Part 5 in 20 Atheist answers to questions they supposedly can’t.
7. How do we account for the origin of 116 language families?
8. Why did cities appear all over the world between 3000 and 1000 BC?
Short answer: Science! (and History, linguistics, etc.)
Longer answer: The precise phylogeny of human language is another unanswered question, and there are a cluster of theories drawing circumstantial-but-not-overpowering support from various features. Perhaps all the languages on earth are distantly related to a linguistic common ancestor, but any association has been ablated. Maybe language has been recovered multiple times by multiple groups. Maybe something else entirely.
The catalyst to forming cities is similarly controversial. Maybe they were formed due to a desire to worship. Or maybe they developed as agriculture allowed non-subsistence farming. Or, again, maybe something else.
Fascinating though this is, I want to spend more time talking about the Saunder’s bizarre view on how theories and evidence work. As the argument behind these questions was that a) biblical christianity thanks to the tower of Babel has a far better explanation for languages: Continue reading “Language, Cities, and inference to the best explanation”