Foerst says that a robot must have human features if it is to learn to relate to human beings. She argues that the image of God (imago dei) represents no more than a promise of God to relate to us. In our view, however, the principle of embodied artificial intelligence (AI) in the robot suggests some kind of embodiedness of the image of God in human beings if they are to learn to relate to God.Foerst's description of how people react to a humanoid robot reads like Otto's description of the divine as mysterium fascinans et tremendum (awesome and alluring mystery). Her description makes robot-human interaction seem more religious than human-God interaction.

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Excerpts from Chapters 1 and 3 of New Maps for Old: Explorations in Science and Religion (Gerhart and Russell 2001) explore the ramifications of metaphoric process for changes in thinking, especially those changes that lead to a new understanding of our world. Examples are provided from science, from religion, and from science and religion together. In excerpts from Chapter 8, a double analogy-theology is to science as science is to mathematics-is proposed for better understanding the contemporary relationship between science and religion. A conservation of epistemological sufficiency is disclosed as one moves from mathematics to empirical science to theology-a move from one discipline to another that involves a sacrifice of one aspect of thought to gain another.We understand metaphors to comprise linguistic objects linked in surprising and superficially inappropriate ways. We understand cognition to be the dynamic activity of a mind traversing conceptual fields of meanings in a search for understanding. Because metaphors link different parts of fields 13 Zygon of meanings, they have the ability to distort or reshape these fields increasing the complexity of the interactive conceptual elements contained. We call this distortion "metaphoric process" and suggest that it plays an important role in the development of understandings of complex states of affairs. METAPHORS, ANALOGIES, AND COGNITION.Metaphor is everywhere! One of our colleagues noticed a sign over the baggage area in the Athens airport; it contained the word METAFOP-equivalent to "transfer," as in "baggage transfer." The occasion serves to remind us that metaphor is a much more common word in Greek than it is in English-at least until recently. Once restricted to the fields of language, rhetoric, and poetry, metaphor has now become so popular that it is in danger of losing its distinctiveness.Definitions of simile, analogy, and metaphor are not mutually exclusive (if they ever were); they refer rather generally to the substitution of some thing (usually some word) in the place of another. Some authors use simile, analogy, and metaphor interchangeably. Some uses of metaphor are so broad that any act of representation can be referred to as metaphorical. There is an increasing danger that the term will soon become meaningless as in the tag line, ". . . speaking metaphorically, of course"-an expression intended to imply that what has been said is, in some unarticulated sense, untrue, just when one means that what has been said is, in some (other) unarticulated sense, more true than otherwise.Turning to theories of metaphor, one becomes quickly aware that, in the words of Paul de Man (1978, 13), "metaphors, tropes, and figural language in general have been a perennial problem and, at times, a recognized source of embarrassment for philosophical discourse and, by extension, for all discursive uses of language including historiography and literary analysis." The failure of efforts to develop a generally accepted theory of metaphor arises, we believe, because t...

Abstract. The idea of a text is reviewed and reconstructed to facilitate the application of concepts of interpretation to the objects analyzed in the natural sciences, as well as to objects analyzed in religion and literature. Four criteria—‐readability, formality, material transcendence, and retrievability—‐are proposed as the basis for a generalized conception of text. Objects in both religion and science, not previously thought to be texts, are shown to be included in the new definition and therefore to be potential subjects of developing methods of interpretation.

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