In Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism, Robert Pennock takes a step in the right direction, toward genuine engagement with his opponents. I don’t think he gets all the way there, but he has made a start. You wouldn’t guess that from Phillip Johnson’s response to Pennock in the last issue of BOOKS & CULTURE (where Johnson speaks of “the kind of logical fallacy you can flunk an undergraduate for misunderstanding” and “these rather obvious points, which bright high school students can readily understand”), nor from Michael Behe’s review of Pennock’s book in The Weekly Standard (June 7, 1999, pp. 35–7). In particular, both Johnson and Behe are dismissive of what Johnson calls
Pennock’s centerpiece argument, the evolution of languages. Of course language has evolved, just as symphony orchestras and computer software have evolved. All these examples illustrate the often unpredictable results of interaction among intelligent agents. They do not support an inference that intelligence is not needed to produce either language or software.
Behe summarizes Pennock’s argument thus:
The Bible says that all the plants and animals were created within a few days of one another; the Bible also records that human languages were created simultaneously by God, to foil plans for the tower of Babel; so Pennock concludes that if he can convince creationists there is good evidence that modern languages arose from a common ancestral language, he may be able to get them to give up their insistence on the simultaneous creation of all living things.
So far so good; that’s an accurate summary. But immediately following this useful exposition, Behe proceeds to garble Pennock’s argument (we’ll come back to this in a moment) and muddies the waters altogether:
[Pennock] announces proudly, “To my knowledge no one has drawn this important parallel before” between linguistic and biological evolution. Well, no wonder. People who believe that the Bible trumps fossils and Stephen Jay Gould will also use it to trump Noam Chomsky and Indo-European roots.
But Pennock is being disingenuous. His target is not biblical literalists; it’s intelligent-design theorists, who have no quarrel with linguistic changes. His whole etymological argument stands as an exercise in misdirection: The point is simply to leave an association in the reader’s mind between the design argument and the inability to see that French is similar to Spanish.
So, let us say we have read Pennock’s book and also Johnson’s and Behe’s dismissals. Where do we begin sorting all this out? And, come to think of it, why should we bother? The answer is that unless we are merely pretending to respond to a particular argument, when in fact we are simply trotting out a stock response, we are obligated to read and respond with a degree of attention and care. Johnson and Behe have not done that, and their responses are in this respect characteristic of the polemics of the intelligent-design movement.
First, Behe’s quotation—which is taken out of context—grossly misrepresents Pennock’s argument. Pennock does not say that no one before him has pointed out the parallel between linguistic and biological evolution—a claim that would be an utter absurdity. On the contrary, Pennock devotes considerable attention to the nineteenth-century comparative linguist August Schleicher, one of Darwin’s first champions in Germany, and the interplay between the maturation of historical linguistics and Darwin’s evolving theory—a subject that receives book-length treatment in a superb monograph by Stephen Alter, Darwinism and the Linguistic Image, published after Pennock’s book had already gone to press. Alter shows how the potent image of Darwin’s “Tree of Life” paralleled the “family tree of language” shown in countless versions in nineteenth-century linguistic treatises, the two images reinforcing the authority of each other in the public mind.
What is novel about Pennock’s argument is that he has noticed a seeming anomaly. Christians who reject evolution because they believe that it conflicts with the account of creation in Genesis rarely trouble to consider the implications of the Tower of Babel story for the study of language.
Once said, this seems painfully obvious—so Behe’s “no wonder”—but it had never struck me before I read Pennock’s book, and it seems a point well taken. Now, Behe is certainly right that Pennock’s point is directed toward Christians whose traditions of biblical interpretation hew closely to what they call a “literal” reading of Scripture; other Christians may say, What’s the problem? But isn’t Behe rather cavalier in his scorn for those who do feel the pinch here? Recall his words: “People who believe that the Bible trumps fossils and Stephen Jay Gould will also use it to trump Noam Chomsky and Indo-European roots.” (Chomsky, by the way, is out of place here; his disdain for most ac counts of the evolution of language is notorious.) The dismissive tone suggests that it is simply a waste of time to reason with such people, because they are clearly beyond persuasion. But who are these people? Perhaps some of those who welcomed Behe to Wheaton College? Perhaps some— a majority?—of those who made Behe’s brilliant book, Darwin’s Black Box, a commercial success? Perhaps even some of Behe’s fellow Roman Catholics?
Certainly, among these “people” are some prominent members of the intelligent-design movement. It seems odd, then, for Behe to charge that Pennock has been “disingenuous” here. Isn’t Behe himself disingenuous in suggesting that there is a clear dividing line between, on the one hand, those “people” who come from a tradition of biblical literalism, and, on the other hand, the “intelligent-design theorists,” when in fact within the intelligent-design movement there is quite a range of views with regard to Scripture and the role of extrabiblical evidence?
Inside every movement there is great pressure to maintain a united front against opposition. So when, in 1972, two graduate students in invertebrate paleontology, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould, published a paper arguing that the fossil record is non-Darwinian and putting forward their own theory of “punctuated equilibrium,” there were howls within the Darwinian establishment. Who knew what the pointy-headed creationists might do when they got wind of that? One hopes for something better from the intelligent-design movement.
Let us then consider Pennock’s idea without prejudice. Suppose, instead of the origin and diversity of species, our subject is the origin and diversity of human language. In the more than 6,000 languages spoken in the world today, we witness a mind-boggling array of mutual unintelligibility. And yet, since the beginnings of historical linguistics in the late eighteenth century, we have known that many languages that appear to the untutored eye and ear to be completely unrelated are, in fact, in the oft-quoted 1786 formulation of Sir William Jones, “sprung from some common source.”
The issue is not, as Behe puts it, “the inability to see that French is similar to Spanish.” It is rather the implications of the fact that languages as various as Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin are all members of the same family, having evolved over time (through sound-changes, influence of contact languages, and so on) to a point where their common ancestry was hidden.
And once our attention is fixed on changes in language over time, we notice something else that’s pertinent to the debate over design. For the most part, these changes do not fit our everyday conception of “design”; that is, they do not appear to be purposeful. (Are the comparisons suggested by Johnson—changes in language, he says, are analogous to changes in software and symphony orchestras—valid?) In this they resemble many changes in the biological world. And that, in turn, highlights the frequent carelessness with which the term design is used by the intelligent-design movement.
These parallels suggest that we should not so hastily dismiss Pennock’s argument here. It would be interesting to learn, for instance, the extent to which professors of linguistics at fundamentalist and evangelical colleges wrestle with questions regarding the evolution of language. Is it an issue at all? (Reports from the field would be welcome.)1
Is the fault all on Johnson and Behe’s side, then? Hardly—for Pennock’s assumptions about human language go well beyond the evidence provided by historical linguistics. “Language,” Pennock writes,
has often been taken as a unique, distinguishing characteristic that separated humans from other animals and thus as a reason to think that humans could not have evolved from them. Darwin discussed this point in the Descent of Man and adduced evidence that other animals do possess rudimentary forms of language. Though the study of animal language remains controversial, it is fair to say that recent evidence has further supported Darwin’s argument that the differences are of degree rather than of kind.
But just at this point, with the reader naturally expecting some support for these claims, Pennock breaks off, saying that he will not pursue this subject because “much that has been written on the subject of glottogenesis, the origin of language, has been rather speculative, and it is only recently that good evidence has begun to accumulate”—all the more reason, it would seem, to present that “good evidence” to us!—and moreover, “my purpose here is to draw a parallel with biological evolution, and the latter is typically taken to include not the origin of life but rather the development of new life-forms from earlier ones. Creationists do focus on the ultimate origins question, but we will have to deal with that later.”
Forget about book reviews; what we need is paragraph reviews. At least 2,000 words would be needed to disentangle the evasions, the bluffs, and the non sequiturs in this masterpiece of misdirection. Here are a few salient points. Darwin’s understanding of language change was defective. He believed, for example, that “the better, the shorter, the easier forms are constantly gaining the upper hand, and they owe their success to their inherent virtue”—a notion that most historical linguists today explicitly reject. In fact, this sort of notion, equating language change with progress or “the survival of the fittest,” is held up for particular opprobrium in many linguistics texts.2 It is emphatically not “fair to say that recent evidence has further supported Darwin’s argument that the differences [between human language and the “rudimentary forms of language” found among animals] are of degree rather than of kind”—hence, one assumes, Pennock’s failure to lay that evidence out for us.
It is absurd to say that “evolution is typically taken to include not the origin of life but rather the development of new life-forms from earlier ones,” with the added absurdity that, in contrast, “[c]reationists do focus on the ultimate origins question.” In fact, I have a whole shelf of books at home in which the origin and development of life are treated together from an evolutionary perspective as parts of a single narrative, and in common parlance, talk about “evolution” always at least potentially includes talk about the origin of life.
Later in this chapter Pennock re turns to the subject of the origin of language. He tells us that Steven Pinker “has argued persuasively over the years that evolution by natural selection is the best explanation for the ‘language instinct’ and that the purported gaps [between animal communication and human language] are not insurmountable.” In the next breath, Pennock acknowledges that “for both the origin of language and the origin of life science can as yet tell us very little,” but in the next breath he accuses members of the intelligent-design movement of resorting to “the God of the gaps argument” when they focus on these questions. Nowhere in the chapter does Pennock—a trained philosopher—take up and consider any of the philosophical arguments regarding the nature of language that—if they are on the right track—entail the rejection of the Darwinian account of language.
Here is a suggestion. Organize a book group around Pennock’s Tower of Babel and William Dembski’s Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology, just published by InterVarsity Press. Invite people who come to the subject of evolution from different starting points. Read both books carefully, in good faith, and with a healthy skepticism. Stir well and bring to a boil.
1. Pennock’s book prompted me to look in a number of evangelical commentaries and Old Testament surveys to see how the Babel story (Gen. 11:1–9) was handled. The answer is, very gingerly. For example, in Kenneth Mathews’s commentary (Broadman & Holman, 1996, in the New American Commentary series), which I have found helpful on other occasions, we read, “Genesis recounts a unique historical event in which God confounded human speech.” This could be taken by the reader to mean, as most Christians historically have assumed, that Babel was the source of the great variety of human languages, or it could be taken to refer to a unique “local” confounding of human speech (analogous to a “local” flood, and equally universal in its symbolic import). Typically, such texts do not address conflicts between a “literal” interpretation of the Babel story and extrabiblical evidence from historical linguistics and related fields—in contrast, for instance, to treatment of the Flood, where in some cases the conflict is addressed, with a proposed resolution supplied, however unsatisfactory; see Davis Young’s excellent book, The Biblical Flood: A Case Study of the Church’s Response to Extrabiblical Evidence (Eerdmans, 1995).
2. There are exceptions; see for example the anthropologist Daniel Nettle’s book, Linguistic Diversity (Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), especially pp. 30–5. Like Nettle—and Darwin—Pennock himself seems to believe that much language change can be explained by natural selection, but he never lays his cards on the table to show us the linguistic equivalent of biological fitness.
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