I Am A Language Learner...

What science people might describe as a law or process I see in terms of grammar: syntax and punctuation.  My world-view has a spiritualist intelligence as well, (I have been Christian since birth), but apart from religion I find points of divergence with the purely mathematical or logical description of the fundamentals of existence.

Words carry baggage.  The signifier does not always point to the sign, and indeed the signified may be found from many signifiers.  All roads lead to Rome, and many ways lead to Christ who is the only way to the Father.

Take “Evolution”.  Evolution as a word carries a particular denotation, but many connotations.  Does the universe display characteristics of evolution?  This is a loaded question: what does “evolution” mean to us as a word, and as a concept?  Is evolution another word for “development”, or “progression” or even “growth”?  Then yes, there is notable development of the natural world over time: we have evolved.  Or does evolution mean “development from one species to another without the need for God?”  Is evolution another word for “Darwinism”, which, like all –isms, has connotations of its own?

Do I believe “in Evolution”?  I believe that there has been development in the natural world, but I do not believe that this has occurred from amoeba to man in the absence of God.

Do I believe that God created “by Evolution”?  Adam and Eve were not Australopithecus, so perhaps not.  But did God establish a process of development that has continued for millennia and that there are now organisms in existence that were not present in Eden?  Yes.

I am a language learner.  What my friends the science teachers describe as laws, and the mathematicians describe as logic, I describe as grammar.  Newton’s apparently rigid system describes the syntax of the known.  Just as 5-3 does not equal 3-5, (but 5+3=3+5), “dog bites man” is not the same as “man bites dog”.  There is an order to what we have experienced, but there is also a freedom to experience more.  In this way I think evolution to be a good word, but I think emergence is a better one.  I like words, words are what I do.  Emergence describes two things for me:

1. The good is becoming better, development is a movement forward.

2. What we once knew in part we now know in greater part and will one day know in full.

The world is emerging, but so is our understanding of it.  The more the world emerges the more we have to understand, but the more we work on emergent thinking the greater our capacity to understand.  Science has evolved along with the natural world: wisdom and process have developed and so has the universe.

I like a “multiple intelligences” view of the universe.

Some see the universe as a system, with logic and laws

Some see the universe as a conversation, with grammar and dialogue.

Some see the universe as a song, with harmonies.

So, was “the big bang”?

A) An explosion of matter?

B) A voice which said “let there be...”?

C) A resonance like the note that shatters glass, leaving behind a hum which hums at different frequencies (or notes) depending upon the size of the shards?

If the universe is a song, like in option C, then for me as a linguist, (a holder to option B), it is the lyrics that matter more than the melody: but does that make one of us “wrong”?

And what set the vibration that caused the resonance (or the explosion)?  Whose was the voice?

If Option B demands a God, then does God-B demand that option?  Can a God-B speak God’s Creation into existence but then not continue the conversation?  When did God-B stop speaking if we can see evidence of “evolution” (and a new creation) taking place even today?