Reading Jack Miles's God: A Biography, has got me thinking about the role of story, or narrative, in our understanding of the world around us. In a sense, it would seem as though all of our knowledge--especially our concepts about things not visible to the naked eye--are to an extent narratives that express the extent of our understanding.

Science is replete with narratives in the form of mathematical equations and proofs. These narratives have a distinct advantage in that they are, if performed properly, internally consistent. Mathematics, by virtue of being what it is, requires internal consistency, because all well-formed mathematics must proceed by drawing conclusions from known axioms, whose truth is either self-evident or derived from other self-evident axioms. What mathematics does not require, or promise, is that the thing being modelled mathematically--a natural phenomenon, say, or the speed of light in a vacuum--has anything to do with the mathematics used to represent it. It is for us, science's users to determine if the language we use to describe nature is an accurate reflection of nature itself.

For example, when Newton published his Principia, the very sound mathematics it contained were seen to be, by most everyone, an accurate representation of nature. And in a way, that was true. Newton's laws of motion and gravity explain these phenomena quite well as far as they go, but they fall short of describing very large phenomena and very small ones. Though Newton vastly oversimplified nature, however, it would be ludicrous to say that his results are useless. In appropriate circumstances, they are extremely useful; it is far easier and practical to discuss the motion of a billiard ball in terms of its inertia than it is to describe it in terms of quantum mechanics or in terms of general relativistic spacetime.

In other words, one might say that Newtonian physics is a kind of practical narrative. It is a story about the world that increases our understanding thereof and is, at least in that sense, true.

Quantum mechanics is another practical narrative that describes things far stranger than billiard balls. In fact, no one has ever seen any of the things that quantum mechanics purports to describe. When researchers measure electrons, they are not actually measuring electrons; they are reading information from a computer screen. No one has ever seen an electron, but we assume that they exist because the narrative of quantum physics is extremely compelling. What we actually see, though, is never an electron, but merely effects upon the world that are consistent with the story of quantum physics.

It bears repeating that although nobody has ever seen an electron, we would be hard pressed to find someone who didn't believe in them. This is very crucial, because what it tells us is that a compelling narrative allows us to accept things as true about which we have no direct experience. In the natural world, what makes a narrative compelling is its repeatability. The same experiment, properly repeated, will always yield identical results. Likewise, a robust scientific narrative is able to predict accurately the results of experiments before they are performed. It is by these two methods, in fact, that nearly all science is verified.

The quantum physical understanding of the electron, interestingly, is almost certainly incorrect, as it contains within it contradictions both internally and with general relativity that cannot be ignored. For instance, an electron in certain situations behaves as though it were a particle, while at other times it behaves as if it were a wave. Clearly, it cannot be both things, so there is something very wrong with the theory on a fundamental level. Superstring theory and M-Theory attempt reconcile this inherent contradiction, but so far has produced only theoretical results. The branch of engineering based on quantum mechanics, known as Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), has been in practical use for decades, making things like computers possible, even though nobody really understands how or why it works.

Having said all that, I now turn to religion. Religion is in most ways unlike science. The primary difference is in its area of concern, which is--in comparison to science--its greatest weakness. The claims of religion are never verifiable by experiment, and no experiment can be devised that would confirm any religious doctrine. And this is as it should be; the realm of religion is not the natural world, but the human soul, whose only data are anecdotal and highly personal. It is probable to the degree of certainty that there will be no mathematical theology forthcoming. There's simply nothing concrete to measure. But the value of religion is not its ability to predict the behavior of natural phenomena; its purpose is to embrace and explain the revealed will of the divine within the human experience.

Therefore, when we talk about religion, our goal is not to discover whether anything within our theology conforms to the natural world; our goal is to discover whether and how our description of God's nature and will conforms to our own personal understanding of God both within ourselves and as revealed through scripture and tradition. None of this presupposes that we must necessarily have a complete or fully correct understanding of God in order to do so. Like an electron, God is not visible or detectable by ordinary means. Our religious narratives tell us stories about God that allow us to perceive God as though God were something tangible, just as physics tells us stories about electrons that allow us to perceive them as though they were tangible. To restate the above, though, we do not ever experience electrons through physics; we only tell stories about them. Likewise, we do not experience God through religion; we tell stories. Our personal interaction with both God and electrons occurs at a level that is beyond reason and metaphor; our science tells us that we are composed of trillions upon trillions of electrons and so we are experiencing them constantly. Christianity tells us that we are suffused with the spirit of God and so we are experiencing God constantly. (The next time an atheist asks you to provide him with concrete evidence for the existence of God, you can ask for his understanding of how it feels to be an electron. Both requests are equally absurd.)

As with the electron, we should not be disheartened that our religious understanding is sometimes contradictory, and that different schools of thought on the matter do not always coincide in practice. Within any denomination or religion, the goal is essentially the same. Since religion produces no tangible results (at least, that is, until the death of the believer), we cannot compare them by virtue of which is correct and which is incorrect. We can only compare them based on the degree to which they satisfy our yearning for truth and our need for God's comfort, love, and instruction.

Our religions are all, like Newtonian physics, practical narratives. They are not the thing they describe; they are representations of it. They do not need to be factually correct in order to be true; they do not even need to be free of contradictions, both internal and external. They merely need to function as useful stories that illuminate our reason and our hearts.

By this I do not mean that all religion is merely metaphor, or that God is merely a pragmatic assumption. What I mean instead is that all of our understanding is necessarily incomplete because we are always separate from the things we attempt to understand with our intellects. All of our knowledge is metaphor; a facsimile of a real thing that we can never truly grasp intellectually. And the beauty of metaphors is exactly their weakness: they are not precisely what they represent. There is room for disagreement, for error, for confusion, for clarification, and for growth. And that's a good thing. A map of the United States need not accurately contain every detail of the United States to be useful. Clearly, a full-scale map of the United States would be utterly useless. For those of us trying to understand God, this is a great relief, as God appears to be, by most accounts, almost wholly beyond our comprehension. The fact that we are able to make models at all speaks highly of our ingenuity.

But we ought not mistake a map for the actual country. And we ought not either mistake our religion for God. A religion is a map of God, nothing more. It is a metaphor, a rationalization, an image of something that cannot be intellectually grasped in full. Religions are not, therefore, sacred. They are not complete, as our understanding of God is not complete. When we accuse those with different religious sentiments from our own of blasphemy, all we are really saying is that we feel that their map is incorrect in different ways than our own. Rather than demand that all other maps besides ours be destroyed, would it not be wiser to instead compare maps and determine which features might come more completely into view as a result of multiple perspectives?