I am a writer. I don't mean necessarily that I aspire to make my living by writing, only that my fundamental way of being in the world is best characterized as literary.
I think a story that Joseph Campbell use to tell about an event that happened while he was on his book tour for Historical Atlas of World Mythology, will illustrate this point:
One tough interviewer jumped right off declaring that "Myth is a lie".
So Joseph responded, "No, myth is not a lie. A mythology is an organization of symbolic images and narratives, metaphorical of possibilities of human experience."
"It's a lie", the interviewer pushed back.
"It's a metaphor"
"It's a lie".
This remained a running theme for the rest of the program. Finally with only a few moments left Campbell says, "I tell you it's metaphorical. You give me an example of a metaphor."
The interviewer paused seemingly baffled in how to respond, but got his composure together and said, "Okay, I'll give it a try. My friend John runs very fast. People say he runs like a deer. There's a metaphor".
In the last few seconds Campbell responds,"That is not a metaphor. The metaphor is: John is a deer".
"That's a lie!" the interviewer exclaimed exasperatedly as the program ended.
Most of the people in the world accept the metaphors of their own religious tradition as facts, while a sizable minority contends they aren't facts, but rather lies. Then there are a few of us literary types, neither theists nor atheists, who make sense of our experiences through metaphor.
The God of my personal experience is the creative principle of nature, herself. Or as Dylan Thomas once expressed it, "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower." Like many other important things in life a great confusion has occurred because we've taken a verb and made it into a masculine noun.
At the most basic level, all known things dissolve into a confluence of reverberating quantum fields, whose interplay in spacetime give us the substance of a stone, the color of a sunset or the fragrance of a rose. Even spacetime may ultimately resolve itself into its own quantum essence as a spider web of interacting particles made up from pure space. There is, perhaps, a germ of truth to the saying that 'the universe has more of the character of a thought than a machine'.
~Sten Odenwald (Astronomer, Ph.D. Harvard)
There is essentially nothing to matter whatsoever-- it's completely insubstantial. The most solid thing you could say about all this insubstantial matter is that it's more like a thought; it's like a concentrated bit of information.
~Jeffrey Satinover M.D.
(Physician and author, Ph.D. candidate in Physics, Yale)