It has always been a mystery to me how Adam, Eve, and the serpent were
taught the same language. Where did they get it? We know now, that
it requires a great number of years to form a language; that it is of
exceedingly slow growth. We also know that by language, man conveys to
his fellows the impressions made upon him by what he sees, hears, smells
and touches. We know that the language of the savage consists of a few
sounds, capable of expressing only a few ideas or states of the
mind, such as love, desire, fear, hatred, aversion and contempt. Many
centuries are required to produce a language capable of expressing
complex ideas. It does not seem to me that ideas can be manufactured by
a deity and put in the brain of man. These ideas must be the result of
observation and experience.
Does anybody believe that God directly taught a language to Adam and
Eve, or that he so made them that they, by intuition spoke Hebrew, or
some language capable of conveying to each other their thoughts? How did
the serpent learn the same language? Did God teach it to him, or did he
happen to overhear God, when he was teaching Adam and Eve? We are told
in the second chapter of Genesis that God caused all the animals to pass
before Adam to see what he would call them. We cannot infer from this
that God named the animals and informed Adam what to call them. Adam
named them himself. Where did he get his words? We cannot imagine a man
just made out of dust, without the experience of a moment, having the
power to put his thoughts in language. In the first place, we cannot
conceive of his having any thoughts until he has combined, through
experience and observation, the impressions that nature had made upon
him through the medium of his senses. We cannot imagine of his knowing
anything, in the first instance, about different degrees of heat, nor
about darkness, if he was made in the day-time, nor about light, if
created at night, until the next morning. Before a man can have what we
call thoughts, he must have had a little experience. Something must have
happened to him before he can have a thought, and before he can express
himself in language. Language is a growth, not a gift. We account now
for the diversity of language by the fact that tribes and nations have
had different experiences, different wants, different surroundings, and,
one result of all these differences is, among other things, a difference
in language. Nothing can be more absurd than to account for the
different languages of the world by saying that the original language
was confounded at the tower of Babel.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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