Christian Linguistics: The Glory of Gods Creation Manifest in Language

Conformity of science and faith In my lifetime, which has been characterised mainly by agnosticism and acceptance of the Big Bang and evolution, I only recently began to question that what we are nowadays force-fed may actually be a theory which does not stand up to Gods purpose. Having been a Christian for about two years, I have kept my views on the development of the universe, generally adapting it to fit Gods design, accepting an evolution set out by God with intent. This seems to be what is now accepted by many Christians, a theistic evolution, a world millions of years old and with Genesis merely presenting in the terms of contemporary writers, with ages represented by days.

The flaw of theistic evolution However, a commonly proposed issue with this viewpoint is that the concepts of sin and death are united in biblical terms. That with the fall, by disassociation with God, by resigning ourselves to temptation, came death. For humans to have developed from ape-like ancestors, they would have had to at one point been primitive creatures without souls, with generations dying off over millions of years, allowing the fittest to survive, eventually giving us Adam. But then surely the whole concept of original sin falls apart? Does the Bible support this view, or are we Christians merely conforming to the world rather than conforming the world to Gods Word? Are we simply accepting what we are taught as the truth (evolution is still only a theory, we must remember) without questioning? Are we turning away from Gods truth set out before us in shame that the world might mock us? These questions have troubled me of late, as Ive wondered to myself if I am too wordly when I should be godlier. We Christians have serious questions to ask ourselves and it does not necessarily mean renouncing science. My field is linguistics, which is in its infancy compared to other sciences, and I am by no means an expert in natural sciences; however, it is necessary in order to be convincing to lay down certain principles that show creationism as a viable alternative to evolution. Other disciplines can be left to other Christians, but my responsibility is linguistics, my passion. But, in my transformation, my

primary passion must be the Gospel and, as it is God alone who meant me a knowledge of the mystery of language an expression of the soul itself, it has become a duty to conform the new science of linguistics to an entity compatible with Christianity. And, going further, to demonstrate the viability of creationism, and the manifestation therein of Gods glory, with language.

Are science and creationism compatible? Dr Monty White is an example of a modern man of science, who has a BSc with Honours in Chemistry, a PhD in gas kinetics and is learned in geology, yet fully believes in the literal interpretation of Genesis. From my basic scientific understanding, fossils lie at the heart of the calculation of the universes age. Nevertheless, carbon dating despite being a marvellous technology can only reliably date the age of an object relative to other objects. Certain aspects must be assumed in order to make the relative age meaningful, such as a constant rate of decay. But what is to say that there is a constant rate of decay? It is assumed that the layers of fossils were formed by cataclysmic weather events over many, many years, but why can it not be assumed in accordance with Scripture that there was one cataclysmic event that gave us fossils, i.e. the global Flood survived by Noah and his family? It is possible that, with dragons or great reptiles featuring in human cultures, that such creatures (dinosaurs) existed alongside humans before the Flood, but were not among the elect animals to be saved and therefore surviving only culturally; this would also suggest that the earliest humans were not simply grunting apes, but fully sentient people with little science but great conscience, cultural, understanding the world around them, and thus able to name the animals as stated in the Bible in a proto-world language. The Flood would have significantly changed the worlds landscape, accelerating the conditions, which are today assumed to have occurred over millions of years, in one single swoop. Those descended from Noahs family would have grown to be a completely new group of humans with a completely new world view, yet still sinful in nature and an inherited culture, if diluted and corrupted, from before the Flood, and also the same single language passed down to each generation. Darwins theory is not to be totally renounced, as communities of animals no doubt adapt to changes in their environment, and it is the fittest that survive, thus passing on their genes in a process of natural selection. But the metamorphosis of one species to another completely different species by

small genetic changes over millions of years is unproved. The scientific community has acknowledged missing links in fossils, meaning that these remain hypothetical until such fossils are found, but what if they never turn up? If we all have common ancestors, then why do some species remain apparently behind, and how could Adam and Eve exist at all as described in the Bible?

Babel language The idea of a Proto-World language is prevalent in linguistics, but cannot be proved by current standards. As the Proto-World theory would have it, language sprung up as a single specimen in a single early community of humans (in scriptural terms, a pre-Babel community). There are tentative examples of very limited lexical similarity between modern language families, as well as the key concept of a universal grammar proposed by Noam Chomsky and now widely accepted. Could language have existed before humans migrated to other continents?

In this theory, there perhaps arises a complication with the assumed biological origin of humanity, meaning that a Proto-World spoken language must be dated to anywhere between 50,000 and 200,000 years ago. Yet written language, beginning with phonosemantic scripts, has only existed for a few thousand years. The question is: how long was the gap between spoken and written language? If humans are endowed with a soul, thus reason and culture, and an ability to express all of these through the unique human power of language, would it really take several hundred thousand years to conceive of recording our language? Can linguistics help to prove that humanity might only be as old as written language? This would thus mean that humans were made human, that they knew language from the onset and that creationism is indeed a valid theory despite atheist scorn.

Avoidance of debate on the origin of language The youthful linguistic community has generally been reluctant to discuss the ultimate origin of language, which is judged to be beyond our current means, and any attempt to spark such a debate has been met with ridicule. Campbell and Poser (2008) remarked, the search for global etymologies is at best a hopeless waste of time, at worst an embarrassment to linguistics as a discipline, unfortunately confusing and misleading to those who might look to linguistics for understanding in this area. Stam (1976) wrote of a prevailing prohibition on the debate of linguistic origin from an 1866 meeting of the Linguistic Society of Paris.