Issues in Science and Theology: Creative Pluralism? by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783031062773
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

6 How Metaphors Live and Die

When a scientific model is tested, it is the target of the analogy that determines the model’s correctness. Arbatzis suggests that the electron resists, so to speak, being misrepresented by a model that cannot account for all its properties. The situation is different for metaphors. In one sense they are also judged by their adequacy, but if we find a metaphor inadequate it is usually because of our knowledge of the source. We no longer call God the ‘prime mover,’ not because God has changed or resisted the description, but because the metaphor only makes sense within Aristotelian physics that we now know to be incorrect.

When it comes to metaphors, the question is whether a metaphor is appropriate, and in science we also want it to be fruitful in the sense of suggesting possible models. As Fodor (1983) notes, it makes a big difference whether we think of the mind as a sponge or as a Swiss Army knife, even though cognitive scientists are aware that each is just a one-sided metaphor. Likewise it makes a difference whether we imagine God as an apocalyptic judge or a loving and forgiving father, even though theologians are aware that no metaphor can capture what God is like. What counts in both cases is which metaphor is more helpful to our understanding. But whereas cognitive scientists can perform observations and experiments of their object, theologians can only observe the practical consequences of their metaphors, not the object itself. This is why in scientific practice metaphors are mostly heuristic; when a model is developed, the metaphor has done its job and can be retired. In religion a metaphor that is no longer appropriate has to be replaced by a better one.

Metaphorical thinking is at the root of all our creativity, artistic, religious and scientific. It is also morally ambivalent. It has enabled us to think of non-related humans as brothers and sisters, and hence treat them altruistically as if they were biological kin. On the other hand, as the example of the wolf shows, creating metaphors has also given humans the ability of imagining ‘the other’ as no longer fully human. Then it can become the driving force for inhuman violence (Barreiros and Vainfas 2020). When it comes to religious metaphors it is important to be aware of both possibilities. In theology there are different reasons why metaphors may be abandoned, but it usually has something to do with the fact that they are always culturally contingent and not necessarily appropriate under all circumstances. In an increasingly pluralistic world the traditional metaphors may become unhelpful, misunderstood, and sometimes damaging.

On the other hand, at least in scripture-based religions there are fundamental metaphors that are anchored and vouchsafed in traditional texts, and thus thought to be as close to timeless as any human expression can get. How do they escape the fate of being swallowed up and assimilated or abandoned? One might answer that sometimes they don’t, that they can fall

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