Languages

[Mister Agenda]

Atheist? So any explanation on any topic that is not taken from the Bible as an explanation, but let's say is based on observation, is to you automatically atheist.

Let me break it down for you.  The atheist has to explain how thousands of (DISTINCT) languages could have "evolved" or come about naturally in such a short period of time without a god intervening - such as in the Tower of Babel.  When I said "hard-pressed" I was being kind, in reality if one was truly open-minded to a deity did something, linguistic origin would be high on the list of the supernatural reasons as the only way we see what we see today.  It's why in a world that seeks to show God doesn't exist, language origin is avoided and you don't hear about it much.  You can't just try the old throw billions and billions of years at it to explain what we see today - recorded language only goes back a few thousand years, but it goes from nothing to an explosion of distinct languages.  Like what was shown in that computer model that placed a sort of origin of Indo-European language in Turkey a few thousand years ago.

You say 'the atheist' like some people say 'the Jew'. Speaking of linguistics, it's 'atheists' and 'Jews'.

Why do atheists have to explain an unproven and unlikely claim about languages evolving in a short time rather than a long time? Anatomically modern humans physically capable of all the vocalizations we can make today begin to appear in the fossil record with remains dating as early as 200,000 years ago; and they likely were preceded by hominids who already had primitive, or at least more vocally limited, languages.

None of this is because of anyone seeking to show God doesn't exist. The evidence could have pointed to a recent origin for languages, it just doesn't. Just because members of a rural tribe visited a city and heard lots of languages and came up with a magical explanation for how there came to be so many languages doesn't mean we should limit ourselves in the same way.

Others have pointed out the issue of conflating recorded language with spoken language. Believe it or not, the Sumerians had a language before they invented cuneiform to record it. Writing things down was such a good idea that other people started doing it to. It was writing that exploded, not languages.