Part 11: Metaphor, Models, and Mystery

We forge our encounters with mystery by an active humility. We create the world we live in. We make the categories that we perceive through. But they only give us an authentic encounter with mystery if we remain humble.

If light always travels at the same speed, we must be willing to change our ideas about relativity. If an authority figure shows signs of weakness or pettiness, we must be humble enough to modify our image of him (or her) and allow it to include human frailties.

And we must always actively seek deeper insights: a deeper encounter with mystery.

One of the ways we do this is by constructing models. Mary Hesse¹ provides a nice example, based on the early development of the wave model in science:

Based on a combination of sameness and difference, scientists saw a pattern which stretched across three very different domains. At first, the pattern was probably understood as a mere likeness—metaphoric at most. (More about metaphors in a moment.) But eventually the pattern became a full-fledged category.

This was driven home to me by a conversation I had with a student whose education was almost exclusively scientific. At the time, I was convinced that models were simply highly developed metaphors. In driving that point home, I said that light waves were called "waves" because we understood them by comparing them to water waves.

My student replied that I didn't understand the situation at all. Light waves and water waves were both called waves for the same reason—they were both examples of the wave pattern, which he could describe mathematically.

My student was a little naive historically, but he did understand something I didn't at the time. A model is a kind of upward classification.

A new category is formed to include two (or three or more) previous categories, in the same way we might form the category of "rodent" to include squirrels and rats. But in the case of a model, one of the child categories provides most of the structure for the parent category.

The original category of "waves", which was initially limited to water waves, is restructured to become the parent category—the wave model. The original wave category—water waves—now becomes just one of several child categories in the new model.

"Waveness" gets detached from "wetness", and this makes room for other child categories: sound waves, light waves, the wave model of the electron, etc.

Over time, if we are humble enough, the model is constantly refined to provide a greater disclosure of the mysteries of light, sound, and water.

My student was right, in explaining to me that a model was actually a parent category, and not just a metaphor, but I was right in thinking that many models begin as metaphors. A metaphor is simply a model that has stopped short, for whatever reason, of becoming a full-fledged category.

When I say of a lawyer, "He's a sly fox." I'm doing something akin to creating a model. I'm taking two categories—people of a certain sort and foxes—and, based on the similarities and differences, producing a metaphorical category—fox—which applies to both.

The difference is that I don't permanently restructure my worldview to actually consider both foxes and tricky lawyers as subsets of the category "fox". I only create the category for a very specialized use, and only use it in a limited way.

This doesn't mean that metaphors don't often profoundly affect our thinking.

If I think of a person as a "soup Nazi" I will react to him in importantly different ways than I would if I didn't. If I think of the United States as the parent, and of third world countries as children, I will construct a very different foreign policy than I would otherwise.

The effect is even more powerful if the metaphor is implicit, as George Lakoff has pointed out in detail.

If you think that Mystery 101 has drifted far from the debate between atheists and believers which sparked it, stay tuned. It was essential to be clear on our tools for dealing with mystery first.

The believer cannot perceive God in his or her experience of mystery without a human-created model of God, anymore than a scientist can perceive an electron without a human-created model of electrons. Both models are encounters with mystery, both are necessary to the particular type of encounter.

This is one reason I personally find it very difficult to answer that apparently simple question, "Do you believe in God?"

My own journey has so changed my worldview that, though I still experience everything that was valuable to me when I was a believer, I do not see those experiences through a model that is even close to the traditional model of "God". If I say "No" it seems to imply that I no longer have that kind of experience, which is not true. If I say "Yes" it seems to imply that I still use the same model, which is also not true.

But there is more to the story. It's not enough to consider the models we use, we also have to pay attention to the area of knowledge they apply to. Remember the "inside world" and the "outside world" we talked about before? There's more to be said about that—in part 12.

__________________________

¹Hesse, M.B. Models and Analogies in Science, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1966.