Sketches on Atheism

Linguistic Creationism

The following is taken directly from Uncyclopedia.

fingerprint-dm Linguistic Creationism is a theory stating that all of the natural languages could not have developed naturally, so they must have been intelligently designed by God when he destroyed the Tower of Babel.

ARGUMENTS FOR LINGUISTIC CREATIONISM

Irreducible Complexity: If you remove letters from the word “book” you get “ook”, “bok” and “boo”, all of which are nonsensical and hence not sustainable by usage for subsequent evolution into meaningful words. It is thus impossible that the word “book” developed from any other word, it must have been created by God so in order to be used.

Improbability of spontaneous linguistic genesis: It is highly improbable that even the simplest English sentences were formed from alphabet letters spontaneously, since the odds of monkeys banging away on hypothetical typewriters and in so doing generating a readable and semantically meaningful text is vanishingly small. Hence the English language must have been divinely created and bequeathed to us by God.

Anthropomorphic Principle: All of the sounds and words in spoken languages can be pronounced, and appear perfectly designed for us. If languages developed by mutations, they would have words like “wthgrrlndyksl” and “gvprtskvni” which would be impossible to speak and understand, hence, the change in a language can only be harmful and languages must have been created as they originally were.

Absence of transitional languages: There are no written texts in Proto-Germanic, Proto-Indo-European and other hypothetical old languages which may be demonstrably shown to be linguistic precursors of the English language. Since no visible stages of development, or transitional manuscripts, were found we can suspect all these transitional languages never existed and English was intelligently designed as it is now by a God proven to exist by the Scriptures.

First speaker problem: If Modern English arose from Old English, who did the first speaker of Modern English talk to?

Sunson homonymy: In the English language, the tongue spoken by Baptists, God’s own people, the words for the physical source of all light and the spiritual source of all light are homonyms. This suggests that God is trying to remind his chosen people of their Lord and Savior through his creation of language.

Word BookContradiction with the 2nd law of thermodynamics: The idea of a language spontaneouly arising into human usage and evolving from simple words over the years into its complex nature today from nowhere contradicts the 2nd law of thermodynamics as applied to information theory, which states that (linguistic) information will only degrade over time.

 

119 thoughts on “Linguistic Creationism

  1. Brilliant… as usual. Now if only creationists would think why this argument fails reveals exactly why creationism in all its forms equivalently fails.

    My hopes spring eternal.

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  2. This is so brilliant I not only cried while reading it (openly and proudly, btw), I also wet my pants. Just brilliant. I gots ta write me an article for Uncyclopedia. That’s my kinda book. I could do one on Pants Creationism. If pants began as dresses, where’s evidence of the one-legged transitional “pant’? Where?

    Liked by 1 person

  3. Please tell me you have made this up. This is hilarious.

    It reminds me of that joke about a white couple who wanted to adopt a child. The social worker suggested that they adopt a Chinese child but the couple seemed reluctant. Being pressed by the social worker they meekly responded that they couldn’t adopt a Chinese baby because they didn’t speak the language…!

    >

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  4. Obviously a malevolent Creator designed languages. They are used to convey incorrect and hostile information all the time, thus spreading human misery way beyond one or two minds that imagine it. Furthermore, taking the existence of religion into account as evidence of the existence of TOOAIN, such a thing could not have happened without language as a facilitator.

    Plus, the idea that languages could arise from tribes of people making sounds that gradually changed over time into the words we use today is just silly.

    Great post!

    Liked by 1 person

    • Ooooh, you’re a genius! Yes! I hadn’t looked at our mischievous Creator from this perspective before, but you’re right. A whole chapter can be written on the perversion of language, the mechanism of confusion. Great stuff 🙂

      Liked by 1 person

  5. Hilarious John! Love the welcome note: “Welcome to the Mother Ship of amateur comedy writing! (Amateur means we don’t pay you to do it.)”

    Thanks for sharing. 😀

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  6. Reblogged this on Primate's Progress and commented:
    To the arguments used here, I would add the following:

    Linguistic evolutionists cannot explain the origins of language. Therefore the theory of language evolution fails its very first test

    If English is derived from German, why are there still Germans?

    No one has ever observed one language change into another. Were you there?

    The real reason why people deny that the different languages were created by God, is so that they can use bad language. After all, if language is not God-given, there are no objective standards and anything goes.

    Liked by 1 person

  7. When I read the title I said to myself: okay, I have studied linguistics. Its some time ago, but I can write something about this. However, when I saw the actual arguments, I decided that I better invest my time into something else. I am not so young again and I better invest my time on intelligently designed things. Just one thing, about the absence of transitional states of language.

    I suggest to protect us from this terrible temptation of the devil, the devilish belief that languages developed historically, lets say a prayer together and repeat it three times:

    Fæder ūre, ðū ðē eart on heofonum,
    Sī ðīn nama gehālgod.
    Tō becume ðīn rice.
    Gewurde ðīn willa
    On eorþan swā swā on heofonum.
    Urne gedægwhamlīcan hlāf syle ūs tōdæg.
    And forgyf ūs ūre gyltas,
    Swā swā wē forgyfaþ ūrum gyltendum.
    And ne gelæd ðū ūs on costnunge,
    ac alȳs ūs of yfele.

    But lets forgyfaþ them, because the don’t know what they are doing and blessed are the poor in spirit, and so on, amen.

    (Sorry, my knowledge of old-english grammar is a bit fragmentary, so I don’t know the right form of ” forgyf” hiere).

    I suggest the authors of such theories visit a university library (there are such institutions in many english-speaking and non-english-speaking countries – such buildings have doors and one can enter them) and have a look at the rich collections of manuscripts (and editions of texts from such manuscripts) from antiquity, late antiquity, the middle ages, etc. The emergence of modern german, english, some of the romance languages etc. are actually well documented.

    But such efforts will probably be wasted. It does not make any sense to take sense to people thinking non-sense. If you shield yourself from any scholarship and science, you can of course invent any kind of nonsense. It is actually possible to believe in anything and if you just ignore any evidence and logic, you can keep such a belief.

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  8. Oh my goodness. I am willing to wager that any first year Literary Theory student would be able to pull this nonsense apart and not even break a sweat. Jacques Derrida must be spinning in his grave.

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  9. Pingback: Linguistic Creationism | Primate's Progress

  10. Could it be the old ‘boiling frog thing? You know—nobody notices incremental changes? Ol’ God may not be all that keen on evolution is other fields but She were clever enough to kick it off with languages.

    As for knocking down that tower, that’s just a nasty myth. God would never be so mean as to risk hurting anyone. I still think that one of the greatest philosophical works of modern times is Billy Connolley’s “The Man Who Sued God” …

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  11. FOR THE SAKE OF ARGUMENT I AM WILLING TO ACCEPT 90% OF THE BIBLE AS TRUE, EVEN ALL THE MURDERS COMMANDED BY GOD, BUT THE TOWER OF BABEL IS RISIBLE AND EASILY DEMONSTRATED AS A SILLY FABLE. .WE CAN TRACK PERFECTLY THE EVOLUTION OF LATIN OVER 2,000 YEARS INTO SEVERAL DISTINCT LANGUAGES. EVERY STAGE OF EVOLUTION IS ABSOLUTELY DOCUMENTED. THE SAME GOES FOR NOAH AND HIS BEASTS, JUST AS AN EXAMPLE, HOW HE CAPTURED 15,000 OF SPECIES OF BIRDS?

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  12. When I read, “Linguistic Creationism” by John Zande, atheist, my first thought was, “This just has to be another atheist hallucination!”

    But then you mentioned the Baptists and the cold hard truth of reality set into my bowels and made them go, “Oye!”

    Liked by 1 person

  13. Brilliant display of creationist logic. Even though it appears to be in jest, it captures the ass backwards ignorance we are all so familiar with seeing. I swear there are days I want to give them some credit for intelligence. Other days I just wonder how they get their shoes tied, and am amazed at how they figured out which hole the food goes into.

    Nooo Mak! Come back!

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  14. well, considering that the bible itself says that the creation of languages at Babel is nonsense (the chapter before insisting that people already spoke different languages), linguistic creationism is already a heresy!

    It’s amazing just how utterly silly the magical bible is.

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  15. “contradicts the 2nd law of thermodynamics as applied to information theory, which states that (linguistic) information will only degrade over time.” I’m sensing some irony here! Lol! Great post, John.

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    • I find it amusing how so many creationist folk cite the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics as ‘proof’ that Evolution is wrong. Perhaps one day I should ask one of them to tell me what they know about the First Law of Thermodynamics to gauge their knowledge of science (though having said that i am not sure myself what the first law is).

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      • It is an odd argument to toss onto the table, especially given that giant, hot, yellow thing sitting in the sky pumping free energy into the earth system 24hrs a day…

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      • Yeah, but the earth is a closed system because of that invisible sunblock god smears on everything including sparrows that then fall to the ground and the ‘styling gel’ people put on their hair… all ways to facilitate his Asperger’s need to count everything.

        And we ths god suffers from Asperger’s because we can align the symptoms revealed to us in the OT to YAHWEH’s autistic leanings:

        :average or above-average intelligence (the suffering of Job is particularly clever)
        :difficulties with high-level language skills such as verbal reasoning, problem solving, :making inferences and predictions
        :difficulties in empathising with others
        :problems with understanding another person’s point of view
        :difficulties engaging in social routines such as conversations and ‘small talk’
        :problems with controlling feelings such as anger, depression and anxiety
        :a preference for routines and schedules (come on… burnt offerings?) which can result in stress or anxiety if a routine is disrupted
        :specialised fields of interest or hobbies (especially how human gonads are used)

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  16. John, you’re making my head hurt! Please tell me that you’ve made this all up and no one is actually this stupid.

    My ex was a linguist by the way. He took his Historical Linguistics class while we were together, which amusingly sounded like Hysterical Linguistics with his accent.

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  17. Dammit! I so thought I’d coined this term! And when you ruined it for me a year ago, it hurt … this is just like another stab to my poor creative pride. But I guess I have to admit this is much funnier than mine. 😉

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