Why Doesn't God Destroy the New Tower of Babel, or Change Everyone's Language?

[Diogenes]

Man has now far exceeded the Tower of Babel, sending people to the Moon, hundreds of satellites into orbit, and more out of the solar system. God was supposedly threatened by a little Ziggurat and man's boldness in Genesis 11. Is he sleeping? Dead?

[Diogenes]

Man has now far exceeded the Tower of Babel, sending people to the Moon, hundreds of satellites into orbit, and more out of the solar system. God was supposedly threatened by a little Ziggurat and man's boldness in Genesis 11. Is he sleeping? Dead?

At Babel, the languages were not just a curse but a blessing in disguise. Now the different languages can all praise God and the song is more marvellous.

Also, most people today are small-minded and do not even reach for the heavens. Who is seriously trying to reach the heavens?

Lol so much could be said about Babel but would you even care?

"For half a century, humans have been putting satellites into orbit around Earth...." There are currently 8000 satellites in orbit around the Earth, with 13000 objects total and thousands more that have crashed to Earth or have gone beyond its orbit and even out of our solar system.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/scie ... al-objects
These FACTS totally refute your claims and answer your question "Who is seriously trying to reach the heavens?"

As for your claim that I don't care, I cited Genesis 11:

 “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens....
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. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another's speech.” So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.

You make vague references, citing nothing.

In addition to missing the point of Genesis 11, you also missed the purpose of this subtopic.

AquinasForGod got it in post #19

It is just a story to show us that you cannot find God in the sky. It was a pagan idea.

The point is that the Bible in general and Genesis in particular is full of stories, some pagan, that did not happen. These myths are mistakenly taken literally by certain sects of Christianity. Christian scholars understand this, but many Christian laymen do not.

[1213]

I don't see any good reason to believe scientists are correct about how languages evolved.

Your inability to see the reasons why scientists are correct about how languages evolved is irrelevant. People have expertise in that field of study and the opinions of people with religious biases don't really diminish their conclusions.

Their conclusions are diminished by lack of proof.

[1213]

...
So all the evidence is totally against the Babel explanation of the diversity of languages, as well as the architectural evidence being against the existence of some particularly tall and particularly early tower intended to reach to heaven, and if the ziggurats of Sumer are detectable, an even bigger earlier one should surely be detectable.

What you says seems to be just wishful thinking, nothing substantial. Diversity of languages is the evidence for the Babels story. Humans have no reason to mix up languages, for example because it makes more difficult to communicate with others.

Also, there is no reason to assume the tower should still be found. Not founding it doesn't mean it didn't exist.

In addition to which, the sheer plot of the story is utterly absurd unless one believes in a heaven with God living there, somewhere in the clouds where humans might think a very large tower might reach, and even more absurd that a god might be so put out by this that he overrode human Free Will (as He so often does in the old stories) to put an end to the building project.

So, no, the science - based view of evolution and language is not silly, but the story of the tower of Babel is about the silliest thing in the Bible. And I'm not accusing it of that, I'm merely pointing it out; it makes no sense.

Only observable matter about "evolution" of languages is that hey are "evolving" to one single language.

And God didn't override free will. People have free will, even if things don't go as they want. Free will doesn't mean people are omnipotent.

Why do you think the reason for the tower was to reach God? I don't think that is what the Bible tells.

(there may have been an actual local Flood, but it did not do what God intended

Are you saying it didn't kill everyone on surface of dry land?

- or is evidence for - any god, fails). So even if we concoct some story of a people building a very big ziggurat where the people thought (mistakenly) that they were about to reach to heaven, that debunks the god - claim even if it validated what is actually true - the Babylonians though a ziggurat enable humans to come into contact with the gods.

There is no reason to think the tower must have been a ziggurat, it is your assumption that seems to be based on ignorance.

I think it is possible that people had silly belief about reaching heaven, but silly beliefs of humans doesn't debunk God. And the idea of reaching heaven depends on what is meant with heaven. If it means for example cloud level, it is not necessary super high. Regular skyscrapers can be in cloud level. Interesting thing is, if they really build very high tower, today it could look like some small mountain and modern people would not recognize it, because they would think it is impossible.

Now, you may dismiss all of that and proclaim some Biblefaith claim, and you may feel that you scraped a draw, at least, but in fact not. You'd need to produce some better evidence than Biblefaith and science -denial to make a reasonable case for the tower of Babel - story. And, as usual, it is not about what you or I prefer to believe, but what persuades others, and that depends on whether they can reconsider arguments or are locked into Faith, as well as what arguments get out to them.

It is interesting if your claims persuade anyone. You have not offered anything solid to support your claims and it seems to me that you are speaking of some other story than what the Bible actually says.

[Diogenes]

...As well as being science -denialist as science says plainly that diversity of language did not happen like that. Languages evolved on divergent courses and were 'scattered' in various tribes before they had proper languages at all, and that was before they even started farming and building stone huts, never mind Ziggurats.

Fact is that Genesis is False start to finish, unless one makes it "Metaphorical" ('not true') or denies science,at least whereit contradicts the Bible.

I think that is a ridiculous claim. I don't see any good reason to believe scientists are correct about how languages evolved.

As Transponder noted, your lack of knowledge is not an argument for lack of evidence. The evidence abounds and shows that language dispersed largely because of geographical movement. The Tower myth of Genesis 11 has it precisely backward claiming a magical change in language that caused people to disperse. The evidence is substantial.

The fundamental cause of linguistic change and hence of linguistic diversification is the minute deviations occurring in the transmission of language from one generation to another. But other factors contribute to the historical development of languages and determine the spread of a language family over the world’s surface. Population movements naturally play a large part, and movements of peoples in prehistoric times carried the Indo-European languages from a relatively restricted area into most of Europe and into northern India, Persia, and Armenia. The spread of the Indo-European languages resulted, in the main, from the imposition of the languages on the earlier populations of the territories occupied. In the historical period, within Indo-European, the same process can be seen at work in the Western Roman Empire. Latin superseded the earlier, largely Celtic languages of the Iberian Peninsula and of Gaul (France) not through population replacement (the number of Roman soldiers and settlers in the empire was never large) but through the abandonment of these languages by the inhabitants over the generations as they found in Latin the language of commerce, civilization, law, literature, and social prestige.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/langua ... l-movement

Linguists, and even laymen can easily trace these changes. For example, with English we can easily see the Latin source in words like 'residence' and the German origin of words like 'house.'
We can seed the Greek origin in English words like:
acrobat...
cemetery. ...
cynicism. ...
democracy. ...
dinosaur. ...
Europe. ...
galaxy. ...
hermaphrodite.

Finnish Suomi of course comes from a completely different source. Unlike Indo-European languages, as you know Suomi comes from the Finno-Ugric group of the Uralic language family. The study of language dispersal is the study of the movement of people and culture.

One of the problems with blindly accepting myths from the Bible like the Babel language dispersal myth and the creation myth is that curiosity and thus scholarship is stifled.





https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_migrations

[otseng]

Lol so much could be said about Babel but would you even care?

Moderator Comment

Please avoid making personal comments.

Please review the Rules.





______________



Moderator comments do not count as a strike against any posters. They only serve as an acknowledgment that a post report has been received, but has not been judged to warrant a moderator warning against a particular poster. Any challenges or replies to moderator postings should be made via Private Message to avoid derailing topics.

[TRANSPONDER]

...
So all the evidence is totally against the Babel explanation of the diversity of languages, as well as the architectural evidence being against the existence of some particularly tall and particularly early tower intended to reach to heaven, and if the ziggurats of Sumer are detectable, an even bigger earlier one should surely be detectable.

What you says seems to be just wishful thinking, nothing substantial. Diversity of languages is the evidence for the Babels story. Humans have no reason to mix up languages, for example because it makes more difficult to communicate with others.

Also, there is no reason to assume the tower should still be found. Not founding it doesn't mean it didn't exist.

In addition to which, the sheer plot of the story is utterly absurd unless one believes in a heaven with God living there, somewhere in the clouds where humans might think a very large tower might reach, and even more absurd that a god might be so put out by this that he overrode human Free Will (as He so often does in the old stories) to put an end to the building project.

So, no, the science - based view of evolution and language is not silly, but the story of the tower of Babel is about the silliest thing in the Bible. And I'm not accusing it of that, I'm merely pointing it out; it makes no sense.

Only observable matter about "evolution" of languages is that hey are "evolving" to one single language.

And God didn't override free will. People have free will, even if things don't go as they want. Free will doesn't mean people are omnipotent.

Why do you think the reason for the tower was to reach God? I don't think that is what the Bible tells.

(there may have been an actual local Flood, but it did not do what God intended

Are you saying it didn't kill everyone on surface of dry land?

- or is evidence for - any god, fails). So even if we concoct some story of a people building a very big ziggurat where the people thought (mistakenly) that they were about to reach to heaven, that debunks the god - claim even if it validated what is actually true - the Babylonians though a ziggurat enable humans to come into contact with the gods.

There is no reason to think the tower must have been a ziggurat, it is your assumption that seems to be based on ignorance.

I think it is possible that people had silly belief about reaching heaven, but silly beliefs of humans doesn't debunk God. And the idea of reaching heaven depends on what is meant with heaven. If it means for example cloud level, it is not necessary super high. Regular skyscrapers can be in cloud level. Interesting thing is, if they really build very high tower, today it could look like some small mountain and modern people would not recognize it, because they would think it is impossible.

Now, you may dismiss all of that and proclaim some Biblefaith claim, and you may feel that you scraped a draw, at least, but in fact not. You'd need to produce some better evidence than Biblefaith and science -denial to make a reasonable case for the tower of Babel - story. And, as usual, it is not about what you or I prefer to believe, but what persuades others, and that depends on whether they can reconsider arguments or are locked into Faith, as well as what arguments get out to them.

It is interesting if your claims persuade anyone. You have not offered anything solid to support your claims and it seems to me that you are speaking of some other story than what the Bible actually says.

Well, let's have the whole stoiry

Genesis 11. 11 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter.
4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
KJV - I often like to use KJV because I prefer arguments that don't require translation -shopping and niceties of interpretation, but are so clear and unarguable about what the Bible actually says that I can use the KJV or any other translation.

First, I don't believe that I said that the point of the tower was to reach God as such, but to heaven, which is what the passage says. All this bothered God and he clearly felt threatened by it - or so it apparently reads - and that is why he ended the work by diversifying their languages - so it says.

Now I'm no linguist but I do know there is linguistic evidence that (no matter where it is going (1) however it originated (2), the 'science' is that it was diversified over the globe before they had got past chipping flint and making twig fires. If you say that this is wrong, then you are doing science - denial, and you are effectively saying that you understand the matter better than the experts in the subject. (3) but, as I said, the evidence indicates that Sumerian and Egyptian was distinct when the first pictograms appeared (more to do with counting bushels of wheat and jars of oil for the purposes of taxation than for writing poetry or history) even before the start of monumental building. I don't even get onto the idea of trying to make a tower to reach (as the Bible says) heaven out of mud brick rather than stone, let alone metal and glass.

Of course, there's the problem of dating YE creationist chronology, which is what we got ourselves here. On the former board, an atheist pal corrected me about the date of the Flood which was supposed to be after the Pyramids were built whereas I had the idea that the Flood was before they were built. Of course Egyptian spoken and written existed by then and if the Flood was supposed to come after that, then'Babel' had to be later than Egyptian. But you may prefer a Chronology with Babel before Egyptian was first written and the flood before that.

Broadly
Creation of earth 6,000 BC
Flood 4000 BC
Babel 3000 BC
Pyramids and Ziggurats 2,500 BC

We could get into the dating, but I suspect you would reject it and I don't know what Chronology you may have if you would even propose one. But the evidence is of a continuous culture (suggesting an existing language) back from earliest written Egyptian, even before more than stone huts were built. Cities and ziggurats were in the future. Cultures such as Harappa or pre pottery neolithic cities inTturkey (Catal Huyuk)were already culturally diverse and the evidence suggests linguistically diverse, too.

We can't go back in time and prove it, like I can't prove there is no massive ziggurat existing before the Sumerian cities and ziggurats appeared, but the absence of any trace of such and the cultural (at least) diversity long before that, plus the technological absurdity, lack of any heaven 'up there' (I suppose at least you don't claim a heaven with a resident god up where a mud brick tower could even hope to be built to reach (4) all sets the evidence of archaeology, technology, linguistics and chronology plus negative evidence for any such tower, against a story with at least some mythical (i.e incorrect) elements in a book that gets other stuff more demonstrably wrong, so why should we take Babel as anything but a tall story? Why do you expect anyone reasonable to credit it?

(1) English now becoming a convenient common language of communication.

(2) like everything else with human origins, it is rather that , communication along with awareness and social behaviours had evolved in the primates even before they became hominids.

(3) epistemology or the "How do we know what we know?" apologetic -argument, is in the end down to trusting that broadly what science and research tells us and which goes in the text -books is reliable, given that there is always new evidence.

(4)cue: "Of course not, but the humans thought they could reach heaven." answer' so why would God even care, since he knew they couldn't?' "That's not the point; it was that if they built such a big tower they could do anything." "No they couldn't, and God knew they couldn't do anything that would be a threat to Him, so why does he act as though it was?"

[1213]

...
(4)cue: "Of course not, but the humans thought they could reach heaven." answer' so why would God even care, since he knew they couldn't?' "That's not the point; it was that if they built such a big tower they could do anything." "No they couldn't, and God knew they couldn't do anything that would be a threat to Him, so why does he act as though it was?"

I think the mistake you make is that you think heaven means the place of God. In this case it can mean just the level of clouds that can actually be on quite low level. And by what the story tells, the goal was to control people, prevent them to be scattered. And because God's solution was to scatter humans, obviously the controlling was the problem, not the tower itself.

[1213]

...
The fundamental cause of linguistic change and hence of linguistic diversification is the minute deviations occurring in the transmission of language from one generation to another. But other factors contribute to the historical development of languages and determine the spread of a language family over the world’s surface. Population movements naturally play a large part, and movements of peoples in prehistoric times carried the Indo-European languages from a relatively restricted area into most of Europe and into northern India, Persia, and Armenia. The spread of the Indo-European languages resulted, in the main, from the imposition of the languages on the earlier populations of the territories occupied. In the historical period, within Indo-European, the same process can be seen at work in the Western Roman Empire. Latin superseded the earlier, largely Celtic languages of the Iberian Peninsula and of Gaul (France) not through population replacement (the number of Roman soldiers and settlers in the empire was never large) but through the abandonment of these languages by the inhabitants over the generations as they found in Latin the language of commerce, civilization, law, literature, and social prestige.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/langua ... l-movement
...

I think, only thing that shows is, people choose to speak the strongest language. If their "original" language is weak, they pick the winner, because it is more beneficial for them. And at this point English seems to be the most powerful language. For example here in Finland in many cases Finnish is replaced with English, because it is economically better. And I assume, if things go like this, it takes less than 100 years and we have just one language again, because economically and for the rulers it is easier, if everyone speaks the same language.

I assume you think all languages evolved from original language. If that is true, I understand that after people have traveled far from the original point, they could get new words and customs, but even then, there should be something common, because it is useful economically. There is no motive for humans to evolve too far from the common language, because it makes things more complicated. If languages would have evolved from single language, it should be possible to see traces of the original language in all languages. And there should be some motive for humans to do so. I have not seen any evidence for that. The official version is illogical, and doesn't offer any motive to support it, that is why I don't believe it. That stronger, more beneficial language supersedes weaker languages is not evolution, it is devolution, it decreases complexity, destroys old and doesn't bring anything new.

[TRANSPONDER]

...
(4)cue: "Of course not, but the humans thought they could reach heaven." answer' so why would God even care, since he knew they couldn't?' "That's not the point; it was that if they built such a big tower they could do anything." "No they couldn't, and God knew they couldn't do anything that would be a threat to Him, so why does he act as though it was?"

I think the mistake you make is that you think heaven means the place of God. In this case it can mean just the level of clouds that can actually be on quite low level. And by what the story tells, the goal was to control people, prevent them to be scattered. And because God's solution was to scatter humans, obviously the controlling was the problem, not the tower itself.

I believe that i covered that; God was not there but they thought he was. So why would God be bothered?

The point about control just raises more questions because it sounds (not for the first time) that God does not know the future or he'd know that this effort at Control was not going to work. Differing cultures and languages merely pushes the need for invention.

I won't even get into Control rather than helpful guidance, but would point out that the other points, that technology and science and the lack of any huge tower still remain objections - in fact your explanation only points more strongly to a story based on the Ziggurat of Babylon. I haven't conclusive evidence that languages were diverse before this supposed breakup of one linguistic group who built a huge mudbrick tower, but you have nothing other than a rather strange tale, and you have pretty much had to fiddle what it says to fit it to science (there is no heaven where God lives that can be reached by a tower).

Indeed it is down to what people are willing to buy into and whether they accept your Explanation that the Genesis 11 building project never represented a threat to reach God's residence which is the general import of the story, and if so, why the Bible again appears to give misleading (if not wrong) information.

That is to say, it doesn't matter how you explain the problems away to yourself, is anyone else going to agree with you? Other YE fundamentalists aside, of course.

[Diogenes]

I believe that i covered that; God was not there but they thought he was. So why would God be bothered?

The point about control just raises more questions because it sounds (not for the first time) that God does not know the future or he'd know that this effort at Control was not going to work. Differing cultures and languages merely pushes the need for invention.

This made me think of a more fundamental question. Why this belief in God in the first place? Why make something up, an idea of something that does not exist. We have at least 5 senses. None of them reveal God or gods. I get why people who were indoctrinated as children believe in this fairy tale. I just don't know why it started in the first place.

The funny thing is that various groups invented different gods and then got into endless squabbles about who's imaginary god is THE god. We have enough REAL things to worry about, w/o fighting about gods. Things like famine and disease, cruelty and beauty, energy and shelter. We have lots to worry about and fight over without inventing imaginary junk to flail about.