You're listening to the Vice Chancellor's Hour, a ministry of Radio ABC 993 FM on the campus of African Bible University. I'm Jeremiah Pitts, a professor and administrator here at the African Bible University in Uganda. The purpose of Vice Chancellor's Hour is to provide biblical and theological teachings that are an extension of the ministry of the university. Welcome back to another episode of the Vice Chancellor's Hour. What a delight to be able to come back with you guys for another episode. This one's gonna be a little bit different. We just finished up a series on the book of Malachi, and I had a really good time going through that. It's such an encouraging book. I hope you were able to hear it. If for some reason you missed it, you can always catch it. Just Google VC Hour, and you'll find it's all over the place on podcasts for free. We put it out there so you can catch those old episodes. I'd hope you go back and listen to it, especially if you're like, I don't really know that much about Malachi. It is unbelievably rich. book, and it's so very encouraging, even through the tough spots of it, honestly. There's just so much encouragement for the book. We're gonna do something a little bit different today. If you've been listening to the show for a while, you know most of the time we stay very, very grounded in God's Word itself, and certainly the lesson for today is gonna revolve around something in God's Word, there's no question about that. But I did want to take just a small departure this time. I hope you'll forgive me if this wasn't what you're here to listen for, because it just so happens I have an area of expertise. And as I'm teaching some students here in African Bible University, occasionally this area of expertise comes up. So I have a number of degrees. I've got a doctorate, I've got two master's degrees, got a bachelor's degree. And my master's degrees are in different areas, so I do teach a lot of Bible here at African Bible University, a lot of theology, and that's what this show mostly is around. But I do have another master's degree, and that master's degree is in linguistics. And so across my professional life and my time here as well, I also teach some classes in linguistics for the students here. The reason I bring that up here is that occasionally, as I'm teaching linguistics, you know, here at African Bible University, we teach everything with a Christian world and life view, right? Now, you may say to yourself, well, how is Christian linguistics different from linguistics at the world, right? And I want my students to ask that question, too. It's not that we have a different linguistics, right? Linguistics is just the study of languages, how languages work. It's not that we have a different one, it's that we have a complete one. We have a full one. You say, what are you talking about? There's amazing experts in linguistics. There are, and a lot of them are secular, but at best, the secular ones only have part of the answer. That's going to come out, I hope, for you so you can see for yourself in today's lesson. So I'm going to give you a bit of something I give to my linguistics students because you need to see that anytime we give people an answer for the questions, especially the most important questions of life, and we neglect to teach them how it intersects with God, we're giving them an incomplete answer. My master's degree in linguistics is from a secular university in the United States, University of South Carolina, fantastic university, and their graduate linguistics degrees, especially at the time I was there, very well ranked, very highly ranked. We had some very legitimate experts in the field. And as a Christian, I was often able to see how it pointed me back to God. even though my professors were not Christians, by and large, and had no interest in me being a Christian, by and large. Nevertheless, as they taught me more and more about how language works with human beings, it actually pointed me back to God. So that's one of the things I want to give to my students, so that they can see it for themselves and as Christians, in this case in education, that they can understand how they can continue to direct their students at their Christian institutions back to God, by understanding how language works. Let me read to you a passage from the Bible. This is Genesis chapter 11. Now, the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they settled there. And they said to one another, Come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly. And they had bricks for stone and bitumen for mortar. And they said, Come let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of man had built. And the Lord said, Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Now, come, let us go down, and there confuse their language. so they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth, and from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of the earth." So there's no question that before that, there was language, right? This passage assumes there was one singular language before this action. Everybody was there together, but already speaking one language together. But that at a particular point in history, language became dispersed, means spread out all over the globe, and that there was differentiation, I mean, there was a change in the language. So languages all over the earth have differences, even though they have a common origin. That's the basis of this story. Now, you may ask yourself, what does that have to do with linguistics? It's a great question. Well, linguists are interested in the origin of human language. It's an area of great curiosity for linguists. Where does language come from? And it's particularly a problem for non-Christians because they want a purely naturalistic explanation, meaning they want an origin of language that comes from nature itself. And in fact, no sooner had Charles Darwin popularized this idea of evolution than he began to confront the idea of where language came from. He really struggled with it. And in fact, linguists have struggled with it since then. you may say, well, why haven't they come up with a good answer? Well, we can talk about that. There's some challenges. For one thing, spoken word doesn't leave any lasting evidence. I hope that's obvious to you. You can hear my words. There is a recording of me saying these words, but before we had that technology, when someone spoke, when you spoke, it was just gone, right? So if we're talking about, let's say, you know, six and a half, 7,000 years ago, there's no chance that you can know for sure how something was said, what the sound was, or what they were doing. And for that far back, before there's recording, we have to use secondary evidence. And what's the secondary evidence we use when we think about language? Like if you were trying to prove what language would be like, what would you use? Well, you would use writing. If you didn't have a recording, you'd have to use writing. But you have to know that written word and spoken word are not the same thing. There was spoken word, all over the place before there was written word. Before people were writing things down, they were still speaking to each other. I hope that's obvious. In fact, the best estimates for how old written, the best evidence for written language is only about 6,000 years old. Not only that, but when we teach language, when we learn language, written language is learned secondarily, meaning you learn how to speak and listen before you learn how to write. Hopefully that's obvious to you. So yeah, your written word is secondary to your spoken word. Not only that, as I mentioned, it's only indirectly related. As one prominent linguist says, your written word is static, meaning it doesn't change, structured by conventions, meaning we tell people how to do it. It has punctuation and it has to use space. When we talk to each other, we have all kinds of things we can hear, our tone and inflection and so forth. When you write, you have to add all these things to try to make those pieces a bit more obvious. You're trying to mimic in written speech what's easily seen or experienced, I should say, in spoken language. Not only that, but even the physical structures of humans don't do well across time. So like you might think of, for instance, your means of articulations, what the linguists call those areas of the body which develop what we use to speak. So your tongue is a soft tissue. Your lungs, your nose, the uvula, that thing that dangles in the back of your throat back there, portions of your palate, all these are soft tissues. your voice box, sometimes called the larynx. These are soft tissues. They mostly disintegrate. There may be harder pieces here and there to those structures, but they don't give good firm evidence. The soft tissues don't even last in the fossil record for the most part. And whatever bones are left only provide some indirect evidence at best of what human structures are like, and that makes it hard. So traditionally then, people who study the origin of human language have come up with, broadly speaking, two different theories for where language comes from. This is going to be a little bit technical, but I hope you're going to see how this points us all back. So if you'll just hang with me, I promise you the payoff for me personally for this is amazing. I hope it is for you too. A lot of modern linguists believe that what happened was human beings all started in a relatively small group of people in one place. spread out all over planet Earth and then suddenly developed the ability to speak simultaneously and independently of each other. Let me say that again. There are many linguists today who think a relatively small group of people who weren't able to speak yet spread out all over planet Earth and then independently of each other developed human language. Now, if you're thinking about what they're saying very carefully, you're going to realize how improbable that is, how unlikely it is. In fact, it's a relatively new theory, the idea that people dispersed without the ability to speak. Because if the ability to speak in human language is rare, how could it possibly have developed independently of each other? Well, they have some answers for that. They say, listen, other innovations happened simultaneously. If you go back through the record, the ability to use fire seems to have been developed among humans around the same time. The ability for agriculture developed almost simultaneously at multiple places on planet Earth. The ability to write developed seemingly independently of each other multiple places on planet Earth. So the question is, if these innovations—fire, agriculture, writing—if these can all happen simultaneously or near-simultaneously, independently of each other, why not language also? And in fact, all linguists agree that there's an innateness of language. What does that mean? Innateness means that the ability to create language and use language is an ability we have as part of who we are. It's a capability we have biologically from the beginning. It's part of who we are. In fact, they compare it to instinct. They say, hey, if we all have the instinct for language, wouldn't it make sense that language would develop wherever you found people? And again, this is actually the innateness of language is something all linguists agree on. I don't know if you can, again, wrap your minds around this. The most atheistic of linguists will agree that humans have a language capacity that no other creature on planet Earth does. that every single one of us that is not physically or mentally challenged in some way, that is we're intact, we all have it, we all equally have it everywhere. It's not something we have to program in a kid, we all have it. And there's no other animal that has what we have. They all agree on that. So they're leaning on that idea, right, that we're all innate, to say, hey, listen, if we all have this innately, I mean, it's just part of who we are as humans, wouldn't you expect it would actually develop? But there's actually some problems with this idea of polygenesis. There's a problem with this idea that we all spread out and developed language independently. What's the problem? Well, it's that when we compare language to other things, we have to be sure we're comparing like to like. You know, they'll say, well, you know, language may be developed independently, but other technologies certainly did. Fire, agriculture, those kind of things. The problem is language is not an invention, right? It seems like an invention, but it's not. Take, for instance, this. My children have watched my wife work in her garden continuously for years. and they themselves are not able to do much of anything in the garden. But language, just a child observing what we're doing, can cause them to be able to speak. Just pure observation. My children have seen me start a campfire, a cooking fire. They've seen me start fires numbers of times. Not one of them figured it out based on this. Every single one of them I had to sit down and do an explicit lesson on how to do it. I had to do it more than one time, explaining it more than one time, but language is not that way. We do just pick up language from our environment because it's who we are. We have some parts of us that are already there, and it takes that input, puts it together, and they're able to produce language. You just pick it up. And what's more, if you're around more than one language, when you're young enough, you'll just pick up more than one language. Two, three, four, more. Doesn't matter. If you're around it on a regular basis, you get enough input, you will learn those languages just naturally. It's just part of who we are. Because it's innate, it doesn't make any sense that it's an invention. It was already there. Where did the thing come from that's there that causes the language? I taught writing for a long time. Nevertheless, many people who've been around people writing can't write. Just being there and just seeing it happen is not going to make it. But language, well, language does work that way. Not only that, but the innateness of it actually pushes us towards monogenesis. If you're going to say language is innate, it's just part of something that humans are, wouldn't that seem to indicate we already had it? I mean, what would instigate it simultaneously everywhere if we all have it and we all had it at the same time? And that talks of a single source, not multiple sources. You see the point? And so for me and for a number of linguists, the thing that makes the most sense is actually that all the people were together, relatively small group of people were together. and those people all had language, and then they shot all over the world, everywhere, and they took that language with them, and the language continued to mutate as they were shot out. That's called monogenesis, one source, one beginning. Now, if we were going to say, what's the best argument for this? Well, I've already read the Bible to you, and I think the Bible is the account. We can trust God's Word, and it says that. It says exactly what happened. But we see that this is actually supported by a number of things. Take, for instance, this. There is a universal presence of language among humans. Literally not one tribe has ever been found that doesn't have language. Never. No matter how remote, no matter how far out, how isolated from everyone, everything else, not one has been found. Everywhere we go, where there's humans, there's language. So for us to imagine that we left each other and then developed language is to imagine something we have no evidence for, and that is a group of people who don't have language. We've never seen it to exist. We've never found one group anywhere who's like that. There is zero chance we'll find them. Not only that, but linguists have gone to great lengths to demonstrate that all of the languages we have are all related to each other. The language I speak, the language you're listening to, is considered an Indo-European language and has things in common with all other Indo-European languages. It's just like a genetic structure, but with languages so that we can go back and show that all of us are related. And if all of us are related, doesn't that recommend that there was one original source? I mean, if you went to the genealogy of me and my cousins and you found all of us were related to one another, wouldn't that point back to common ancestors? Well, that's exactly what we have with language families, isn't it? All of these languages are seen to be related to one another. Doesn't that recommend just what we find in Genesis chapter 11, of a singular source? And of course, that's actually what makes the most sense. What makes the most sense is precisely because we all have the ability for language, and because all of our languages are related, that wherever there were people, there was language. And that's exactly what we see in Genesis chapter 11. A people with diversity of language practices coming from a single source. Not only does it make the most sense, but the other option is so improbable, it sort of is confusing why anybody would choose it. And I can tell you, most of the time, the reason why people don't like the idea of a single source for all languages because they have an alternative theory about the dispersion of human beings, they have an alternative theory about the development of human language, and they don't want what the Bible says to be true, even if it makes the most sense and it clearly is the most probable. Innateness of human language is so clear that non-believers, people who don't even believe in God or in God's Word, clearly attest to it. One prominent linguist says, in any natural history of the human species, language would stand out as the preeminent trait. This linguist is telling you that if you're thinking about what makes human human, you have to think language. Another linguist says, as far as we know, humans have always had language. There is no creature we could think of as effectively human without language. It's part and parcel of who we are. So if there were a group of humans, they were speaking a language, just as we find there in Genesis chapter 11. Now it's kind of amazing because human language all has some things in common. In fact, linguists struggled for years to try to figure that out. How can we be sure about human languages? The guy who kind of cracked the code is a guy named Noam Chomsky. And he's credited with the idea that human beings have what's called a universal grammar, that we are made, essentially, with something that is itself language. And Chomsky's ability to prove that, it really makes him the father of modern linguistics, along with a few other traits as well. But this view posits that all languages have a few components which are interrelated, that all human language is equally creative, equally recursive, and equally rule governed. Every language has the capacity to create new forms and new sentences. That's why I would say it's equally creative. Take, for instance, the word computer. Before there were computers, there was no prominent word for the computer. There was no internet. There was no word for internet. We talk about wiki, like Wikipedia. There was no wikis, so there was no reason to call it a wiki. The word meme that we have now, it came into existence from the existence of memes. Well, originally it came from biology and was adopted that way, but before it was described that way, there was no word. We have the ability to do it. Not only that, but we have the ability to create sentences we've never heard before. We're not just mimicking each other. There's something there. And every language has the ability to change over time. If you have native speakers, in fact, you know for sure that your language will change over time. Not only that, but every language is equally recursive. Every language on planet Earth has the ability to create infinitely long utterances, limited in communication only by the memory of the listener. I can say I love pizza. I can say I love pizza that's found in the store. I can say I love pizza that's found in the store near the house. I can say I love pizza that's found in the store near the house of the girl. I love pizza that's found in the store near the house of the girl who I dated in high school. You see what I'm saying? I can keep going and going. Every language has the ability to do that. Every human language has the ability to do that. And what oftentimes comes as the biggest surprise to people is every language is equally rule governed. Yeah, and I don't mean prescriptive rules. I mean descriptive rules. I mean, rules we know are there. I can give you a great example of this. Let's say I'm creating a new word, right? There are things that can be a new word and things that can't, right? So if I told you Zunger, Z-U-N-G-E-R, Zunger is a new word, you would go, oh yeah, okay, that's possible. You don't know what it is, maybe, but it's possible. It looks like and sounds like a word. But if I said XXYDDTSXM is a word, it's a new word, you would say, no, no, can't be. That's not a word. It can't be a word. You have a sense that it's breaking rules. Where do those rules come from? That's a good question. In fact, when we look at where these rules come from, we find there's not a good example of where they could come from the stimuli alone. This is what's often referred to as the poverty of stimulus argument. Think about it. Children are able to create sentences they've never heard before, just as you and I are. Where does that come from? How can they do that? How can they say something they've never heard? How can they make constructions that they've never themselves experienced? They're not just mimicking or repeating, but they're creating and oftentimes doing it correctly. You yourself are able to create sentences you've never heard. They may contain components that you're aware of, but it will be a new and utterly new sentence. In fact, many people create words, create combinations of sounds, which mean something, and then are attached to them. There's new words being developed in all of the languages all the time. Something not provided by the environment is created. There's something innate. There's something in us. It's like we were created with it. And the best explanation for this phenomenon is just what Noam Chomsky has said, that there's something in us, just like we find in Genesis chapter 11. The people are there, and they have language already. They were created with language. Before there was Darwinian evolution and it affected linguistics, it was thought that really there was no pre-human existence and no pre-linguistic human experience, as one linguist put it. And because of that, everyone assumed that language itself was divinely inspired. And, of course, that explanation actually happens to be the one that makes sense. So what we're given as an alternative is, supposedly, there has to be—well, these people want to say, essentially, it can't be God, and so it has to be naturalistic. But is that accurate? Well, let's listen for Noam Chomsky himself. Chomsky's by no means a Christian, by no means interested in believing the God of the Bible or the evidence in the Bible. This is what he says in his book Language and Mind. It is perfectly safe to attribute this development to natural selection. Sounds like Darwinianism, doesn't it? so long as we realize there is no substance to this assertion, that it amounts to nothing more than a belief that there is some naturalistic explanation for these phenomena. What is Chomsky telling you? Though he's convinced he lives in a purely natural world, that there is no divine being interjecting himself in human history, Chomsky is not a believer. He himself says it's just a belief that it's natural. There is no evidence for it. There's no substance to the assertion. They're just very sure that it's true. Why would they say that? Well, because animals and humans both communicate. That's very true. But animals don't have language like humans do. Let me just give you a few differences between us. Animals make calls. I hope you know that. Take bonobo monkeys, for instance. Bonobo monkeys may have a particular call for a specific type of predator. You know, so like say there's a snake or there's a leopard. They have a call that delineates where the edge of their territory is and so forth. But you would say that it's finite, meaning there's a set limit to the number of calls that they have and they're relatively simple. Humans, by contrast, because of infinite creativity, the ability to continue to add more and more and more and more words, have literally no limit to the number of words, the complexity of words, the number of sentences that we create, the complexity of the sentences we create. We are by no means comparable. They're very fixed. We are very not fixed. They're very limited. We are very creative. Think of even the sentence that I'm saying right now, the number of things that have to be put together, the way the words have to be framed. the distinctions between each sound that help us differentiate literally everything that I'm saying. No animal on planet Earth can do a single sentence like this one, and yet you and I are capable of going on and on like this for hour after hour. In fact, every human being who doesn't have any type of limitation is. We would say that animal communication is what's referred to sometimes as continuous analog signal. What does that mean? Well, they're not saying varied things. They just put greater and less stress on the things they're saying. So like a sense of urgency, right? But by contrast, human language might be described as being digital. It's achieved by rearranging these discrete elements rather than amplifying a signal. We're not just saying one thing harder. We can say more and more different things all the time. Now, you might find animals who communicate with random variations on a theme. You might think of a bird's song. When a bird sings, they make a song, and there is some variation in a bird's song, but it's more or less random variation, whereas human communication, language, is compositional. It means each arrangement has a different yet predictable rule-based meaning. I could put this sentence together, and each piece has an individual meaning, but there's also a meaning that we get by putting them all together. There's no animal who can do what human beings can do. Now, if some of you have read the right things, heard the right shows, you may be familiar with the fact that linguists and animal trainers have oftentimes tried to get, especially primates, like monkeys and gorillas, to do something similar to human language, right? One of the most famous ones was Coco the gorilla. And doesn't a mastery of American Sign Language indicate an innate language learning mechanism, right? If you watch shows and whatever, you'll see Coco making signs, and they attribute language to it, and it seems like Coco was able to do quite a bit. And in fact, there was another one called Nim Chimpsky, this chimp, and it appears in this book, Aping Language. Well, can animals learn American Sign Language? Well, it turns out actually no animal of any kind, no matter how smart, ever actually learned American Sign Language. Really learned a vocabulary of around 1 to 200, 1 to 200. words, sometimes a bit more, but it seems like never more than a few hundred words. Whenever they would take the signs that the animal was giving, if you watch on a show, they'll supply a lot of meaning to it to make it into a proper English sentence. But if you were to translate the signs literally, Even the researchers themselves describe it as inanely repetitious, meaning the primate is not actually making a sentence like I'm making right now, but instead is actually literally just saying the same word over and over again. We shouldn't be surprised because that's how animals communicate. It's not how we communicate. but that's how animals communicate. When a bonobo sees a large snake, he just makes the sound that says snake, snake, snake, snake, snake, snake. That's really boring. If we did that, we're like, you're crazy. You can't just, you know, a kid just repeats themselves. We're like, stop repeating yourself. The kid understands what I'm saying when I say stop repeating yourself, and he stops repeating himself and gives some variety, right? But the primate is not able to make complex sentences. They were often described as complex sentences, even though they weren't. And not only that, even the researchers themselves, when they made sort of broad claims, even if their broadest claims were true, it would be nothing like what a human being is able to do. Let me give you what's described in this book as what the chimp was able to do, right? So the chimp could say things like, nim, eat, nim, eat. Drink, eat, me, nim. Me, gum, me, gum. And by the way, repeating that over and over and over again. Me, banana, you, banana. Me, banana, you, banana. You me, banana me. Notice how the construction is varied, so you have to figure out what he's saying. A child, naturally, with no prescriptive teaching whatsoever, learns hundreds of words in the time it takes a chimp to figure out just a handful of signs, and can say things like, look at that train Ursula brought. We're going to turn the light on now so we can see. These are completely different abilities. The example of these primates like Coco, they're having to take the absolutely most capable, I mean, you might say the genius of the primate world, and they're giving them a range of experts to give them explicit training. And they can't do anything like what the youngest of children is able to do naturally on their own. No matter how much time you spend with Coco the gorilla when Coco was around, Coco will never be able to do what a five-year-old human can do with no training. It doesn't matter how much time or money or resources you give, they can't do it. So are animal communication attributes relatable to human attributes? Are animals doing what we're doing? I hope you've heard me say, no, but let me give you some words of a linguist. If you speak to these researchers, you won't find anyone downplaying the enormous differences between human and other animals, despite the fact that they happen to be interested in the commonalities. What's being said here is, even though there are areas of similarity, you won't find any linguist who says we're the same. Not one. None of them. The differences between us are enormous. They go on to say, human linguistic ability taken as a whole is still completely unlike anything else in the biosphere. There's nobody who's like us. By the way, that's true even on a physical structure. Take, for instance, your tongue. You got a human tongue, yeah? Your tongue is in a particular location, sometimes described as a descended tongue. And the other primates are not able to do this. So chimps, for instance, can make an M sound, a B and a P and an N and a D and a T and a number of vowels, but they can't make anything like what you can make. You have your voice box, right? And it's very, very active when you speak. Not only that, but you have minute control over how that box works. There's literally not one primate who has a permanently descended voice box like humans do. Not one. They can't point to a single primate who can do what you and I do naturally. Not only that, but human beings have what's referred to as selective articulation. That is, we have discrete letter-like sounds that are articulated purposefully. Animals don't do that. If you hear an animal cry, it doesn't sound anything like human language. Even again, primates, like monkeys, chimpanzees, gorillas, they don't articulate their sounds where there's individual M, P, B, N sounds the way that we do. And while other species mimic well, our auditory mimicry is unique to humans. compared to primates. So there's not a monkey who mimics what it hears the way we do. There's not a chimp that does it or a gorilla that does it. So why is that important? Well, in order to be able to have human language, you have to have the ability to hear and discern what's being said, the actual sounds. And we don't find them doing that type of mimicry the way that we do. It's unique. Not only that, but we have what's called auditory discrimination. We have the ability to hear the difference between a voiced and a voiceless sound. Take, for instance, the sss and the zzz. When I say it in a word, bus, buzz, the difference between those two is measured in milliseconds, fractions of a second. And the human can hear the differences, but no one else can. Those others, the primates, are not able to do it. Not only that, but we have the mental acuity. Our mental capacity is required in order for there to be the type of communication. So we talk about things that are abstract concepts. You know, this is far beyond nym, eat, you know, you, me, banana. But think about the concept like fatherhood. time, peace, even love. I mean, how do you go about describing these communities? You have to have the mental capacity to describe abstract and differentiate between abstract concepts, and these creatures simply don't have it. And as mentioned before, we have creativity. No creature has a robust ability to create new, discrete tokens of meaning the way that human beings are. So the only right conclusion is that human language is a uniquely human trait. And if it's uniquely human, Where is it coming from? The best answer for that is that it's coming from God. The God who spoke the world into existence and made us in His image is the very God who gave us speech. And in fact, He made us to commune with Him, related to the word communication. And we see God speaking to man, and man speaking to God, man speaking to man, and man being given the responsibility to make new words, to create names, to name things. And what we see at the Tower of Babel is this difference between what you might refer to as competence and performance, right? What you know and what you're able to do. And at Babel, it seems, there in Genesis chapter 11, what happens is There's a separation of the language level that begins at the competence performance level, what you know and what you're able to do. And that's what created the distinguishing. This is a long lesson. Listen, that's on linguistics. And you know, it's not like anything else I do. So if this is the first time you've ever listened and you just absolutely hated what I just did, that's okay. That's okay. I'm stepping outside of bounds of what I normally do. But my students, when I do this lesson, my students love it. And I think the reason they love it is because Sometimes students in this world, they get pounded with the idea that there's a naturalistic explanation and therefore we can avoid God in it. And I'm here to tell you that there is no answer to be given that is a full answer that does not include God. And the reason I know this for sure is, to give an answer is to assume an orderly universe, and there is no adequate explanation for order to the universe except an orderly creator. And we see that played out everywhere. So when I read things in the Bible, like Genesis 1 through 3 and the creation of man, or when I look at places like Genesis 11 and I see the dispersion of human language, When I compare it to areas of which I am aware, like linguistics, what I see is that the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament displaces handiwork. That everything he says is true, and the earth and everything in it testifies to that. And even as people like certain linguists go looking for a way that it won't be true, what they actually find, despite their best efforts, is that it is true. that God's Word is what makes sense, and it is the best for us. I know that's going to challenge some people's belief, and I say, thank God. If you hear that the God of the universe made everything, that challenges you. I pray, I pray that you'll turn to Him for the answers and the explanations, because that is the only way that this world will make sense to you. I hear a person speak, and as a person trained in linguistics, when I hear it, I take time to think. I see someone made in the image of God, made by God to speak. And when I see our languages, how our languages are different, I see a God who said, I'm going to put separation between you, and therefore we have different languages in the world. All of this tells me God is great, and he's to be trusted, and his Word is good. I hope it's been encouraging to you. We'll be back on track next week, looking at some lessons in leadership from the life and testimony of Jonathan. Hope you'll follow me for that next week. You're listening to the Vice Chancellor's Hour, a ministry of Radio ABC 993 FM on the campus of African Bible University. I'm Jeremiah Pitts, a professor and administrator here at the African Bible University in Uganda. The purpose of Vice Chancellor's Hour is to provide biblical and theological teachings that are an extension of the ministry of the university. you