Religion as an interface: The Strangeness of being human cont'd.
by John MacBeath Watkins
One of the most popular posts on this blog explores the roots of religion, and the need we have for a mythopoetic understanding of the world. Scot Adams, blogger and cartoonist of the Dilbert strip, says that religion is not a bad interface with reality.
And it strikes me that as we've made our machines more compatible with us, we've made them more artistic and poetic. I do not speak machine language, but I am able to communicate with my computer through my simple faith that when I reverently click an icon, the file will open.
On rare occasions, I have to use the command line to communicate in a more concrete way with my computer, and sometimes I even have to open the back and stick in more memory. But I don't really understand the machine in the way my nephew Atom Ray Powers, a network administrator, does, nor do I understand the software the way his brother, Jeremy, a programmer does. And neither has studied assembler code, which my uncle Paul learned after he was injured out of the woods as a logger.
It's as if we are replicating the way people perceive the world. The graphical user interface gives us a visual, metaphorical understanding of how to face the reality of the computer, just as religion gave us a metaphorical, poetic, and often visual way of interacting with the reality of the world. The command line gives us greater control of the computer, just as technology gives us the control of nature. Science attempts to learn how the world really works, at deeper and deeper levels, similar to knowing how the transistors work and how to read machine language..
The fact that computer scientists, who started at the scientific end of things, felt a need to make the interface more metaphorical and even artistic tells us something about how humanity interacts with the world. The intuitive approximation is vital if we are not to be overwhelmed with detail. It is sometimes said that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, because every fetus goes through phases of looking like a primitive fish, then a salamander, and eventually takes on human form. It would appear that the same thing happens cognitively.
Those of us, like myself, who follow the methods of the metaphorical interface in our daily lives often seek guidance from computer gurus. And those gurus, when they are not repairing malfunctioning machines or recalcitrant code, operate their computers in the symbolic realm made possible by the GUI.
We seem to have some difficulty doing this in our world of faith and science. This is usually because each side insists that its way of understanding the world is truth, therefore the other cannot be truth. But a model of an atom isn't what an atom really looks like, because an atom is smaller than a visible light wave. All of our understanding is metaphor and artistic license at some level. In my view, we have understandings at different levels.
Now, perhaps I've offended some religious people by saying religion is metaphor. But all sacred texts were written to be understood by people, not by gods. All of our understanding is metaphor. "For now we see through a glass, darkly" a biblical passage says. We understand the world by telling stories about it, and deciding which best describe it. Sometimes, as with math, the stories can be very precise, and the grammar quite rigorous, but they are stories none the less.
One of the most popular posts on this blog explores the roots of religion, and the need we have for a mythopoetic understanding of the world. Scot Adams, blogger and cartoonist of the Dilbert strip, says that religion is not a bad interface with reality.
And it strikes me that as we've made our machines more compatible with us, we've made them more artistic and poetic. I do not speak machine language, but I am able to communicate with my computer through my simple faith that when I reverently click an icon, the file will open.On rare occasions, I have to use the command line to communicate in a more concrete way with my computer, and sometimes I even have to open the back and stick in more memory. But I don't really understand the machine in the way my nephew Atom Ray Powers, a network administrator, does, nor do I understand the software the way his brother, Jeremy, a programmer does. And neither has studied assembler code, which my uncle Paul learned after he was injured out of the woods as a logger.
It's as if we are replicating the way people perceive the world. The graphical user interface gives us a visual, metaphorical understanding of how to face the reality of the computer, just as religion gave us a metaphorical, poetic, and often visual way of interacting with the reality of the world. The command line gives us greater control of the computer, just as technology gives us the control of nature. Science attempts to learn how the world really works, at deeper and deeper levels, similar to knowing how the transistors work and how to read machine language..
The fact that computer scientists, who started at the scientific end of things, felt a need to make the interface more metaphorical and even artistic tells us something about how humanity interacts with the world. The intuitive approximation is vital if we are not to be overwhelmed with detail. It is sometimes said that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, because every fetus goes through phases of looking like a primitive fish, then a salamander, and eventually takes on human form. It would appear that the same thing happens cognitively.
Those of us, like myself, who follow the methods of the metaphorical interface in our daily lives often seek guidance from computer gurus. And those gurus, when they are not repairing malfunctioning machines or recalcitrant code, operate their computers in the symbolic realm made possible by the GUI.
We seem to have some difficulty doing this in our world of faith and science. This is usually because each side insists that its way of understanding the world is truth, therefore the other cannot be truth. But a model of an atom isn't what an atom really looks like, because an atom is smaller than a visible light wave. All of our understanding is metaphor and artistic license at some level. In my view, we have understandings at different levels.
Now, perhaps I've offended some religious people by saying religion is metaphor. But all sacred texts were written to be understood by people, not by gods. All of our understanding is metaphor. "For now we see through a glass, darkly" a biblical passage says. We understand the world by telling stories about it, and deciding which best describe it. Sometimes, as with math, the stories can be very precise, and the grammar quite rigorous, but they are stories none the less.
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