Category Archives: Theological Method

Separation of Physics and Theology?

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Down in the comments section of this post, reader St. TY has the following kind thing to say about me:

What an excellent blog. I have been looking for one like this for a long time. I tell what I like about it: Although we all know St. Aron’s Christian bias, but he does not let it intrude into his physics and, as one with a mathematical background, I like that separation of Church and State.

As for the format I’m old fashioned and I like the written word because good writing demands clarity and coherence I must add honesty, and so I like reading Aron’s pieces and the comments.

I would like Aron to put all of this meaty stuff in a book.
Would you, Aron?
Thank you.

Thanks so much for your gracious compliments about my blog!  It’s too bad really, that I must strongly disagree with you when you say that

Although we all know St. Aron’s Christian bias, but he does not let it intrude into his physics and, as one with a mathematical background, I like that separation of Church and State.

Your proposal that I keep a separating wall is not really very undivided, is it?  I expressed a different aspiration in my About page:

“Undivided Looking” expresses the aspiration that, although compartmentalized thinking is frequently helpful in life, one must also step back and look at the world as a whole. This involves balancing specialized knowledge with common sense to keep both kinds of thinking in perspective.

So in response I would say, that one’s physics views can and should be influenced by one’s theological views (or vice versa), if there is a legitimate reason why it should do so.  There is, after all, only one universe, and therefore no compartments can be kept completely watertight.  For example, most economists don’t need to know much about chemistry, but if they’re talking about buying things that might explode then there needs to be some cross-talk.

Christianity is not a “bias”, but a “belief”, one which happens to be true.  Deducing things from one’s beliefs is not bias unless it is done in an irrational and capricious manner.  But perhaps you were speaking in a semi-humorous way, in the way that we might say that all scientists seek to be biased towards the truth!

Reasonable physicists will probably have similar intuitions about how physics should be done (I’m excluding unreasonable people like Young Earth Creationists), regardless of whether they are atheists or theists.  Or rather, people have different intuitions about physics but they mostly don’t correlate with religious views!  But if on a particular matter (e.g. the universe having a beginning in time) somebody happens to be influenced by their religion (or lack thereof) to think that one viewpoint is more likely than another, I don’t think that should be taboo.

Far from corrupting the scientific process, I think science usually works better when people explore a variety of intuitions and options.  As I said in discussing the importance of collaboration in science:

Healthy scientific collaboration encourages reasonable dissent.   Otherwise group-think can insulate the community from effective criticism of accepted ideas.  Some people say that scientists should proportion their beliefs to the evidence.  However, there’s also some value in diversity of opinion, because it permits subgroups to work on unpopular hypotheses.  I suppose things work best when the scientific community taken as a whole proportions its research work to the evidence.

It doesn’t necessarily matter whether the source of the original intuition is something that could be accepted by all scientists.  What matters is that the resulting idea can be tested.  Sometimes, the original motivation for a successful scientific theory is rather dubious (e.g the Dirac sea motivation for antimatter), but nevertheless the resulting theory is confirmed by experiment and later is motivated by a different set of considerations.

So I don’t believe in the complete separation of Physics and Theology, hence the blog.  But maybe I believe in something else which has some similar effects on my writing.  You must after all be detecting something about what I am doing which provoked your favorable statement.

Perhaps it is this: I believe in being honest.  I must to the best of my ability weigh the evidence on fair scales, and be open about what I am doing.  It would be dishonest if, because I want to prove the truth of Theism, I were to report the relevant Physics data in an imbalanced way, playing up anything which might seem to help my case and playing down anything which does not.  People often do this kind of thing reflexively when they argue, even to the extent of first deceiving themselves before they deceive others.  But it’s still unfair tactics, especially when deployed by the expert against the layman.

It is not dishonesty for me to have my own views about what’s important in Physics and what’s not, but it would be dishonest if I implied that all physicists agreed with me about that when they don’t.  Nor would it be dishonest if my views about speculative physics are influenced to some extent by my theological views—I think this is inevitable, and possibly not even fully conscious—but to pretend that a view is based on purely physical considerations when it is not, or to distort the data about Physics to match a preconceived agenda (theological or otherwise) is repugnant to me.

So I’ll do the best I can to be honest, and hopefully that will tilt the scales in the right direction.

Once upon a time, a college friend and I planned to write a book about Science-and-Religion topics, but that never got off the ground.  A few of the ideas from that time are being recycled here.

I originally started this blog because an elder Christian whom I respect back in Maryland told me (and gave me to understand that it was a divine revelation to him, and I trust him to know the difference) that I should not neglect my gift of teaching when I went to Santa Barbara.  At first I tried to start a Bible study with my church, but it already had lots of other groups, and it kept not working out for various reasons; then I thought of the idea of blogging instead.

Once I reach a critical mass on the blog, perhaps some of them could be organized into book format.  But I don’t need to decide that yet.  For the time being, the informal blogging environment seems more fruitful for developing ideas.

Gaps at the Dinner Table

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Speaking of the God of the Gaps™, I was myself accused of believing it just the other day.  I was at dinner with Raphael Bousso, Eva Silverstein, Ori Ganor, and some other physicists, and they were discussing fine-tuning and questions involving the precise way in the Multiverse is supposed to explain it.

Well, eventually I got tired of remaining in the closet, and I asserted: “Given that I believe in God for other reasons, I think it’s most likely that God chose the Laws of Nature to be conducive to life”.  Well, this got everyone pretty worked up (in a friendly way) and Raphael tried to apply that ominous phrase: the God of the Gaps™.

Well, it isn’t.  In my comment, it was completely manifest that I did not believe in a God whose sole purpose was to fill the fine-tuning “gap”.  I believe in God primarily for other (good, evidence-driven) reasons.   Once you already believe in God, it is seems totally natural (supernatural?) that he should pick laws of Nature which support life.  Theism isn’t an ad hoc hypothesis invented solely to fix the problem of fine-tuning.   Whereas the Multiverse is, so I guess I should have made a counter-accusation regarding the Multiverse-of-the-Gaps!

Or perhaps it should be called Naturalism-of-the-Gaps, that touching faith that Naturalism can explain away the apparent meaning and purpose of the Universe (something which is perfectly obvious to many ordinary people, who haven’t been trained out of this intuition by a Naturalist worldview masquerading as “Science”).

Of course, for all I know God did create gazillions of other universes besides ours, and this is the explanation for the fine-tuning of our universe.  But I’m certainly not required to believe that the laws of physics are ultimately due to blind processes which don’t care about us.  Without that premise, a fine-tuned universe just doesn’t seem like as big of a problem.  Hence there is no need to fill the gap with elaborate new physics.

(But don’t worry, if I think of a wonderful physical explanation with experimental consequences, I’ll still be perfectly happy to publish it and collect my Nobel prize… just because I am open to supernatural explanations, does not mean my mind is closed to natural ones.)

The other thing the dinner conversation made clear is that some physicists get seriously nervous about the fact that God can’t be described by equations, and is therefore (in their eyes) ill-defined.  I’ll have something to say about this later, in response to Sean Carroll’s debate comments.  For now I’ll just say that it seemed rather insular to me—there are only a small number of people who are capable of using equations to describe the world, yet everybody else manages somehow.  As they say, if all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.  It is our job as physicists to describe the world as completely as we can using equations, but it does not follow that there are no other ways of gaining knowledge about the world.

Perhaps I should have asked whether any of them had ever had a mystical experience.

On the other hand, somebody else (I think it was Ori) pointed out that Monotheism is the ultimate example of a unification hypothesis—explaining diverse things in Nature based on the operation of a single principle.  The elegance of Monotheism seemed to have some appeal to him.

It’s a funny thing.   These days, the Multiverse is taken seriously by theoretical physicists, yet God isn’t.  (Although the more old-fashioned types attack both concepts as equally unscientific.)  And yet, there is at least some observational evidence for the existence of God (in the way of claimed miracles and visions and so on).  On the other hand, there is no observational evidence for the existence of the Multiverse.

Apart from fine-tuning itself, the best that can be said about the Multiverse is that certain types of speculative new physics (such as string theory) might also predict multiple universes with different laws of physics (depending on certain other factors).  But it’s not like there’s any actual experimental evidence for other universes, or for any specific theory which predicts them.  It’s almost as if people care more about whether an idea has the flavor of Science (or science-fiction) than if there is any actual evidence for it.  The most important aspect of Science is always observational support!

(It’s important for people like me who study quantum gravity to remind ourselves of this point from time to time.  It’s always especially ironic when people in my field dismiss concepts for lack of observational evidence, since there isn’t much in the way of quantum gravity experiments.  \(10^{-35}\) meters is just way too tiny to see!)

God of the Gaps

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Then there is the phrase “The God of the Gaps”™.  In any long discussion on “Science and Religion”, this phrase must eventually be deployed by one or the other party, either by the skeptic (with a triumphal tone as of one finally deploying his most powerful weapon) or else by the articulate and educated defender of a modern faith, showing his sophisticated ability to rise above primitive superstitions: “But that’s the God of the Gaps™!” they say in response to a proposed act of the Deity, “We can’t possibly believe in that!”

In the debate between Carroll and St. Craig, both participants had their obligatory five seconds of hate towards this idea.  Craig:

This is not to make some sort of naïve claim that contemporary cosmology proves the existence of God. There is no God-of-the-gaps reasoning here. Rather I’m saying that contemporary cosmology provides significant evidence in support of premises in philosophical arguments for conclusions having theological significance.

Carroll:

It is certainly a true issue that we don’t know why the early universe had a low entropy and entropy has ever been increasing. That’s a good challenge for cosmology. To imagine the cosmologist cannot answer that question without somehow invoking God is a classic god-of-the-gaps move. I know that Dr. Craig says that is not what he’s doing but then he does it.

It is difficult to fight against a slogan delivered so frequently and with such conviction, especially when for some perverse reason educated and intelligent people on both sides insist on attacking the same strawman.  But it is worth pointing out, that if the detractors of an idea could be defeat it simply by labeling it with a silly-sounding alliterative phrase, we wouldn’t be able to believe in the “Big Bang” theory either.

As Carroll quotes the philosopher David Lewis as saying:

I do not know how to refute an incredulous stare.

These references to the God of the Gaps™ often function as a similar incredulous stare, not any kind of actual argument.  (Mind you, the incredulous stares Lewis got were because of his belief in modal realism, i.e. every single logically possible world is equally real.  Perhaps those incredulous stares just meant that ideas which flagrantly violate common sense should be assigned a tiny prior probability?)

Anyway, if the God of the Gaps™ is a fallacy, it’s a very strange one.  It is not any one of the standard textbook logical fallacies, and it is only ever brought up in theological contexts.   On the surface, it sounds awfully like claiming that inference to the best explanation is a fallacy.  Let me pull out some home truths here, and make the following bold statement:

Any time we ever believe in anything rationally, we do so because there is some kind of “gap” in our understanding of how the universe works, which is filled by postulating the existence of that thing.

In other words, all valid arguments that something exists are based on Of-the-Gaps type reasoning.  This is just how reasoning (scientific or otherwise) works.

This is not to say, of course, that all gaps are best filled by postulating specific divine intervention.  Of course not.  Admittedly, Monotheists do believe the following:

All phenomena which occur in Nature do so because God sustains the world in being, thus (at least indirectly) causing everything.

But this hardly implies that all phenomena make equally good evidence for God’s existence.

To the best of my knowledge, no Christian apologist has ever made the following argument: 1) Science cannot explain high temperature superconductivity [a puzzling phenomenon in condensed matter physics], 2) therefore an intelligent designer must have caused it, 3) therefore God exists.  The reason is that it is obvious in this case that there should exist in principle an ordinary scientific explanation for this phenomenon.  Superconductors involve complicated, messy physics and there is no particularly good reason to be surprised that we don’t understand them fully yet.

(When an Intelligent Design theorist such as St. Behe argues that: 1) there exist phenomena in Nature such as bacterial flagellum which could not plausibly have evolved naturally because they have irreducible complexity, 2) therefore they must have been created by an intelligent designer, he is not committing any type of logical fallacy, let alone God of the Gaps™.  The problem with his argument is that biologists have shown that his premise (1) is false, but it’s a perfectly good type of argument, if its premises were really true.)

In other cases, such as the seeming low-entropy beginning of the Universe, or the fine-tuning of the constants of Nature to permit life, or why certain forms of life have conscious experiences, or why murder is wrong, or for that matter why there is a material Universe at all, it is at the very least not completely obvious that there will exist a natural explanation of the usual scientific type.  There is a reason that theistic philosophers (not being totally stupid) latch onto these types of “big” or “fundamental” questions rather than questions about superconductivity.

It’s actually the exact same reason why many atheistic philosophers will deny that these are meaningful questions to which one has a right to expect an answer.  (Carroll does this in the debate, regarding the question of why the Universe came into existence.  Assuming for the sake of argument that it did, he argues that this is not the sort of thing one needs an explanation for.)  One could imagine a hypothetical physics which is in one sense a complete system of equations, and yet fails to answer some or all of these questions.  In that case the Naturalist will (because of his conviction that Science is the only ultimate path to truth) deny that the questions are meaningful, while any person who feels unable to swallow this will have for themselves an argument for the existence of God.

Other, more optimistic Naturalists may hold to the belief that “Science will one day explain that”.  Since data about what Science will do in the future is sadly unobtainable, this type typically appeals to one of those historical just-so stories I mentioned in my previous post.  To rephrase it once more (note that I do not accuse Carroll of making the following argument in all particulars; as I said I am using the debate as a springboard to talk about larger issues):

“Our superstitious ancestors thought that nearly all natural phenomena—the rising of the sun, the growth of the crops, etc. were attributable to numerous supernatural beings. Science has discredited nearly all of these ideas, but of course Science is not yet complete. The modern day defenders of religious traditions, therefore, although their original motivation for belief is gone, cling to these holes in our understanding as keeping a place for the divine activity. If only evolution or Big Bang cosmology or something leaves a place for God’s activity, these religious types argue, then we have some role for Religion. But as Science continues to discover more and more, the gaps get smaller and smaller, and eventually these claims will disappear as well. To cling to this sort of Religion is worthless.”

This type of reasoning (which is quite common, although I phrase it in my own words) tends to glide imperceptibly from popular pagan polytheists (who thought there was a divinity for every major or minor phenomenon) to the Hebrew monotheists (who resisted this trend as superstitious and wrong).

It was perfectly obvious to any pagan philosopher or early Christian that Nature proceeds according to orderly laws, and natural processes. Modern Science can take credit for unifying the description of many phenomena into common mathematical frameworks, but to act as though the existence of order in Nature is a modern discovery is simply absurd. It is true that this fact is in considerable tension with certain forms of Animism or Nature Polytheism. But certainly almost any astute monotheist living in the last two thousand years, is going to admit that God causes most things to happen, not through whim but through the operation of certain natural processes, which can be understood to some extent by human reason.

In this sense, Naturalism and Monotheism have a shared (and highly successful) common heritage.  Both of them imply that the material world is not to be understood as divine, and that therefore it is fair game for impersonal study and observation.  To act as though the fruits of this shared common presupposition is some type of falsification of one of these two positions is completely unfair.

So then, everyone should stop using this phrase, God of the Gaps™.  In addition to being confusing and condescending, and not really a logical fallacy, it almost always indicates the presence of a strawman opponent.  Very few religious people believe that God exists only to fill gaps in our understanding of Science.  Let’s argue against the real positions on the table.

Word-for-Word translations

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St. Rollin Weeks writes:

As an FMC member, I have attended two of your sessions.

I am interested in the prospect of time “before” the Big Bang, Time and Eternity, God’s foreknowledge and man’s free will, the Arrow of Time (Roger Penrose), Time Reborn (lee Smolin), and the books and papers on ‘time’ by William Craig Lane and J P Moreland of the Apologetics Dept. in Talbot Theol. Seminary at Biola.

But what I am really into right now is writing a paper on the King James Only (KJO) controversy. I have narrowed it down to 3 essential issues: (1 which are the best manuscripts (Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic) to use–the issue of Textual Criticism’? (2 if God preserved His Word perfectly throughout the ages, what mechanisms did He use, and where in the Scriptures do we find evidence that He would use these mechanisms?, and (3 how do we deal with the very intractable problem of translation from the original languages?

I have an MA in Linguistics, and I have done field work in Brazil with an indigenous tribal people. Some translation issues I have become aware of are:
~ ancient historical translations ((Coptic, Syriac, Septuigint) have used slightly different source texts. Were these the genuine Word of God?
~ Greek-to-English translation works fairly well, because both have highly developed vocabularies, but this is not the case when translating into a language with vastly different cultural emphases and interests, and
~ Greek and English are both members of the Indo-European Families. Ancient Hebrew to English is not so good a fit. When one gets into other wildly different languages, word for word translations become impossible.

I hope to join in again in one of your classes.

In Christ,
Rollin Weeks

Hi Rollin, I’m glad you enjoyed the classes.  That’s a nice grab bag of issues you mention there, but since you highlight King-James-only-ism, I think I’ll focus on that. I find it difficult to even take the KJO view seriously, for a variety of reasons.

There is simply no such thing as a perfect translation.  Even from Greek to English, word-for-word translation is not always the most accurate or faithful way to translate. I assume you know that Greek is a case language, meaning that (unlike English) it is the endings of the words, rather than their position in the sentence, which determines their grammatical role in the sentence (subject, object, possessor, etc.).  Instead they used word order for purposes of emphasis.  The first and last words in a sentence are the ones which are being emphasized.

Another issue is particles.  In a normal Greek sentence, there are a few two or three letter words called “particles” which normally appear right after the first word. When you are first learning how to translate Greek, you simply leave these words out since they don’t seem to affect the basic meaning.  For Greek experts (as I am not!) they show how the ideas in the sentence are connected to the ideas which have gone before.

There are various tricks which can be used to render these meanings into English, but they usually involve departing from the word-for-word ordering.  In these respects, “paraphrases” like the New Living Version or St. Phillips’ translation can sometimes actually be more accurate than a more “literal” translation, since they have the freedom to signal emphasis and connection-between-ideas in other ways.

In the absence of a specific divine revelation, it is simply hubris to say that God specially favors one particular English translation, given the existence of numerous good translations both before and after the KJV. That being said, given the time and the lesser degree of scholarly knowledge, the KJV was a remarkably good translation, combining literalness with style in a skilled way (partly with the help of archaic English “particles” such as “lo!”).  Another very nice feature is that when the original language is ambiguous, they tried to translate into English in a way which reflects that ambiguity, instead of just picking one possibility.

I said it was a good translation: since the meanings of many English words have changed over 400 years, and many passages now convey an incorrect meaning to modern readers.  To use the KJV today, especially with uneducated readers, is to guarantee that they walk away with wrong ideas about what the Bible says.

Regarding issues of Textual Criticism, the Textus Receptus differs from the accepted scholarly text in numerous places.  This has a lot to do with the fact that St. Erasmus’s Greek text was based on only 7 relatively late Greek manuscripts, each including only parts of the New Testament, and all but one from a single textual tradition.  And we are supposed to believe that this is more accurate than all other more carefully compiled texts?  That God miraculously preserved his word through Erasmus, while allowing all other scholars everywhere else to fall into error? Because of his special desire for later English-speaking people (but apparently not people in other cultures) to have a perfect translation?  Ridiculous!

Regarding the Old Testament textual issues, you are right that the Septuagint seems to have been based on a somewhat different version of the Hebrew text than the Masoretic, which is used by almost all modern translations.  Which text is more accurate in a given place is anyone’s guess, but the Dead Sea Scrolls are more similar to the Masoretic text.  There are many instances in which we know that the Septuagint was poorly translated (sometimes they even left out large chunks which they didn’t know what to do with!), although in other cases we have to defer to them because the meaning of the Hebrew words is otherwise unknown, or in when the Masoretic text is corrupt (e.g. 1 Samuel 13:1, which in the Masoretic text says that Saul was one year old when he became king, and that he reigned for two years!)

I believe that God has promised this about his word:

For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater:

So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it. (Isaiah 55:10-11)

This, however, is not a promise about every word being preserved perfectly in some static sense.  It’s a promise about God getting the results which he intended to get: namely a harvest of righteousness and justice in the lives of those who are transformed by God’s word.

The belief that this transformation will somehow be inhibited if we don’t have 100% certainty about every word (or even 100% certainty about which books should be in the Old Testament!) is a Fundamentalist notion which has little connection to actual progress in holiness.  Yes, God’s word is fully inspired and should be treated with respect, down to the last “jot and title“—at least when we know what they are—but we can’t lose sight of why he gave us his word.

I believe that God is very unscrupulous in how he reaches people.  His Spirit can sometimes even use translation mistakes to bring people closer to him (and in that sense, they may be God’s word to that particular individual), but we should still do our best to avoid making them.

There’s a very important word which is missing from this post so far.  That word is “Jesus”.  Muslims believe that the highest revelation from God is a Holy Book, dictated to a prophet without any human contamination, and perfectly preserved from error through the centuries.   We also have a Holy Book, but we believe that God’s final revelation is a Person.  That’s why God chose to use the human personalities of the biblical authors as a means to communicate to us the personality of Jesus.

What we need is not a word-for-word translation onto paper, but a “Word-for-Word” translation onto our hearts and minds.  Remember what St. Paul says:

Do we begin again to commend ourselves? or need we, as some others, epistles of commendation to you, or letters of commendation from you?  Ye are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read of all men: Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart. 

And such trust have we through Christ to God-ward: Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God; Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.  (2 Cor 3:1-6)

Metaphors in Theology

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Having identified a multitude of metaphors in the Nicene Creed, I have some concluding reflections.

First of all, I hope that it is clear that this project had nothing to do with “watering down” theology.  Most of the time, when people talk about taking theological ideas metaphorically, they mean that they don’t really believe it.  If someone says that they believe “God is a metaphor” (i.e. for the sacredness of the world, or compassion for the needy, or whatever), that means that they don’t really believe in God; they’re actually atheists cloaking themselves in religious language.

On the other hand, if there really is a Creator of infinite power and wisdom who designed the Universe, it makes sense that he would be beyond our capability to grasp.  We can say what God is not, but we cannot understand him in any positive way except by making metaphors.  Precisely because we Christians believe that God exists, we have to resort to metaphors in order to describe him.

You may have noticed that many of the metaphors I pointed out in the Creed are actually ordinary figures of speech which are used all the time by regular speakers.  While others are attempting to describe aspects of the Divine Nature, which transcends all understanding.  I make no apology for including both of these together.  Metaphors are practical as well as mystical.  The human mind is an incorrigable metaphor-machine, and we pretty much resort to metaphors all the time, even for understanding things which are closer to earth than God.  Yes, Theology is metaphorical—but then again so is everything else.

Perhaps this is another way in which we humans are created in the “image of God”.  Even God the Father, it seems, uses a metaphor to understand himself: his self-understanding is the Word (the rationality, intelligence, self-expresssion) of God which is coeternal with him.  It turns out though, that the Son is a quite excellent metaphor for representing the Father, since he is exactly like him in every respect.  (Hint: this paragraph contains another metaphor).

Now, let me draw out some implications for how we do Theology.  Atheists love to point out that the biblical description of God is full of contradictions.  This is, of course, quite true and a natural consequence of the fact that we understand God through metaphors.  That is, we say that God is like a Father, or like a Judge, etc.  God is unchanging, and yet he changes his mind when we intercede for others.  He cannot be contained in the highest heavens, yet he tells Jesus to sit at his right hand.  All things are possible for him, yet it is impossible for him to lie.  He dwells in impenetrable darkness, and yet in him there is no darkness at all.

If the metaphors contradict each other, that doesn’t mean that the reality is self-contradictory.  It just means that the images conflict, if you take them literally.  But you aren’t supposed to take them all literally.  Paradox is a way of seeing the invisible.  You can see in three dimensions precisely because the image in your left eye doesn’t quite agree with the image in your right eye.

(This should be enough to show why we Christians don’t have to literally believe that 1 = 3.  It’s fun to express things in a paradoxical way, but here we’ve helped you out a little by inventing some vocabulary.  The thing that God is one of is called, in technical language his substance or essence.  The thing that he is three of is called persons or hypostases.  1 substance = 3 persons is not actually a logical contradiction.)

You might wonder what ties all of this speculation down.  How do we know our metaphors correspond to an actual objective reality?  The answer is simple.  Metaphors about the beauty of nature, or social justice, cannot turn water into wine, or raise the dead.  In the end, Theology is about selecting the most reasonable theories which explain the sense-data of certain human beings.  Just like, you know, Science.

But if we can’t recognize the metaphors in Theology, then of course we will end up thinking it is superstitious and ignorant and cannot be reconciled with Science.

Rationalists like to tell a narrative something like this:  “The ancients were ignorant and made up a bunch of mythology which they took literally, but now we know that it contradicts Science™.  Sensible atheists like ourselves reject this mythology, while the more sensible among religious people manage to hold onto it, by reinterpreting most of it to be metaphors.  Yet if people had known about Science™ from the beginning, they never would have believed in God or heaven or angels or any of that.”  As if the culture which gave us the Song of Solomon was incapable of understanding the idea of metaphor!

Many of the images, taken literally, would indeed be silly.  For example, the Bible is full of body-language descriptions of God, yet no serious Christian theologian has ever thought that the Father has a body.  That’s because the ability to use and recognize metaphors didn’t come down from Heaven to Earth during the Age of Enlightenment.   It has always been with us, as long as there have been human beings.  So if we don’t watch it, people might even use metaphors to descibe scientific theories!

Of course, even if people did mistakenly believe something to be literal, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the core idea is eliminated by reinterpreting some of the details as being metaphorical.  (There’s a good discussion about this in St. Lewis’ book on Miracles.)

As a specific example, there is one example of something I think is a metaphor in the Nicene Creed, which historically at least some Christians have taken literally, although almost no one would nowadays.  I refer to Heaven being literally up, somewhere among or outside the planets or stars.  This is most famously illustrated in St. Dante’s Paradiso, in which the blessed in heaven are assigned positions associated with the various planets.  Dante himself was certainly aware of the allegory in his own poem, but I assume he was illustrating a common conception.  Arguably, then, this is an exception to my statement that the metaphors in the Creed “would have been understood by educated ancient people”.

So let’s suppose that the Apostles, when they witnessed Jesus’ Ascension, literally believed that Heaven is above the Earth.  What of it?  Either they actually saw what looked like Jesus going into the sky or they didn’t.  If they didn’t see it, then Christian theology is just wrong, apart from any considerations involving Science.  If they did see it, we still need to explain it somehow, even if we understand it using different imagery than the Apostles did.  Although, since our own image of going to another universe would probably be just as metaphorical as theirs, maybe we should just stick with their metaphor, once we recognize that it is a metaphor.  It was, after all, the metaphor Jesus was using, to communicate something about where he was going.

I’m not trying to say that all of the tensions between Science and Religion instantly disappear, once we recognize the existence of metaphors.  There are substantive issues to discuss.  But we won’t be able to discuss them, if we can’t distinguish the symbolism from the claims about reality.