Language develops. But from what?

This tactless question makes materialists squirm in every context in which it’s posed. Especially if the question is backed up with a reference to Parmenides who already knew in the 5^th century BC that “nothing comes from nothing”.

In other words, before things develop they have to be. And when a materialist tries to explain how things came into being, he sounds childish at best.

In this as in most other areas, the Biblical explanation makes more sense on a purely logical and factual level – even if it’s read as a purely historical account and not a sacred text.

For example, Genesis helpfully provides the exact dimensions of Noah’s Ark. It so happens that these are ideal for any sea-going vessel, which mankind only discovered, or rather re-discovered, in the 18^th century AD.

Here’s what the same book says about the origin of language: “And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” (Genesis 11:6)

Keeping the Lord out of it and staying impeccably secular for as long as logic allows, this says that to start with all people had the same language. Actually, linguists agree.

An overwhelming majority of them accept that all Indo-European languages (which is to say just about all languages) came from a single source, what they call the Proto-Indo-European Language. The general belief is that it was Sanskrit, but most linguists agree that Sanskrit too had precursors.

That stands to reason for any polyglot. He’d notice that all the languages he knows share a whole glossary of common roots, and practically every word recurs in one form or another throughout the linguistic atlas. That much is beyond dispute.

But how did the very first language, whatever it was, come about? Was it a collective human effort similar to that which produced the King James Bible translation? Then, 54 scholars led by the poet and philosopher Lancelot Andrewes got together and spent several years arguing in Latin about every English word to be used.

We know that’s how the KJV was produced, just as we know that the first language couldn’t possibly have been devised the same way.

For language is inseparable from thought, and thought from language. Every word is the symbol of a thing, action or concept. These can’t exist in man’s mind without their symbols, and nor can the symbols exist without them.

For the proto-Lancelot-Andreweses to design their proto-language, they already had to have a language to discuss which symbols were appropriate for which concepts. This is a logical oxymoron we have to dismiss with the contempt it deserves.

Thus we arrive at what looks like an irrefutable syllogism. Thesis: thought is the defining and exclusive property of man. Antithesis: thought is inseparable from language and vice versa. Synthesis: ergo, thought, language and man are co-extensive. The proto-man always had his proto-language.

Plato knew all this, as he knew most othe things: “For myself, I consider it an obvious truth that words could only have been imposed on things originally by a power above man.”

Now let’s cast another glance at that Genesis 11:6. Suddenly it’s a bit harder to argue against, isn’t it? That perfect logician Sherlock Holmes did say that, when all the options but one have been discarded, the remaining option is correct no matter how improbable it sounds.

A materialist may argue that, since thought uses information delivered by the senses, and all animals are capable of processing sensory data, thinking isn’t man’s exclusive property. This is a logical fallacy known as petitio principii (begging the question, assuming the conclusion).

This particular fallacy, that thought comes from the senses, was destroyed by Aquinas back in the 13^th century. He distinguished between passive and active intellect. The former is indeed the ability to gather and process sensory data, and it’s common to all animals. Yet active intellect, the ability to raise sensory data to a generalised concept, belongs to man only.

Thus a dog may know that it gets dark at night, but only man can come up with the concept of night darkness. Language clearly divides its time between both types of intellect, which is why it belongs only to man and has done so since man took his first steps on earth.

Has it developed? But of course it has. Everything and everyone develops. However, insisting that development explains origin is another fallacy – but I’ve promised myself not to say nasty things about Darwin just this once.

The same logic can be applied to any institution man is assumed to have created, but could only have developed. The state is one such.

The materialist explanation is that at some point those primordial half-apes, the noble savages of Rousseau’s fancy, decided they needed to cooperate the better to protect themselves against other half-simian savages who were, by contrast, ignoble.

At that point, they got together in their cave, put their clubs aside, and designed a proto-state, the primitive entity that eventually evolved into the United Kingdom. This is yet another case of the simplest explanation being the silliest.

One can see how those proto-humans felt their natural rights to life, liberty and pursuit of wild animals were being violated by other proto-humans and indeed the stronger wild animals. In fact, people only ever talk about their rights when they feel they are under threat.

Yet for our ancestors to feel that way, they already had to have at their fingertips (or talontips, if you’d rather) the concept of their inalienable rights, something they were all entitled to and hence something they all had to come together to protect.

Hence the basics of social organisation had to exist from the very beginning, for otherwise there wouldn’t have remained any ‘primitive’ people to produce those ineffably beautiful cave paintings at Santander. That inchoate social organisation wasn’t delivered by any development, though of course it later evolved into more complex institutions.

The ancient thinkers knew all about such development millennia before Darwin, and they were aware of natural selection as one of its essential biological mechanisms.

Already in the first century BC Lucretius observed that it was by their superior cunning and strength that all existing species were different from those that had become extinct. Plutarch made a similar observation when he wrote about wolves devouring the slower horses, contributing to the survival of the faster ones and thereby speeding up the whole species.

“I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before,” was how Chesterton described his arrival at theological truth. Darwin could have said the same thing about his ‘discovering’ natural selection, but didn’t. He was a different kind of man…

Yes, I know I promised not to be beastly to Darwin. But you know better than to trust an old liar like me.