Analogismoi Ten: Metaphor, Not Mere Metaphor

The book of Genesis contains within it a series of stories that each represent a new and growingly sophisticated beginning. The first, lowest resolution, is Genesis 1:1 and God’s creation of habitable order out of chaos. Our last post dealt with the second beginning, the creation of man in Genesis 2:7. With the introduction of conscious living souls into the world, the order created by God in Genesis 1:1 sharpens in focus.

It is here, with the creation of man, that we will need to stop and go over some material as a preparation for the next beginning which will be Adam’s life in the garden. Over the course of the next several posts we will cover things I believe are essential as background before we proceed to higher and higher levels of complexity in the world. To this end, today I would like to discuss levels of epistemic analysis and the role of biblical metaphor.

The world, much like the Bible, exists on multiple levels of analysis simultaneously. The level of analysis we tend to default to is the one with the most pragmatic use for our continued existence in this world. In his An Introduction to the Study of Speech (1921), anthropologist Edward Sapir notes that many concrete, basic nouns — such as those for common animals like “cat,” “dog,” or “bird” — tend to be short and often monosyllabic because they are high-frequency terms in every day speech. Brevity of this sort aids efficiency in communication, a key theme of how languages evolve to prioritize for practical and pragmatic use.

We could, conceivably, upon seeing a dog think “multicellular living organism” or “composite of atoms” or “canine”

but we don’t. We see “dog.” There is incredible utility in this from an evolutionary standpoint. Some decades after Sapir, in his book Human Behavior and the Principle of Lease Effort (1949), linguist George Zipf takes this idea and runs with it as he introduces what is now called Zipf’s Law. Zipf’s Law states that words used with higher frequency evolve to optimize communication efficiency. This relates to our earlier discussion on predator detection systems and the pragmatic reality of dragons.

Primates, over hundreds of millions of years, developed the predator detection system to immediately stop a threat and react. If man saw “poisonous snake,” he would never have been able to react in time to not die. What man sees when he sees a snake is “danger.” It is immediate, actionable and evolved for practical defense mechanisms. The same goes with a cliff. We do not see a cliff and then assume a place we may fall off. We see a “falling off place” and then later can rationalize a cliff. If we didn’t, our ancient ancestors would have all died falling off cliffs and being bit by venomous snakes.

Dragons, being predator as such, are an artistic abstraction of all that is common across predators. A dragon is not dangerous, that is too many cognitive processes to allow for practical reactions. Dragons are not dangerous, dragon is danger. So while a puma and an asp may seem to have little in common, we can immediately react with “danger” because of the higher level abstraction ability of humans. They are both, essentially, dragons.

In the same way, when we encounter a dog we see “dog.” That is the level of analysis which we see. Of course, we can later break this up and pull it apart and see it on a million other levels. We can see “four legged animal” or “barking thing,” or “pile of molecules.” There is no limit to the number of different valid constructions of analysis we can come up with, but they are not the default level of analysis for man. The default level of analysis is “dog” or “cat” or “bird.”

The multitude of levels of analysis are key for understanding the biblical stories. The inexhaustibility of the levels of analysis presented to us in the biblical stories is, of itself, worthy of study. At no point does a valid level of interpretation invalidate different, even contrary, levels of interpretation. This is no different from the fact that a dog being a “dog” does not mean that, on a different analytical level, it isn’t also a “connected series of atoms,” a “burglar alarm” or a “vacuum cleaner for table scraps.” All of the levels of analysis are valid simultaneously and afford a multi-trait multi-method analysis verification which increases the probability of validity on future levels of analysis for each other level successfully achieved.

One of the reasons this is important is because the richness of the biblical stories requires a nuanced, multi-level approach. However, and this might actually be more important, misunderstanding that there are multiple, often contradictory, levels of analysis to the biblical stories that are simultaneously valid is at the very heart of so much of the problem with understanding, misunderstanding and fighting over the text. Whether between secularists and the faithful or varied religious traditions within a single religion or just between various people within a similar or the same tradition, the lack of understanding of nuanced multi-leveled analysis is at the heart of the conflict.

What happens with people and sects all too often is that they have latched onto a level of analysis which they then see as the “correct” interpretation. When people or groups with different “correct” interpretations meet the conflict is immediate and often catastrophic.

So many secular atheists begin their lives and religious education learning the biblical stories and then, around the age of 12, stop learning. As they get older and they develop a more sophisticated understanding of the world, the level of analysis they were given as children no longer makes sense — and rightfully so. Rather than update their understanding of these ancient, civilization creating texts they merely dismiss them as archaic superstitions. The fault lies entirely with the reader dismissing a level of analysis which is not proper to them rather than attempting a more nuanced understanding while seeing how the former level of analysis is simply telling the same story differently.

The same goes with scientific atheists. The idea that Darwinian evolution weakens biblical claims is patently false. This line of thinking exists because, and only because, atheists have tried to piggy back science for credibility and have created a false schism between science and religion. The scientific atheist is just attempting to read the ancient texts through modern frames which were thousands of years from being invented at the time of the biblical stories being written down. Reductionist, scientific rationalism and atheism amounts to nothing more than saying a baseball team lost because they didn’t score enough touchdowns.

And all of this says almost nothing about the religious sects which have been bickering over whose analysis level is the “right” one for millennia. The wealth of the biblical stories lies in its ability to be understood across nearly infinite levels of analysis. In Jungian terms, terms which I believe capture the essence of this wonderfully, the biblical stories are the collective unconscious mind of man. They are eternally relevant on any level of analysis and all people are eternally tapped into them.

With all this in mind we finally come to the idea of the biblical stories as metaphor….but not mere metaphor. Several posts ago we discussed Genesis 1:1 and God’s extraction of habitable order from chaos. That the world, at its lowest resolution and most basic level, is primordial chaos transformed into order by God is, in some sense, a metaphor. It is the dragon myth told repeatedly, cross-culturally since the beginning of time.

Is the battle with the dragon of chaos a metaphor? Of course it is, but there is more to the story.

I have mentioned before that I do not believe that there is any way to poke a hole in Darwinian evolution. For the Darwinian, nature can be defined as “the thing that selects.” What is real, for the Darwinian, is that which has been around the longest and has exerted the most selection pressure.

Keeping this in mind, we can take a look at the human brain. The human brain has two hemispheres, the left and the right. The left hemisphere, typically dominant for language and logic, controls verbal responses and focus on known, ordered elements, yet remains unaware of actions or perceptions handled by the right hemisphere. The right hemisphere, suited to novelty, emotions and holistic patterns, can respond non-verbally (drawing, pointing) to stimuli presented only to the left visual field. They are connected and communicate with one another through the corpus callosum.

In cases of intractable epilepsy, scientists such as Roger Sperry and lain McGilchrist, having performed a corpus callosotomy (severing the corpus collosum), found that the hemispheres form independent consciousnesses revealing the brain’s hemispheric independence.

The cognitive neuroscientist Elkhonen Goldberg, a student of Alexander Luria, father of modern neuropsychology, detailed out the functions of the hemispheres and the manner in which they work together. Goldberg, as well as his teacher Luria, were Soviet neuroscientists and so for reasons both scientific and political, their work was purely rational and has no real connection to theological and mythological influences.

Goldberg’s theory, novelty-routinization theory, posits that the bifurcation and hemispheric structure of the human brain evolved to enable the brain to efficiently handle both novel, unfamiliar situations and routine, familiar ones by assigning differential roles to each hemisphere.

The right hemisphere specializes in processing novel and unknown information, integrating diverse sensory inputs via broad, long-range connections. In contrast, the left hemisphere excels at processing routine, well-established patterns through focused, short range connections.

Anyone who has ever lost a tooth should know exactly how this works — at least the basics. Your body, including your teeth, have been brought into routine. Your body knows them and because they are known they are in the category of stuff which can be ignored and assumed. When you lose a tooth what happens? Your tongue spends days darting around the gap. What is it doing? It is mapping a novel area to incorporate it back into and update the known bodily structure. Your left hemisphere is activated for something new and takes steps to routinize it and push it to the right hemisphere where it updates the routine, ignorable recognized image of the world to include this new information. (In a future post we will come back to this with a discussion on the artists role in the world and the origin of the biblical stories).

We can see this in our most ancient ancestors as leaving the tree or the fire to go into the unknown, map it and extract value out of it incorporating it into the known world. It is Saint George confronting the dragon which

hoards the treasure. The unknown is filled with both mortal danger and treasure. It is by confronting the unknown that we encounter the dragon. The confrontation with the dragon, should you prove successful, rewards you with the treasure. This is to say, from the perspective of the neuroscientist, that the left hemisphere bravely enters the unknown and in doing so successfully it brings back a treasure in terms of information (keep the treasure of information in mind as we get deeper into the Garden of Eden) which then is passed to the right hemisphere and habituated into the known world.

That the human being has evolved to be able to simultaneously exist in a known, habituated and routinized world while also exploring the novel and unknown world. In the novelty is turned into information and then added to that routinized world which is, in essence, what we call learning.

The human mind is so construed, after billions of years of evolution, that it can deal with routinizing novelty….that is, make habitable order out of chaos. For the Darwinian this is only possible as a result of selection pressure on the evolving human over a vast stretch of time by a world which is, at its most fundamental level, made of chaos and order.

In essence, atheist to the core Soviet neuroscience combined with Darwinian evolution posits the human being as being an echo of God’s creative act in Genesis 1:1.

So yes, God creating order out of primordial chaos is a metaphor….but not a mere metaphor as it is also that which is most real — at least from a Darwinian perspective.

Returning to the idea of multiple levels of analysis being simultaneously valid, here we see the biblical story validated by Soviet athiest neuroscience and also Darwinian evolution.