Consider the humorous convergence of human ideas separated by thirty-five centuries. We think we are so advanced, yet two things spoken of mythologically in the Bible have acquired literal meaning today.
Lately, I delved into how humans might have gained language and whether any of the other animals could learn to communicate with a smidgeon of the sophistication we do. The possible evolution of language is a relatively recent topic of study. Linguistics as a discipline has only been around since the nineteenth century. We didn’t seriously consider the relatedness of humans and other animals until Darwin.
A century later, behavioral psychology posited that human speech evolved from animal vocalizations, particularly of chimpanzees. Numerous experiments attempted to prove this hypothesis by teaching apes to understand the meaning of words. These experiments yielded limited evidence because it became clear that even animals of relatively high intelligence did not understand words as names for things or as symbols.
An animal’s understanding of a spoken word goes straight to an existing physical condition or situation. A dog may know the word “squirrel,” but its response is to run to the window to look for the darting furry animal. It cannot passively sit with the idea of “squirrel” and think, for example, that it has noticed some are brown and some gray.
As Pavlov showed, the dog salivates when trained to understand a word for food. It cannot but have an immediate expectation of food to eat. It cannot offer an opinion about what order he would list his favorite flavors. Similarly, a dog cannot savor his food, which requires thinking about pleasant aspects of flavor and texture, even of the room atmosphere or others sharing the experience. On the contrary, the dog scarfs down his food and ends eating.
The critical difference for humans is using words as names for things and as symbolic representations manipulated imaginatively.
Here, the book of Genesis weighs in, chapter 2, starting at verse 19:
Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them, and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man named all the livestock, the birds in the sky, and all the wild animals.
The passage immediately recognizes that this situation will be unfortunate for the created man. While Adam can name and think about the animals, they cannot communicate similarly with him. God steps in (verse 20):
But for Adam, no suitable helper was found. So the Lord God [created woman].
The story implies that humans needed other humans for language. It also identifies the crucial aspect of naming things. Twenty-first-century science has shown that only humans understand the symbolic nature of names.
Of course, language is also more than mere words. While words are more than mere vocalizations, language also contains many types of words that combine according to syntactical rules. Scientific studies to date have shown that non-human animals cannot master words, much less language. The interesting unresolved question is how we acquired language, if not through evolution. Since humans diverged from apes only a few million years ago, evolution would not have had enough time for language development. Some researchers have argued that language ability could have resulted from a beneficial genetic mutation. Or its rapid advancement may have been possible due to socialization without involving genes.
The Big Bang Theory is the second Biblical myth to receive a recent literal interpretation. Under this conception, our universe began suddenly from a single location with an enormous burst of energy and has never stopped expanding in space and time. Astrophysicists might say the biblical story was incorrect to have the creation of the heavens take so long as a week. On the other hand, they believe the Earth did not form until our solar system began, about five billion years ago and almost four billion years after the Big Bang.
So Genesis would be more accurate to say, “In less than a second, The Lord created the heavens, waited over four billion years, and then created the Earth.”
The New Testament Gospel of John brings these two biblical issues together, stating in the first verse,
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him, all things were made[.]
Perhaps the best way to interpret the idea that humans have been “made in the image of God” is to see that we are the only animals who speak and understand words and that words were in some way involved at the beginning of all creation.