Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. In John 14:6, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The goal of Anchored by Truth is to encourage everyone to grow in the Christian faith by anchoring themselves to the secure truth found in the inspired, inerrant, and infallible word of God.

And the Lord said, “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, … now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them. Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, ... Therefore its name is called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

Genesis, chapter 11, verses 6 through 9, New King James Bible

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VK: Hello! I’m Victoria K. Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. We’re very glad to be with you today as we continue the series we started several weeks ago on Anchored by Truth. We are calling this series “10 Facts Every Christian Needs to Know.” In the studio today we have RD Fierro. RD is an author and the founder of Crystal Sea Books. Today we are going to cover the 9th of the 10 facts that we are discussing during this series. For any listeners who want to hear the discussion about any of the first 8 facts episodes of Anchored by Truth are all available on their favorite podcast app or from our website crystalseabooks.com. RD, can you give us a brief overview of what we have covered in this series to this point.

RD: Well, I’d like to start by also saying hi to the listeners joining us here today and thanking everyone for their interest. As you just mentioned this series is all about giving listeners a solid factual foundation for being assured the Bible is the inspired, inerrant, and infallible word of God. People need that today because so many of the narratives that circulate in our culture today not only don’t acknowledge the Bible as the word of God but they actively promote the fallacious notion that science, archeology, and history “disprove” the reliability of scripture. This notion is countered by the facts but frankly those facts won’t do anyone any good if they are not aware of them. In this series we want to highlight some those facts. So, the first 5 facts we covered demonstrated that the popular narratives of Deep Time, evolution, and uniformitarianism don’t possess nearly the quality of scientific support that they are normally assumed to possess. In short, these narratives aren’t trustworthy as a basis for forming a coherent worldview yet these narratives are often used as the basis for doing away with the need for God to explain the physical universe and life. Now, with fact number 6 we moved on to beginning our demonstration that the foundational book of the Bible, Genesis, is, in fact, a trustworthy foundation for our understanding of the universe, life, and human history. And that’s the theme we are continuing as we move through these last 5 of the 10 facts. We are showing that the most disputed book of the Bible, the book of Genesis, is a reliable record notwithstanding the many attacks that are hurled against it.

VK: So, thus far, we saw from fact 6 that the available evidence demonstrates that Moses was the author of Genesis and the other 4 books of the Pentateuch – the name given to the first five books of the Bible. Why is it important that we know that Moses wrote Genesis?

RD: Because it helps us date when Genesis was written. The traditional date assigned to Moses writing the Pentateuch is in the 15th century B.C. Many scholars place the composition starting around 1445 or 1446 BC which is the so-called “early date” for the start of the Hebrew exodus out of Egypt. But even the scholars like the supposed “late date” for the exodus would place the composition of the Pentateuch in the 13th century BC.

VK: In other words Genesis and the other books of the Pentateuch were written about 3,500 years ago. So, it is a reasonable question to ask whether we have evidence from those 3,500 years of human history that we can point to as validating the record that Moses gave us.

RD: And the answer to the question is a decided “yes.” So, we began our demonstration of the fact that the events described in the book of Genesis have left their imprint on today’s world with facts 7 and 8. Fact 7 was that there is not only geological and paleontological evidence the flood of Noah occurred as described by the Bible (which we covered with fact number 3) but also that there is geographic, historical, and linguistic evidence of the reliability of the text. Said slightly differently, there is considerable evidence that the names of Noah’s grandsons have been preserved in remarkable ways on at least 3 different continents – in the names of cities, regions, rivers, tribal names, and in languages. Fact 8 that every Christian needs to know is that the Biblical time periods and population sizes are far more reasonable when it comes to explaining the current size of the world’s human population than the alternatives that are commonly believed. We pointed out that to go from 3 reproducing couples to 7 to 8 Billion people in a period of 4,500 years you don’t need an outlandish population growth rate – one-half of one-percent a year will do it.

VK: So, with facts 7 and 8 we can see that we can still see evidence all around us of the truth of the book of Genesis. You do need to know where to look but it’s not all that hard. And Genesis fits the world as we know it far better than the evolutionary and Deep Time alternatives. Last time we pointed out that if humans had been around for a million years, as the evolutionary hypothesis would have us believe, the current population of the earth is far smaller than would be expected. To explain this discrepancy those who support the evolutionary hypothesis say that famine, disease, plague, etc. simply kept the earth’s population greatly suppressed for most of our history. But this would mean the human population of the earth was literally on the brink of extinction for 99.9% of the time of its existence. That seems to be at odds with the idea that we are the “fittest” creature on the earth when it comes to survival. If we were so “fit” we should have been reproducing a lot more.

RD: Yes. Genetic researchers have found by comparing DNA from different humans around the world that humans share roughly 99.9% of their genetic material. In other words humans, no matter where they live on the earth, are almost completely identical, genetically. Geneticists tell us that human beings exhibit very little polymorphism, or variation.

VK: Polymorphism, as related to genomics, refers to the presence of two or more variant forms of a specific DNA sequence that can occur among different individuals or populations. Simply put, the absence of polymorphism means that a given cohort of living creatures displays very little difference genetically. Species that have existed for hundreds of thousands or millions of years would be expected to show some amount of polymorphism because mutation in individuals would gradually lead to perceivable differentiation. But studies of humans don’t show this.

RD: The lack of a significant amount of polymorphism is consistent with a recent human origin. It is also consistent with a global flood where everyone on earth except for one family died. Evolutionary models of origins would not predict such low human genetic diversity. Mutations should have produced much more diversity than 0.1% over millions of years. Again, this means that pretty much the entire population of humans on the earth provides testimony to the accuracy of the first several chapters of Genesis.

VK: Let’s remember that Moses wrote Genesis about 1400 years before Jesus lived. He would have had very little knowledge of civilizations and peoples outside of Egypt and Palestine. Yet far away from where he was writing people were living and developing in exactly the way we would expect if the account he was writing was true. We still see that today. The size of the earth’s population is consistent with a significant bottleneck that occurred about 4,500 years ago. Moreover, the names of nations, rivers, and even languages give testimony to the first generations that emerged from the ark after the flood waters receded. The lack of genetic diversity among human beings today testifies to a common ancestor. And as we have covered on other Anchored by Truth shows even the bit of DNA contained in human mitochondria gives evidence that people today can trace their ancestry back to 3 female ancestors.

RD: So, we can demonstrate that Moses gave us an accurate record of the creation of the earth – and its subsequent destruction by a global flood – by taking a look at the current population of the entire earth. But we can also verify that the Bible’s description of what happened after the flood is also validated. Today, we want to consider the famous episode of God’s confusion of the language that occurred at Babel. So, the 9th fact that every Christian needs to know is that we see evidence of the Bible’s accuracy through the study of linguistics and languages. Let’s start this discussion by noting that it is not easy to study the differences or commonalities in languages.

VK: Scholars often say that there are two major ways of classifying languages. All languages exhibit certain characteristics. They obey certain rules and constraints that apply to word order and other conventions. These rules are referred to as syntax. In addition, of course, all languages have vocabularies of their own. Each assigns meaning to particular sounds or collections of written symbols. In other words each language has its own vocabulary and its rules of grammar and syntax tell the users how to arrange that vocabulary to communicate.

RD: And, interestingly enough, this construction pattern for language is innate in human beings. In his book, The Genesis Account, Dr. Jonathan Sarfati notes an instance where a group of about 500 deaf children in Nicaragua developed their own unique sign language. One behavioral neuroscientist from Rutgers, Judy Kegl, described what happened as “the first documented case of the birth of a language.” Dr. Kegl reported that the sign language invented by the deaf children displayed all the characteristics of other languages such as noun and verb agreement, subject-verb-object sentence construction, and distinct hand shapes and movements that were the building blocks of their communication. Dr. Kegl said, “It’s clear evidence of an innate language capacity.”

VK: So, the two ways of classifying languages look at these two different aspects. Typological classification looks at grammatical structures and classifies languages accordingly. But in the middle of the 20th century Dr. Joseph Greenberg came up with a new way of classifying languages that is often referred to as the genetic approach. The genetic qualification of language uses ‘core vocabulary’ to classify a language. Core vocabulary are words that don’t change much over time. The method aims to see how many of these words are similar in different languages. Core vocabulary includes words that every vocabulary would be expected to contain such as words for body parts, numbers, and personal pronouns. When clear patterns of similarities between languages are observed, then those languages are said to be related. Greenberg’s method has become the most commonly used way of comparing languages because it works well for languages that don’t have an abundance of historical written material that can show changes in language structure over time. Greenberg developed his method after noting that several African languages which had puzzled linguists had similar sounding words for similar things so he concluded those languages must be related.

RD: Core vocabulary between related languages is never identical, but similar, or ‘cognate’. An article from Creation Ministries International on this subject, entitled “The tower of Babel account confirmed by linguistics” says this about cognate words. “Words are cognate when they are shown to be consistent to the pattern of phonetical change that has taken place in the past. For example, the word tahi in Tongan might not look like kai in Hawaiian, even though they both mean ‘sea’. But, if you also compare Tongan tapu to Hawaiian kapu (both meaning ‘forbidden’) and Tongan tanata to Hawaiian kanaka (meaning ‘man’) you begin to see a pattern: Where Tongan has an initial ‘T’ Hawaiian has an initial ‘K’, and one begins to see that the words might be related. They are cognate.”

VK: So, linguists can compare languages by their structure and by their vocabulary. But how do linguists decide that languages are “different?”

RD: A common definition of a different language is mutual unintelligibility. In other words languages are different when speakers of one language cannot understand speakers of another language. Of course, there are instances where speakers may be using different dialects of the same language. The speakers may be able to understand one another by there are still distinct differences in pronunciation, word usage, vocabulary, etc.

VK: George Bernard Shaw once famously said that “The British and the Americans are two great peoples divided by a common tongue.” His observation was pretty clever but speaking precisely British English and American English are probably best described as being different dialects that had their origin in the same tongue. So, how does all of this help us with our 9th fact that we see evidence of the Bible’s accuracy through the study of linguistics and languages?

RD: Because of what we see in language variance around the world. For the reasons we mentioned briefly above there is no precise count of the number of the world’s languages. But it is commonly thought that there are 6,000 to 7,000 different languages spoken around the world. That seems like a lot but that number becomes a lot less daunting when you consider that those 6,000 to 7,000 languages are usually grouped into about 20 or so language families. For instance, the language family that includes English is the Indo-European family. The Indo-European family covers most of Europe plus a part of south west Asia. In northern Europe there is the Uralic Family, which includes Finnish and Hungarian. In north-east Asia we find the Chukchi-Kamchatkan family. Central Asia and the rest of northern Asia host the Altaic family, which also contains Turkish. Southern Asia is considered to have another 3 or 4 language families and the Caucasus region may have two further families. The Pacific region has three or four families. The languages of the Australian Aborigines are usually grouped as one family, as are the languages spoken on mainland Papua. There is no agreement on the treatment of Tasmanian, which is now extinct. The Austronesian family includes languages spoken on Madagascar, the Southern part of the Malaysian Peninsula, the Indonesian Islands, the Philippines, and the Maori languages. And Africa and America each have another 3 or 4 major families.

VK: So, what all that means is that even though there are thousands of separate languages worldwide there are far fewer so-called language families. And languages are grouped into families because linguists can tell that those languages are related to one another. For instance we sometimes hear of the Romance Languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French. They are called Romance Languages because they are all derived from Lain which was the language of the Roman Empire. Languages such as German, Dutch, and English are often grouped in a group called the Germanic Languages. Languages such as Russian, Czech, and Polish are grouped into the Slavonic Languages. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that all of these groups share a similarity with some languages you wouldn’t expect such as Sanskrit and the languages spoken in India. So, all of these groups are part of the Indo-European Language Family.

RD: Exactly. And the fact that the languages spoken in such diverse places as England, Spain, Russia, and India all bear some similarity might surprise us until we think back to what we learned from our 7th fact – that Noah’s sons and grandsons left an indelible mark on history. So, harkening back, we remember that Noah’s oldest son, Japheth, had descendants that settled in territories that spanned the Eurasian territory from England to India.

VK: And all of this is very consistent with what we heard from our opening scripture today about God confusing the language at Babel. In Genesis chapter 8 God had told Noah and his sons to “reproduce and spread over all the earth.” But we see from Genesis chapter 11 that the people had not obeyed that command. Instead they had remained together and begun to settle in a “plain in Babylonia.” And once there they decided to build a huge tower which seemed to be an expression of pride and arrogance. Genesis, chapter 11, verse 4 says the people said, “Now let's build a city with a tower that reaches the sky, so that we can make a name for ourselves and not be scattered all over the earth.”

RD: So, rather than spreading all over the earth as God had commanded they wanted to create a tower that would be a reason to not “be scattered all over the earth.”

VK: Given that the Babel incident is only decades after the flood it seems like those people had a pretty short memory. And at that point at least one of Noah’s sons was still alive. You might have thought they would have been more attentive to God’s commands given there was a rather stark example in the recent past of the consequence for disobedience. That’s a good lesson for today.

RD: You might have thought that – but no. At any rate, God decided to enforce his command by going down and confusing their language. This effectively forced the people to begin to separate and spread. It also gave birth immediately to several new languages which over the intervening 4,400 years or so have continued to transform into the thousands of languages that are spoken around the globe. And we have distinct evidence of the truth of the Babel account because there is no evidence of a common point of origin among the many language families. We can see that within the families there was most likely a common ancestor that is now lost – but there is no indication that there was a common ancestor for all the families. Linguistically, at least, the various families stand separate and distinct. This is not what you would expect if the evolutionary hypothesis were correct and there was a single point of origin of all the languages on the earth.

VK: Moreover, the Biblical explanation makes better sense about the number of languages in existence today. Let’s just say that God divided the language in such a way that there were several new languages. If there were 10 new languages present after Babel, then as time went on the languages would begin to change. New languages would come into being and some languages would fall into disuse or become extinct if the speakers all died from war or tragedy. In general linguists know that it takes hundreds of years to create a new language but languages can arise in very small populations. Today there are over 800 languages spoken in the country of Papua [POP-OOH-AH] New Guinea. For simplicity’s sake let’s just say that the number of languages present on the earth doubled every 400 years. That would mean that there would be over 5,000 languages present now after 4,200 years. That’s pretty close to the number of languages estimated to exist right now.

RD: Linguists also know that languages tend to get simpler through time, not more complex. Dr. Sarfati notes that “For example, in the Indo-European family, Sanskrit, Classical Greek and Latin had many different noun inflections for different case, gender, and number, while verbs were inflected for tense, voice, number and person. Modern descendants of these languages have greatly reduced the number of inflections, i.e. the trend is from the complex to the simpler, the opposite of evolution. … English has also lost 65 – 85% of the Old English vocabulary, and many Classical Latin words have also been lost from its descendants …”

VK: So, does all this discussion prove the truth of the Babel account in Genesis?

RD: It’s not correct to say that a linguistic analysis “proves” the Genesis account but it’s correct to say that it is consistent with Genesis. There’s really no way to prove that a particular event happened in history because alternative explanations are always possible. It is also fair to say that the Biblical explanation for the languages we hear all over the earth makes far more sense that the evolutionary alternative. The number of languages that are present, the linguistic relationship within language families and the lack of relationship among language families are all consistent with the Genesis account. It is yet another example of where accepting the historicity of Genesis allows us to form a coherent view of the world we see and hear – whereas the evolutionary hypothesis just leads to more and more questions.

VK: The point of this series and today’s discussion is to help Christians guard against the narratives that circulate so widely today. One of those narratives is that the Bible cannot be trusted. So, to push that narrative the critics must cast doubt on the reliability and authenticity of scripture. But reality pushes back on the claim that the Bible can’t be trusted. And that’s what these 10 facts that every Christian needs to know points to. Furthermore, the evolutionary explanations that are offered all come with significant problems. As we discussed in our last episode of Anchored by Truth if humans had been around for over a million years we should have countless numbers of additional people alive today. We should also find billions of remains and the artifacts of those who came before. We don’t find either. Moses wrote Genesis 3,500 years ago. Humanly speaking, he could not have known what the population of the earth would be in 2022, what languages would be spoken, or how the names of Noah’s grandsons would continue to be found in the names of rivers, cities, regions, and cultures. But God did. Moses just recorded the history God gave to him. He did so faithfully and accurately and we see the fidelity of his account all around us today. Sounds like a good time for a prayer. To close, for today let’s listen to a prayer for our friends. God meant for us to live in communities where we share the joys and trials of this world – giving each other mutual strength and receiving mutual comfort. We should all pray regularly for those friends and praise God when He gives us friends who pray for us.

---- PRAYER FOR FRIENDS

VK: Before we close we’d like to remind our audience that a lot of our radio episodes are linked together in series of topics so if they missed any episodes in this series or if they just want to hear one again, all of these episodes are available on your favorite podcast app. To find them just search on “Anchored by Truth by Crystal Sea Books.”

If you’d like to hear more, try out crystalseabooks.com where “We’re not perfect but our Boss is!”

(Opening Bible Quote from the New King James Bible)

Genesis, chapter 11, verses 6 through 9, New King James Bible

The development of languages is nothing like biological evolution - creation.com

• Cast doubt on God’s goodness

• Deny God’s truth

• Elevate self-importance

• Establish a replacement in the mind and heart for God’s truth

Cultural Narratives

One way to look at narratives is that there are primary and secondary narratives that circulate in our culture. The primary narratives are so embedded in our culture that they are not even noticed any more. They are like the framed prints on your wall. Initially you see them but as time goes by you notice them less and less. Eventually you only know they are there when a visitor comes in and remarks about them.

Deep time, evolution, uniformitarianism, and the equality of all religious viewpoints are now primary narratives in our culture. Only fools and the suspect disagree with them. The narratives we notice (such as the prominent social and political narratives) are secondary ones - the acceptability of abortion, same sex marriage, the difference between "green" energy and fossil fuels, "public" education, increased government control and regulation, etc. The secondary ones emerge from and are dependent on the primary ones.

• The Big Bang/deep time does away with the need for God as Creator.

• Evolution does away with the need for God as the Author of life.

• Uniformitarianism does away God as the Administrator of justice (become evil continually and God will wipe you off the face of the earth).

Since we've done away with God we now create our own standards for what constitutes "personhood," family, man's dominion over the earth, etc.

The problem is, of course, we didn't do away with God or His truth.

And the house built on intellectual sand falls when the river of reality hits it.

So, we will proclaim the truth to try to save some and maybe by God's grace many or most. People who doubt the inerrancy of scripture never think about any of this but they should.

The line from that which they doubt the Word to a life they don't want to live is very straight. The line grows even more straight as it uncoils - just like the hangman's rope.