The Shoe Box Universe
I love the metaphor of "The Shoe Box Universe" and use it frequently, especially when discussing the world portrayed in the Bible -- the world actually experienced by the authors of that book. While the idea seems obvious to me, I'm finding that it is far from obvious to most people I talk to, so let me try to describe what goes through my head when I talk about the shoe box.
I assume that everything "historical" or "factual" in the Bible was pretty well worked out before it was written down. This is especially true of the strongly mythical elements, such as the stories in Genesis but it's also true of the stories featuring Jesus, which were passed on by word of mouth for generations before being committed to Greek. This would seem to be a minor point, but the effect is to drastically obscure what the writers would see "looking back". This contrasts remarkably with what we are used to with, for example, film records of Word War II and massive written eye-witness descriptions of history going back centuries. The "shoe box" metaphor is used to describe the dramatic shortening in the time dimension (in this case, the past).
It is not generally understood that it is only fairly recently (roughly the period of the Enlightenment in Europe) that intellectuals began to make a distinction between what we would regard as a mythical world view and the actual, observed universe. The clash is famously illustrated in the struggles of Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton and even Einstein as they struggled to see the world as it is rather than as it "should" be or as ancient tradition says it should be. To the writers of the Bible, the past, present and future would be totally absorbed in what we would call a world of myth. In such a world things like miraculous birth, intervention of the Gods, choirs of angels are accepted without question. In fact, no story would have been very interesting without elements that we would today recognize as fantasy. For committed Christians, this is a hard fact to swallow, but it is an inescapable fact that the Biblical stories belong to a whole genre of fantastic stories about the heroes of history, including (for example) Alexander the Great, Mohammed and Buddha.
Mythical thinking is another way that inhabitants of the shoe box see past, present and future in a way that is shockingly fuzzy and obscure when compared to the way we are used to seeing things in the 21st century.
And then there is space. Genesis tells us the story of how God created the shoe box universe. To someone for whom the world pretty well ends just over the horizon, it would not have seemed too crazy to think that the entire world was wished into being over seven days, especially since such a person would think entirely in mythical terms anyway. For such a person, a thunder storm would fill the entire world. A flood would drown all of the world. All creation myths take place in shoe boxes -- not just the stories in Genesis.
In a chat with a modern inhabitant of the shoe box world (fundamentalist Christian), I mentioned the fact that, according to the Biblical story of Noa, God killed off all living things on the planet - a fact that was somehow not noticed by civilizations in China and the Americas at any point covered by the supposed time frame covered in the Bible. Of course, such discussions are pointless since some people still live in the shoe box and still think in mythical terms without making the distinction between myth and observable reality.
The modern intellectual lives in a universe that is over 13 billion years old, vast in time and space beyond the ability of humans to fully comprehend.
This is not just a bigger "box". The shoe box was not created to "answer" the questions we now have about how the world began. We have only been asking such questions for the last few centuries. Before that, we just heard stories around the camp fire. We didn't even assume they were true, since the very idea of checking the stories against the real world is modern and unthinkable to the ancient writers. The way to think of this is to picture the ancient people as living on a stage, enacting the stories that structured their societies, constantly elaborating the stories, inventing new stories and passing on the best stories to the next generation until somebody started writing them down.
For the "true believer", it is easier to come to understand this fact by looking at the struggles of (for example) Galileo. In his time, the workings of the world (such as the way falling objects behaved or the way the body worked) were matters of philosophy (especially Aristotle). Galileo belonged to a new generation that started to check things out and ask what was really going on. It was very difficult for those around him to appreciate the relevance of such observations and conclusions. The entire way of thinking was new.
Even in the 21st century, the old, mythical mind set is still popular among religious fundamentalists and cults that pop up like weeds all over the world every day. Mythical thinking is natural. "Scientific" thinking is fundamentally skeptical and goes strongly against the grain. It needs to be learned and cultivated by daily application.
This, at any rate, is my vision of the shoe box universe. It is a metaphor that I find useful. Sorry if it offends.
I assume that everything "historical" or "factual" in the Bible was pretty well worked out before it was written down. This is especially true of the strongly mythical elements, such as the stories in Genesis but it's also true of the stories featuring Jesus, which were passed on by word of mouth for generations before being committed to Greek. This would seem to be a minor point, but the effect is to drastically obscure what the writers would see "looking back". This contrasts remarkably with what we are used to with, for example, film records of Word War II and massive written eye-witness descriptions of history going back centuries. The "shoe box" metaphor is used to describe the dramatic shortening in the time dimension (in this case, the past).
It is not generally understood that it is only fairly recently (roughly the period of the Enlightenment in Europe) that intellectuals began to make a distinction between what we would regard as a mythical world view and the actual, observed universe. The clash is famously illustrated in the struggles of Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton and even Einstein as they struggled to see the world as it is rather than as it "should" be or as ancient tradition says it should be. To the writers of the Bible, the past, present and future would be totally absorbed in what we would call a world of myth. In such a world things like miraculous birth, intervention of the Gods, choirs of angels are accepted without question. In fact, no story would have been very interesting without elements that we would today recognize as fantasy. For committed Christians, this is a hard fact to swallow, but it is an inescapable fact that the Biblical stories belong to a whole genre of fantastic stories about the heroes of history, including (for example) Alexander the Great, Mohammed and Buddha.
Mythical thinking is another way that inhabitants of the shoe box see past, present and future in a way that is shockingly fuzzy and obscure when compared to the way we are used to seeing things in the 21st century.
And then there is space. Genesis tells us the story of how God created the shoe box universe. To someone for whom the world pretty well ends just over the horizon, it would not have seemed too crazy to think that the entire world was wished into being over seven days, especially since such a person would think entirely in mythical terms anyway. For such a person, a thunder storm would fill the entire world. A flood would drown all of the world. All creation myths take place in shoe boxes -- not just the stories in Genesis.
In a chat with a modern inhabitant of the shoe box world (fundamentalist Christian), I mentioned the fact that, according to the Biblical story of Noa, God killed off all living things on the planet - a fact that was somehow not noticed by civilizations in China and the Americas at any point covered by the supposed time frame covered in the Bible. Of course, such discussions are pointless since some people still live in the shoe box and still think in mythical terms without making the distinction between myth and observable reality.
The modern intellectual lives in a universe that is over 13 billion years old, vast in time and space beyond the ability of humans to fully comprehend.
This is not just a bigger "box". The shoe box was not created to "answer" the questions we now have about how the world began. We have only been asking such questions for the last few centuries. Before that, we just heard stories around the camp fire. We didn't even assume they were true, since the very idea of checking the stories against the real world is modern and unthinkable to the ancient writers. The way to think of this is to picture the ancient people as living on a stage, enacting the stories that structured their societies, constantly elaborating the stories, inventing new stories and passing on the best stories to the next generation until somebody started writing them down.
For the "true believer", it is easier to come to understand this fact by looking at the struggles of (for example) Galileo. In his time, the workings of the world (such as the way falling objects behaved or the way the body worked) were matters of philosophy (especially Aristotle). Galileo belonged to a new generation that started to check things out and ask what was really going on. It was very difficult for those around him to appreciate the relevance of such observations and conclusions. The entire way of thinking was new.
Even in the 21st century, the old, mythical mind set is still popular among religious fundamentalists and cults that pop up like weeds all over the world every day. Mythical thinking is natural. "Scientific" thinking is fundamentally skeptical and goes strongly against the grain. It needs to be learned and cultivated by daily application.
This, at any rate, is my vision of the shoe box universe. It is a metaphor that I find useful. Sorry if it offends.
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