Why isn't linguistics used as an argument against Christianity more often?

[RealityCheck]

Most of you already know that the evolution vs creationism debate has been addressed thoroughly.  I've found strong parallels studying linguistics and branching out to other languages recently.  I am a native Spanish speaker who recently picked up Portuguese and realized the extent of the similarities.  I moved on to French and other Romance Languages and realized that there are a ton of cognates an similarities in sentence structure.  I dabbed in Latin and found the root words of all these tongues.  To summarize, languages evolve much as life does by gradually accumulating "mutations" (consonant shifts, etc) to the point where mutual intelligibility is lost.  The equivalent of this in biology is two species diverging to the point where they can no longer mate.  When you move further away in the language tree, say jumping to Germanic languages, the differences become more and more. Some language families are utterly different to the Indo European tongues that most of us speak.

Now like life itself, languages too have their moment of creation.  This of course is the story of Babel and god making everyone speak differently etc.  Some Christians claim that Hebrew was the original language yet it's just another branch in the Semitic family related to Arabic.  Unlike digging for fossils in the ground, linguistics have more concrete evidence.  I recently read a poem in medieval Spanish and it sounded like some kind of transitional form between the modern language and Latin.  If you read old English, you will see the same link between the modern form and it's Germanic roots.  Furthermore, the time scales here can be measured in centuries rather than millions of years.  Hell, none of the modern languages even existed in the time of Jesus.  Some language documents predate the era when the story of Babel even took place and show that different families existed even then.

This isn't something that is usually brought up when debating a literal interpretation of the Bible.  The idea that all languages came to be at once is preposterous.

[LogicalFallacy]

That is a jolly good point and one I have never thought of considering.

 

Thanks for point it out.

 

To answer your question: Perhaps because the field of study is not as well known as other arguments? I think this should be studied and fleshed out.

[♦ ficino ♦]

Good observations. I think comparative philology had already gotten underway before evolutionary models were applied to biological species in a rigorous way.

 

 

[pantheory]

From my perspective most religious arguments are so ridiculous that it isn't worth my time talking about them. There really is no "real" debate concerning the validity of religion. Yes, some bright people believe in religion but few of them are well educated in the related facts. Many are happy believing in their religion and an afterlife, so to convince somebody of the stupidity of religion and praying, will not necessarily help them.

 

I believe that the motto should be "live and let live," which I believe is often the best policy. As to linguistics, I can see the possibilities of valid arguments against some religious ideas using linguistics, but would you really be helping the other person by presenting such arguments? Maybe not.

[RealityCheck]

21 hours ago, pantheory said:

From my perspective most religious arguments are so ridiculous that it isn't worth my time talking about them. There really is no "real" debate concerning the validity of religion. Yes, some bright people believe in religion but few of them are well educated in the related facts. Many are happy believing in their religion and an afterlife, so to convince somebody of the stupidity of religion and praying, will not necessarily help them.

 

I believe that the motto should be "live and let live," which I believe is often the best policy. As to linguistics, I can see the possibilities of valid arguments against some religious ideas using linguistics, but would you really be helping the other person by presenting such arguments? Maybe not.

I well aware that the debate against religion has been won long ago and rehashed to death.  I also know that you can't convince the willfully ignorant.  However, this is more akin to a tactician revisiting a historical battle and wondering why a certain tactic wasn't used at the time.

[pantheory]

4 hours ago, RealityCheck said:

I am well aware that the debate against religion has been won long ago and rehashed to death.  I also know that you can't convince the willfully ignorant.  However, this is more akin to a tactician revisiting a historical battle and wondering why a certain tactic wasn't used at the time.

 

got it