Metaphorically speaking

I started reading Michael Gerson's recent article in the Post, but I had stopped about halfway through, when Mr. Gerson told us:

So the dilemma is this: How do we choose between good and bad instincts? Theism, for several millennia, has given one answer: We should cultivate the better angels of our nature because the God we love and respect requires it. While many of us fall tragically short, the ideal remains.

Atheism provides no answer to this dilemma.

That just sounds confused and wrong-headed to me, but when I tried to write something about it, what I wound up with was so boring it put even me to sleep.

Just now, however, I came across two posts by Mark Kleiman that were prompted, at least in part, by Gerson's article. They're both very good.

The first addresses Gerson directly. It's short. Go read it.

The second, longer, piece criticizes an atheist, P.Z. Meyers.

Religious thought, writing, and speech, at its adult level, is always metaphorical. 'Humans are created in the Image of God,' taken literally, is nonsense, if you remember that it is a part of a religious tradition that says that God is an infinite, omniscient, beneficent, immortal being 'without parts or passions,' which is the opposite of finite, finitely rational, ethically challenged mortal beings with physical bodies and emotional drives. It makes no more sense as a proposition in comparative primatology than 'My love is like a red, red rose' makes sense as a proposition in botany. But it's a very powerful metaphor for the ethical proposition 'Human beings are not to be damaged or degraded.' (Of course religious writers don't generally assert that 'God' names a metaphor rather than an entity, any more than the actor playing Hamlet looks at the audience and says, 'I'm not really the Prince of Denmark' or any more than a Pynchon novel carries a disclaimer on the title page, 'None of this stuff really happened.')

Confronted with the verse from Robert Burns, Meyers would no doubt say: 'She is not! Why, she doesn't even have petals, and her reproductive strategy is entirely different from that of a rose.' And Gerson would reply angrily, 'If you don't believe in the petals of your beloved you have no objective reason to have sex, and the species will die out.'

Considering "God exists" as an empirical proposition on the model of "the Earth is a spheroid," there's no evidence for it. It corresponds to no observation or well-formed theory, and the attributes usually attributed to the metaphorical entity are, in logical terms, mutually inconsistent. (Really, It's not very hard to prove that One doesn't equal Three.) Believing literally in the old but remarkably fit white guy with a long beard that Michelangelo painted on the Sistine Chapel ceiling makes about as much sense as believing in unicorns. So, as between Gerson and Meyers, I side with Meyers, since "The proposition you maintain has no evidence to back it up and is, moreover, incoherent" is a stronger argument than "Yes, but I couldn't stand it if the proposition were false."

But if, like anyone who has thought deeply about these matters, you think of God as an especially potent metaphor (or, to put in more flowery terms, "a mystery to be understood only in part, and then by faith") — if you think that, then the whole debate is pointless. Both Gerson and Meyers are just being silly: it's two blind men debating the nature of the elephant while groping around different parts of a Land Rover.

The Reality-Based Community: Atheistic bigotry and religous metaphor