Tuesday, May 5, 2020

Anti-Mormon Old Earth Creationist Attempts to Support Genesis 11 and the Diversity of Human Languages


In an attempt to preserve his belief in creationism (Old Earth), one anti-Mormon tried to give the impression that science supports the naïve view that all human languages came from the Tower of Babel (albeit, with significant recalibration of biblical chronology):

The findings of modern science and archaeology demonstrate the need to recalibrate traditional views about the chronology of the early events in Genesis but do not undermine their historicity. While no archaeological remains of the Tower of Babel described in Genesis 11 have yet been found, recent discoveries have pushed back the origin of temple buildings many thousands of years earlier than many scholars thought possible just two decades ago. Currently the oldest man-made structure in the world thought to be a temple is Göbekli Tepe, a site in southeastern Turkey dating from at least 9000 BC and perhaps as far back as 11,000 BC (Curry 2008; Schmidt 2010; Mann 2011), though the site has also been explained as consisting of houses with religious symbolism (Banning 2011). A recent study has suggested that the human languages of Eurasia evolved from a common ancestral language originating in the vicinity of the Middle East roughly 13,000 BC (Pagel, Atkinson, Calude, and Meade 2013; see also Ghose 2013). The authors noted a plausible link “the near concomitant spread of the language families that comprise this group to the retreat of glaciers in Eurasia at the end of the last ice age” (Pagel, Atkinson, Calude, and Meade 2013, 8474). These recent studies provide some admittedly tentative support for the conclusion that Genesis was correct in claiming that human languages diversified from an original language in the Middle East, but some ten thousand or more years before the time of the Jaredites by any current LDS reading of the Book of Mormon. (Robert M. Bowman Jr., “The Sermon at the Temple in the Book of Mormon: A Critical Examination of its Authenticity through a Comparison with the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew” [PhD Dissertation; South African Theological Seminary, 2014], 419-20)

In reality, none of the sources he references would agree that Gen 11, even with a recalibrated biblical chronology, would support the belief (common among LDS, I will grant) that all human languages came from Babel as a result of God confounding the languages of the area. This is a blatant example of abusing sources (in a dissertation, no less!)

I will pause to state that if a Latter-day Saint were to pull a similar stunt to support an aspect of our theology, this critic would (rightfully) call the LDS author(s) up on such.

As an aside, for a brief discussion of the diversity of human languages in light of Gen 11 and the Book of Ether, see Brant Gardner, “Excursus: The Confusion of Tongues in Light of Historical Linguistics” in Second Witness: Analytical and Contextual Commentary on the Book of Mormon, Volume 6: Fourth Nephi Through Moroni (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2007), pp. 171-76

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