One Cosmos:

There is nothing you can say about anything that isn’t laden with implicit or explicit metaphors, which is one of the reasons why it is so absurd for the materialist to object to spirituality, since the idea of solid matter is itself a sort of airy metaphor, just a fanciful concept based upon the illusions of our nervous system, illusions like “solidity” or unambiguous “place.” Scientists often conflate the abstract and the concrete, and essentially extend the concretions of the nervous system into an abstract worldview. Which is fine, so long as you don’t confuse them with metaphysical truth, or with the Ultimate Real.

For their part, so-called fundamentalist religionists often do the reverse, which is to say, concretize the abstract. But only God can really do that, since the cosmos itself is none other than a concretion in a small corner of the Divine Mind. As mentioned a couple of days ago, one of the purposes of scripture — which employs countless metaphors and other seemingly concrete images — is to follow it back upstream to its hidden source, the “place” from which revelation perpetually flows like a spring from the ground. Indeed, the place from which language itself flows.

That’s just a short excerpt from a long post. Read it all.