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<\/a><\/p>\nAtheist anti-theist Jonathan M. S. Pearce is the main writer on the blog,\u00a0A Tippling Philosopher<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0His\u00a0\u201cAbout\u201d page<\/a>\u00a0states: \u201cPearce is a philosopher, author, blogger, public speaker and teacher from Hampshire in the UK. He specialises in philosophy of religion, but likes to turn\u00a0his hand to science, psychology, politics and anything involved in investigating reality.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This is a reply to his post, The Tower of Babel Story Is OBVIOUSLY Not Historical<\/a> (11-23-21).\u00a0Jonathan\u2019s words will be in blue<\/span>.<\/p>\n *****<\/p>\n Genesis 11:1-9<\/strong>\u00a0(RSV) Now the whole earth had one language and few words. [2] And as men migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar<\/span> and settled there. [3] And they said to one another, \u201cCome, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.\u201d<\/span> And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar.<\/span> [4] Then they said, \u201cCome, 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 scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.\u201d [5] And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the sons of men had built. [6] And the LORD said, \u201cBehold, 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. [7] Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another\u2019s speech.\u201d [8] So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. [9] Therefore its name was called Ba\u2019bel, 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I\u2019ve got to the point where, and I know this will be counter-productive, I have to claim that anyone who believes this story\u00a0actually\u00a0<\/em>happened is an idiot. Such believers are idiots. There, I\u2019ve said it. Deal with it.<\/span><\/p>\n I know there will be some Christians who might come across this article who believe in the historical veracity of the story and who will stop reading on account of my forthright position that they are idiots. But sometimes you just gotta tell it like it is.<\/span><\/p>\n And, because it\u2019s what I do, I\u2019ll help them along the way to realising it is ahistorical so that they\u00a0can<\/em>\u00a0deal with it.<\/span><\/p>\n The problem at the level of presupposition or premise here is that Jonathan almost certainly is unfamiliar with how educated, scholarly Christians typically interpret a very early biblical story like the one about the Tower of Babel. He assumes (very typically of atheist anti-theists) that everything must be taken hyper-literally and that there can be no metaphor or hyperbole or non-literal expression. Basically, his modus operandi<\/em> is to approach every biblical issue as if the only possible interpretation is that of an anti-intellectual, anti-science, woodenly literalistic fundamentalist.<\/p>\n But (quite obviously) that is a tiny, unbalanced, often misguided portion of all of Christianity. So why do anti-theists keep concentrating on them? Well, because they best fit into the caricature of Christianity and the Bible that anti-theists wish to convey, for the purpose of making Christianity look anti-intellectual and ridiculous. Caricature, fight straw men, and dismiss.<\/p>\n Whatever works . . . Never<\/em> interact with serious Christian thought on any given biblical \/ exegetical issue. That\u2019s Jonathan\u2019s MO<\/em>! He sometimes has serious philosophical discussions with Christians (because he self-identifies as a philosopher), but rarely serious, open-minded discussions about the Bible and its sensible, plausible interpretation.<\/p>\n So, as to our present topic, Jonathan says no one can possibly believe the biblical Tower of Babel story is historical (in any way, shape, or form), without being an \u201cidiot.\u201d He simply assumes it is a complete myth, fable, legend, fairy tale. Again, it is a question of what exactly a Christian thinks happened<\/strong><\/em> with regard to this reported incident and what we can know about it, lo some five thousand years later.<\/p>\n In all likelihood, the educated Christian will not interpret it as Jonathan does. So it\u2019s basically \u201cships passing in the night.\u201d Jonathan needs to first understand that (believe it or not!) there is a plausible interpretation that is not immediately ridiculous, absurd, and idiotic.<\/p>\n His main objection, no doubt, would be the notion of origin of languages. He thinks that anthropology deals a death blow to the Tower of Babel story. But it only does to (here\u2019s a little \u201cdirty secret\u201d) the hyper-literal version<\/em> that he thinks is the only possible<\/em> version of the story.<\/p>\n Both stories<\/span> [the flood and this one] show that God is not omniscient. . . .\u00a0Yet again, the story reports God getting a\u00a0realisation<\/em>, not knowing something from the start. . . . With the Tower of Babel, he wouldn\u2019t have to pop down to Earth to see what humans were up to and then\u00a0<\/em>realise that they were getting together, using their teamwork, and building things up to the heavens.\u00a0This\u00a0<\/em> is what they have started to do, God realises, musing.\u00a0The narrative makes no sense of his omniscience and foreknowledge. . . .\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n If God was truly omnipotent, there really was nothing to worry about.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>God\u2019s omnipotence should mean that he doesn\u2019t have to worry one iota about anything like this.\u00a0It\u2019s utter nonsense.<\/span><\/p>\n Etc., etc. ad nauseam<\/em>.<\/p>\n And so, for the umpteenth time, one has to explain to Jonathan that there are things called anthropomorphism and anthropopathism<\/a> in the Bible. These are well-developed non-literal \/ metaphorical literary techniques by which God\u2019s actions are made more comprehensible to human beings, by condescending to our understanding. Jonathan has been informed of this so many times, that one must at this point conclude that he is being willfully ignorant, and stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the existence of these clear features of the Bible.<\/p>\n They don\u2019t fit with his cynical, quixotic determination to always interpret the Bible hyper-literally, so he deliberately ignores them and pretends that they don\u2019t exist. It\u2019s like the fairy tale of the The Emperor\u2019s New Clothes<\/em><\/a>. The monarch was walking around naked and everyone pretended that he wasn\u2019t. Or he acts like the ostrich putting its head in the sand, or the monkey covering his eyes and ears, etc.<\/p>\n Such builders at the time really weren\u2019t equipped with the knowledge or technology to build very high at all.<\/span><\/p>\n Everything is relative. I can\u2019t find the exact estimated height, but for its time, the White Temple and ziggurat at Uruk<\/a> [present-day Iraq; then Mesopotamia] \u2014 finished around 3500 BC \u2014 was a very impressive structure, as can be startlingly visualized in a photograph of what remains of it<\/a>. And that was built some 600 years before the Tower of Babel (as I shall argue), with mud-bricks, whereas the Tower of Babel utilized the recently developed technology of kiln-fired bricks.<\/p>\n The Great Pyramid<\/a> of Egypt was built c. 2600 BC and its height was originally 481 feet, or the equivalent of a 34-storey building (a storey<\/a> being usually considered to be 14 feet). Its height wasn\u2019t surpassed for 3900 years, until the Lincoln Cathedral<\/a> in 1311, with its 520-foot high central spire (since collapsed).<\/p>\n Jonathan finally gets to the bottom line at the end of his article:<\/p>\n We know how languages evolved and it wasn\u2019t like that. The story is refuted by linguistics. Go research it, Christian.<\/span><\/p>\n Nuff said.<\/span><\/p>\n Who is saying that was<\/em> how all languages evolved? Not educated Christians, familiar with science (particularly anthropology and the history of languages and linguistics). Baptist theologian and apologist Bernard Ramm, in his 1954 classic, The Christian View of Science and Scripture<\/em><\/a>, wrote about this:<\/p>\n With reference to the origin of languages, we must make a decision as to a local or universal flood. If we choose a universal flood we must eventually find all languages stemming from Babel, but if a local flood we need only trace some of the Caucasian languages back to a common point. It is true that the languages of Europe can be traced back (on paper at least) to the primitive Indo-European. We know that French, Italian, and Spanish derive from Latin, and that Latin and Greek derive from a common ancestor with Sanskrit. The convergence of Caucasian languages upon a primitive Indo-European stock may be taken as a suggestive substantiation of the record of the Tower of Babel.<\/p>\n Two things more need to be said about the Tower of Babel, (i) Such structures called ziggurats have been discovered by archaeologists. In the clay tablets expressions are found of their reaching to heaven\u2014a figure of speech like our skyscraper. On top of these ziggurats were temples, so that there could have been an anti-God spirit in building these temples for some other deity or deities, (ii) Anthropologists have stated that the chief barrier among peoples is the language barrier . Differences of food, customs, and clothing do not present the barrier that language does when two cultures mix. No other device known to anthropologists could break the unity of a group like a confusion of tongues. We need not speculate how the confusion was done nor how long it took. (pp. 339-340)<\/p><\/blockquote>\nIt\u2019s Not How Languages Evolved.<\/span><\/h4>\n