Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Edward Avery-Natale - The God Metaphor

http://www.heartofeugene.org/images/LWT0029.jpg

This is an interesting article from Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology on the linguistically constructed nature of God - as a metaphor.

Reference:
Avery-Natale, E. (2009). The God Metaphor. Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology; 3(4), 402-415.
Abstract:
In recent years there has been a marked increase in the number of books and articles produced by the so-called “new atheists,” led by authors such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. However, while Dawkins’ concept of memes is, in many ways, at least partially a linguistic concept, indicating that Darwinian processes can impact cultural forms, little work has been done on incorporating linguistics from an evolutionary perspective into works on the origins of the belief in god(s) and general religious faith. This paper analyzes linguistics and their connections to supernatural beliefs using works from comparative and evolutionary biology, theoretical biology, comparative religion, neural networks, linguistics, and philosophy. I ultimately show how the metaphoric and semiotic nature of human cognition could have possibly developed and how this could have led to a belief in god(s) and the supernatural.
After looking at Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett in this regard, the author moves to George Lackoff's metaphoric model (as well as Mircea Eliade) is seeking the origins of the God metaphor.
The God Metaphor

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) and George Lakoff (1987) show that the human mind is structured in such a way as to understand the world through various tropes, metaphors, metonyms, and gestalts. There are a number of ways that this may connect to the human belief in god(s).

Lakoff and Johnson (1980) discuss the idea of a personification metaphor. This is the metaphoric shift in which an object is treated as a person or a subject when it, in fact, is not (1987, p. 33). This is similar, though not identical, to Dennett’s idea of the intentional stance, in which we imbue non-agentic things with human agency in order to quickly and accurately track where their potential movements are likely to bring them. Thus, here we may see the ways in which the personification metaphor erupts out of our evolutionary history. The intentional stance may be the evolutionary precursor to the metaphor of personification. Furthermore, metaphoric cognition itself may have developed as a way of assisting us in better understanding an extremely complicated and potentially dangerous world. Therefore, we may draw this together by claiming that metaphors helped us understand and survive the world, while the possibility for personifications could produce god(s) as one possible end result of this.

Furthermore, once the meme for god(s) got started it may have spread like wildfire. Dennett and Dawkins detailed one way that this might have happened—the parent-child superhighway. Bringing in Lakoff’s and Lakoff and Johnson’s work we can further understand how this might have happened. These texts show that the development of new metaphors is particularly important, as a new metaphor can open up understandings of the world that an agent was not previously privy to; through new metaphors one can come to understand a different piece of a concept or to understand a concept in a new way. Thus, if god(s) and other supernatural entities were concepts that helped human evolutionary conspecifics to understand the world in a new way that proved particularly useful for survival or reproduction then the meme for these beliefs could have spread very quickly through the parent-child superhighway. However, to accept this we must consider whether religious narratives are metaphorically structured.

Metaphors in Religion

Mircea Eliade’s work is particularly important for connecting metaphoric cognition and religion. Though Eliade does work in comparative religion, his ideas prove to be particularly astute when connected with that of Lakoff and others.
Read the whole article.


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