Cognition and Perception Commons^™

What Shall We Call God? An Exploration Of Metaphors Coded From Descriptions Of God From A Large U.S. Undergraduate Sample, Adam K. Fetterman, Nicholas D. Evans, Julie J. Exline, Brian P. Meier

Psychology Faculty Publications

People use numerous metaphors to describe God. God is seen as a bearded man, light, and love. Based on metaphor theories, the metaphors people use to refer to God reflect how people think about God and could, in turn, reflect their worldview. However, little work has explored the common metaphors for God. This was the purpose of the current investigation. Four trained raters coded open-ended responses from predominantly Christian U.S. undergraduates (N = 2,923) describing God for the presence or absence of numerous metaphoric categories. We then assessed the frequency of each of the metaphor categories. We identified 16 metaphor …