Here’s Tom Talbott from the second edition of The inescapable Love of God which he quoted on Fr Akimel’s blog;
My point in this post is to discuss Tom’s statement about an omnipotent Being instantaneously creating a language using person. First I’ll take a look at language and some aspects of how we learn language and some thoughts on what language means to us, and then explore how and if God could* instantaneously* create a language using person that would be sufficiently separated from God to be an individual.
I was reading a book by Gisela Krenglinger, Storied Revelations: Parables, Imagination and George MacDonald’s Christian Fiction, and at one point she quotes MacDonald quoting Carlyle in a section discussing metaphor:
This got me thinking more about language and brought to mind Tom Talbott’s thoughts above. I realized a certain wonder at language, how sounds and visual symbols are used to transmit thoughts ranging from the concrete and mundane to the exceptionally abstract or poetic. Thinking about language, I realized how deceptively simple it seems while actually being quite complex. This in turn made me think about how we actually learn language. Is the end result something that could be created instantaneously or is the process somehow important?
Let’s look at a simple word–“dog.” Our first exposure to the word was probably as an infant with a parent repeating the word while pointing out a toy, a picture or a living canine. After a series of repetitions, we learned to associate the spoken word “dog” with one of these, and hearing it repeated to identify another physical representation or actual dog, began to generalize the word to include similar looking creatures, pictures or toys. We also may have had increasing experiences with living dogs, some small some large, different colored dogs, some that bark and some that growl. We may have read picture books with stories about dogs or watched movies with dogs ("Old Yeller?). The possibilities of what the word “dog” referred to increased exponentially. In later years we may have heard the word “dog” used as a verb or as an affectionate greeting–“What’s up, dog?” There may have been an emotional connection with a family dog, perhaps with grief at it’s death. There may have been fear associated with dogs due to a dog-bite or attack. A Muslim child may have learned to see dogs as ritually unclean. Perhaps we read of dogs in the Bible licking Lazarus’s sores or outside the new Jerusalem. In any event, there are layers upon layers of association and meaning with even a simple word such as “dog” and these meanings are very individual. We may recognize what a word like “dog” refers to but the* meaning* for me and it’s associations is not the same as it is for you.
Take the word “cilantro” for instance. To me, it’s that green leafy stuff used in a lot of mexican dishes and salsas that I can take or leave. For my wife and daughters, it’s a nasty green herb that tastes like soap and should be avoided at all costs. 
Believe me, there’s definitely an emotional and physical association with cilantro for them.
We haven’t even looked at other words such as “father” and “mother” which will certainly have individual associations, meanings and memories. And what about “love?” How many different meanings that word has and how different the associations for each individual! I won’t belabor the point, but obviously words are not one to one representations and of course that’s what makes poetry interesting and communication so difficult at times.
So, if we wanted to “create” beings that use language “right out of the box”, how would we do it? In Perelandra, the second in C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy, the “Green Lady” (and presumably the “Green King”)–allegorical representations of a new Adam and Eve–are taught by apparent direct inspiration by Maleldil, the Perelandrian name for God. Imparting language in this fashion isn’t really “instantaneous” in the story, however. Having read the story many times before, the plausibility (or potentially* im*-plausibility of this) never registered with me. As an aside, I think it’s interesting that the protagonist in the first two books in Lewis’s “Space Trilogy” (and a secondary character in the third) is Elwin Ransom, a philologist.
From the wiki entry:
So, how might we create our being *de novo *with “language?” (With the assistance of an omnipotent God) It seems rather simple at first blush—why not “program” our creatures with images, feelings etc associated with various words or phrases? Simple!
Hold on a minute! Where do these associations, images etc. come from? The creatures have seen nothing, felt nothing, tasted nothing…they’ve experienced nothing!
Well, can’t God just implant the information from His knowledge?
Hmmmm……sounds reasonable until you think that if God implanted his knowledge of the word “tree” it would be more than all the minds in the world could hold. God’s knowledge of “tree” would include every tree that ever existed from seed/nut to death/ burning/ being made into furniture or rotting in a forest as well as every future tree, and every possible tree. Let’s not forget all the literary references to “tree” and emotional associations with trees (Liberty trees, lynching’s from a tree, “Hoap of a tree” …) It seems obvious that a human, or any finite mind, could not hold God’s knowledge of “tree”.
Perhaps, God could implant only a particular portion of his knowledge of “tree.” That might allow our creatures to communicate, but unless they could learn on their own, the idea of "tree’ would always be* God’s* idea. If everyone of our creatures had the same “data” implanted regarding “tree” and other words, then what makes them individuals, and perhaps more importantly, what separates them from their Creator? Even giving each creature a different portion or version of God’s knowledge doesn’t solve this dilemma.
Does Lewis’s description of Maleldil directly communing with the “Green Couple” in Perelandra solve this issue? Hmmm… Lewis does not describe this process in detail, but presenting images, ideas etc. directly into the mind of someone is pretty intrusive. The reduction in epistemic distance could be considered an elimination of “freedom” by free-will theists and I would agree as I see little difference between* Maleldil* “teaching” and “programming” in this scenario.
This is, I think, an extremely important point. If language (and the associations, emotions etc. associated with it) are “programmed” by God into his creatures, then the creatures themselves would be merely extensions of God without the individuality and capability for “independent action” that Talbott describes. I think this idea of creating* independent* creatures instantaneously who are “language using” may indeed be a “metaphysical impossibility.”
Thoughts? Any scenarios where you can see the capability of instantaneously creating a creature having language without the thoughts ideas etc being God’s ideas? I’ll tag [tag]Chrisguy90[/tag] who has an interest in philosophy and feel free to tag anyone else who might be interested in this.
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