of science which I believe are fallacious.

Modern science has a strong Platonic emphasis, teaching that the material world is governed by a set of "eternal mathematical laws" that exist a priori. The math, then, is seen as more real than material stuff.

Divergence between the math and reality is taken to be a failure on the part of hyle to live up to the mathematical ideal. For instance, if an equation predicts the outcome of an experiment will be 4, but the real measurement is 4.0032, the scientist shrugs and concludes not that the math was off, but that reality was off.

In my view, mathematics is a language which closely models the patterns of general self-consistency in the cosmos. "Laws of physics" are human constructs which give very close and accurate approximations of cosmic self-consistency. I do not believe in the existence of Platonic "Ideals," nor do I believe that the "laws of physics" are eternal and cosmos-governing. Instead, I think that everything in the universe is special-case and that self-consistent patterns are ultimately local (even if they stretch very widely), not global. This neat game that lady_babalon turned me on to illustrates this interestingly.

A while back I started exploring an idea I called the "Neoplatonist Fallacy," which is essentially that our brains are wired to look for patterns of self-consistency in the universe and that, since these patterns precede cognition, we have no way to differentiate between the raw universe, and our perception thereof. I believe that the Neoplatonist Fallacy is what causes us to intutively feel that mathematical equations and geometric figures are more "fundamental" than the messiness of raw matter.