Tuesday 20 May 2008

The wonders of language, and how human speech defies atheism

If you're a Kenyan who's been to school, you'll almost certainly (depending on what region of the country you live in) be able to speak three languages fluently: your (tribal) mother tongue, Swahili and English. I've studied a few languages, but by that standard I'm still lacking.

Once you've studied a few (I think I'm on my seventh now, despite only being able to hold functional conversations in three), some things become clear. Beyond the vast differences between them, there are certain constants. These are what make learning another language possible! There are certain facts of grammar which transcend the variations and without which we cannot even conceive of a human language. We use tenses to distinguish past, present and future with all the subtle shades in between (future perfect continuous, anyone? Or in English - "I will have been running for 1 hour"). We have the concepts of 1st person, 2nd person, 3rd person, singular, plural. We have ways of expressing positive and negative; verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs. The differences may be vast and one language may have quirks and features that another completely lacks. (For example, an English person can learn French without much conscious knowledge of grammar because of the structural similarities between the two languages; but trying to learn Biblical Greek without a primer in grammar would be futile). Nevertheless, these features transcend human language, wherever it is found.

If you've studied this kind of area before at any level, you'll remember that transcendence in general is a big problem for atheistic thinking. It smells of the dreaded Platonism - the idea (which goes back way beyond Plato) that beyond the immediate world of sight, taste, touch and the man jabbering at me in Swahili, there is some kind of set of ideals, the mould from which all that we can experience through sense here below is cast from. It is the idea that the material world is not the total or even the basis of ultimate reality - that there is an unseen world that is in some way superior to it and which has imposed upon the material world.

The atheist essentially has to claim that there's something necessary in matter and the laws governing matter that made the transcendent features of human language inevitable. That is, he has to say that somehow, from the moment that the Big Bang occurred, it was inevitable that the future perfect continuous had to arise - that it was built somehow into the fabric of matter, just waiting to manifest itself given enough time and the outworking of the inevitable laws. This is a very difficult claim for the atheist to make, and has to be accepted entirely on faith: no empirical proof for it exists or is even conceivable. There are plenty of living creatures in the world that communicate all that they wish to without using the features of grammar. They communicate through tone, through smell, through frequency (even in ways we cannot detect without special instruments, e.g. bats using ultrasound) - but not using grammar. Somehow, grammar is uniquely human. "Uniquely human" is another phrase that causes thoughtful atheists pain, because the Darwinist doctrine which they hold to is designed to obliterate the idea of the uniqueness of humans. The uniqueness of humans is a creationist idea - Darwinists rather hold that humans, bats and cabbages all exist as cousins in a single tree of life. But how to explain the vast gulf that separates our language from theirs, should they even have any?

No plausible evolutionary theory for the development of human language yet exists, because human languages have this irreducible minimum of complexity. There is no smooth and gradual pathway from communicating without tenses to communicating with them. The 3rd person plural cannot evolve gradually out of the 3rd person singular or the 1st person plural. Without all of the features mentioned above and many more and the various relationships between them, human language cannot exist. These features have to all exist, together, at once - the very opposite of the idea of evolution.

The Bible tells us that human languages were imposed from above rather than gradually developing from below (Genesis 11). God wished the rebellious people at Babel to not be able to communicate with each other, so he confused them - whereas before they spoke one language, from then on they spoke many. However, God also wished humanity in due time to communicate, as the good news of his mercy was to be preached through the whole world. Hence he didn't give us all languages that have nothing in common so that we could never get a handle on anyone else's speech. It's no surprise that human language, whilst amazingly diverse, has a transcendent unity - the Bible tells us so.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Samuel Skinner
Or it could simply be that people have a limited vocal apparatus and that we have specific parts of our brain that are biased towards certain grammar structure. I mean, why now kids do- they can make pidgin into a real language.

David Anderson said...

You've given essentially the same answer that I anticipated in the blog post itself: "The atheist essentially has to claim that there's something necessary in matter and the laws governing matter that made the transcendent features of human language inevitable. ... This is a very difficult claim for the atheist to make, and has to be accepted entirely on faith: no empirical proof for it exists or is even conceivable."

But, given that you appear to believe that your own use of language is forced upon you by your brain, I shouldn't really reason with you about it as presumably your answers are also pre-determined by your brain and so any idea of intelligent discussion with you is just an illusion!

David