Since coming to this site, I've frequently made posts about the intellectually futile practice of explaining theological concepts through metaphor. So many times have I found myself talking about the uselessness of metaphors in discussions about god and spirits that I thought maybe I should join the ranks of the Rational Responders who write blogs to avoid having to retype what they've already said a thousand times.

So listen. Attempting to explain or understand god through metaphors is an exercise in delusion with some clumsy smoke and mirrors involved. Don't do it. Don't let it be done to you.

A metaphor used properly does not relay anything true, nor does it provide a definition, nor an explanation. It is a rhetorical device that draws a purely superficial relationship between two understood items so that one or both can be admired in a novel way. It is a play on perception.

For example, the following is a metaphor used properly:

"The sun was a bauble in a tree."

When we hear this expression, we immediately understand that the sun is not actually a bauble, nor is the bauble a sun. It takes almost zero thinking for us to get that far. Since the speaker obviously did not mean this literally, we must take the next logical step and ask ourselves: "What did he mean by that?"

Through our knowledge of the sun and of baubles, we can ultimately infer a superficial relationship that exists between the sun and a bauble, namely the way they look in relationship to a tree when viewed a certain way.

The metaphor does not tell us anything new about the sun, nor does it tell us anything new about baubles. It simply allows us to playfully regard the sun in a way we may not have done before.

If we were to write out an equation for a good metaphor, it would go as follows:

X (understood thing)

is like

Y (understood thing)

because

Z (inferred superficial relationship)

It is necessary that the metaphor draw a relationship between two things that are understood, because if one ingredient of the metaphor were a mystery, the entire thing would be rendered incoherent, as in the following example:

"The sun was an engwark in a tree."

We cannot infer a relationship in this metaphor because we do not know what the sun is being compared to!

When being used correctly, because of their ability to equate items (superficially), metaphors are often used as thinking models to assist understanding, such as with some of Richard Dawkins's famous examples where he compares evolutionary processes to the process of picking a combination lock or to gradually climbing a mountain. His lock-picking metaphor, if plugged into the equation, would look like so:

X (natural selection)

is like

Y (picking a combination lock)

because

Z (they are accumulating, step-by-step processes).

However, he is not using this metaphor to define natural selection or combination locks, and he is not at all saying that natural selection is exactly equivalent to the picking of a combination lock. Natural selection is already defined and understood by other means, and the picking of a combination lock is already defined and understood by other means; the metaphor only relates the two so that natural selection can be thought about in a novel, more accessible way. The metaphor adds no new information. It simply looks at old information from a new angle.

Theological metaphors pretend that they aid understanding in the same fashion, but they are only costumes for dressing up presuppositions. This is obvious since a supernatural/theological metaphor draws a relationship between a thing that is defined or understood and a thing that is not defined or not understood (the very problem the metaphor is [cicularly] trying to solve.)

When you take something like "god" or "spirit" and attempt to explain through metaphor, you end up with an incoherent result. We can compare it to Ray Comfort's painter/painting metaphor. "The world is like a painting", he says, "and god is the painter." This is offered as a metaphor that assists in understanding a theological concept, but is it really an aid, or even a proper metaphor? Not at all! It's really an attempt at reconciliation.

He is attempting to reconcile an unknown thing with known things by comparing the unknown thing to known things, thereby muddying the waters and stacking the deck. The equation now looks like this:

X (presupposed thing that is not understood)

is like

Y (thing that is understood)

because

Z (false relationship, necessarily presupposed because X is presupposed).
 

This is exactly like our bad example where we said that the sun was like an engwark. We cannot attempt to understand an engwark through a metaphor that compares it to the sun, because any suggested relationship will be incoherent until we understand what an engwark IS beforehand.

Similarly, a supernatural concept cannot be understood through metaphor since any suggested relationships will be incoherent until we already understand the concept before introducing it to a metaphor.

In short, we're back to this: it only makes sense if you already believe it.