 The term “model” in religious and philosophical contexts is related to but not identical with its use in scientific contexts, in ways Ian Barbour (1974) foundationally traced. Though there is some disagreement between the fields on whether models describe their target or not and what the point of modeling is, importantly, in both contexts, the term “model” (1) connotes that its target is somehow out of reach—not able to be directly examined—and, perhaps by force of this, (2) encodes a conceptual distance between the target and the model. In particular, the model is not a copy of the target but rather chooses revealing aspects of the target to relay by leaving out or distorting other  aspects.[15]  Think of a model of a city that is by design not to scale, precisely so viewers can see the relationships between the city’s streets, buildings and neighborhoods. Models are thus simultaneously epistemically instructive and humble.