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Scientific and Religious Metaphors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Earl R. MacCormac
Earl R. MacCormac
Affiliation:
Professor of Philosophy, Davidson College
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Extract

For quite some time, critics have attacked religious language on the grounds that theologians employed metaphors that were irreducible. By irreducible, they meant metaphors that could not be paraphrased in literal language. And any such language that could not be reduced to words that can be taken in a literal sense, would be devoid of cognitive meaning or truth value. Since theologians claimed that statements like ‘God is love’ cannot be reduced to a literal sense without robbing the concept of God of its transcendent status, sceptics replied that such failures merely indicated the meaninglessness of religious language. Or, if apologists did assert that ‘God is love’ can be paraphrased by statements describing the love of one man for another, the sceptic claimed that such a move reduced religious language to anthropological language where terms like ‘God’ were superfluous. Critics argued that metaphors of religion posed the following dilemma: either religious metaphors could not be reduced to literal paraphrases and were, therefore, meaningless; or, religious metaphors could be reduced to literal paraphrases, but the method by which they were reduced eliminated the necessity for theological terminology.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , December 1975 , pp. 401 - 409
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1975

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References

page 401 note 1 Cf. Paul, Edwards, ‘Professor Tillich's Confusions’, Mind, Volume 74 (1965), pp. 192–214Google Scholar; also more recently Burgess, Andrew J., ‘Irreducible Religious Metaphors’, Religious Studies, Vol. 8 (1972), pp. 355–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 402 note 1 For the most famous exposition of the reductionist programme see: Carnap, Rudolf, ‘Testability and Meaning’, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 3, No. 4 (October 1936), pp. 420–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Vol. 4, No. I (January 1937), pp. 2–40.

page 402 note 2 Carnap modifies his reductionist programme to one of partial interpretations in his ‘The Methodological Character of Theoretical Terms’, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science edited by Herbert, Feigl and Michael, Scriven (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956).Google Scholar For an analysis of the imprecision of scientific language see: Mellor, D. H., ‘Inexactness and Explanation’, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 33, No. 4 (December 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and his ‘Imprecision and Explanation’, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 34, No. 1 (March 1967).Google Scholar

page 403 note 1 Cf. MacCormac, Earl R., ‘Meaning Variance and Metaphor’, British journal for the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 22 (1971), pp. 145–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 403 note 2 Hutten, Ernest H., The Language of Modern Physics (London: Allen and Unwin, 1956), p. 84.Google Scholar

page 403 note 3 Jammer, Max, Concepts of Force: A Study in the Foundations of Dynamics (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962)Google Scholar, and his Concepts of Mass in Classical and Modern Physics (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964).Google Scholar

page 404 note 1 Jammer, , Concepts of Mass in Classical and Modern Physics, p. 224.Google Scholar

page 405 note 1 Edwards, ‘Paul Tillich's Confusions’, pp. 199–200, also quoted by Burgess, ‘Irreducible Religious Metaphors’, p. 356.

page 405 note 2 Cf. Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Second Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).Google Scholar

page 406 note 1 Cf. MacCormac, Earl R., ‘Metaphor Revisited’, The journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. XXX (Winter, 1971), pp. 239–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and ‘Metaphor and Literature’, The journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 6, No. 3 (July, 1972), pp. 57–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a more complete development of my theory of metaphor. Note that I take similes and other grammatical forms to be included as metaphors. There and in this essay I draw upon standard sources for a tension theory of metaphor including: Douglas, Berggren, ‘The Use and Abuse of Metaphor: I and II’, The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 16 (December 1962), pp. 237–58Google Scholar, and (March 1963), pp. 450–72; Max, Black, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962)Google Scholar; Northrop, Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957)Google Scholar; Colin, Turbayne, The Myth of Metaphor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962)Google Scholar; and Philip, Wheelwright, Metaphor and Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962).Google Scholar

page 406 note 2 Max Black, ‘Metaphor’ in his Models and Metaphors.

page 406 note 3 Johnson, Samuel, A Dictionary of the English Language (London: W. Strahan, 1755)Google Scholar, reprinted by AMS Press, Inc., New York, 1967 under the entry for ‘Seed’.

page 407 note 1 Stein, Jess, The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 129.Google Scholar

page 407 note 2 Wheelwright, Philip, Metaphor and Reality, pp. 57 ff.Google Scholar

page 408 note 1 Hanson, Norwood Russell, The Concept of the Positron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963).Google Scholar

page 408 note 2 Newton, Roger G., ‘Particles That Travel Faster Than Light’, Science, Vol. 167 (1970), pp. 1569–74.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed