Letter #272: Dante, Dinosaurs, and Dragons

Oh my.

Dad,

Do you know about the dinosaur meme? Forgive the language. It starts with the typical kind of dragon they used to put on Medieval tapestries—wings, feathers, scales, horned beaks—with the caption “Middle Ages Bulls**t.” Then it progresses through different reconstructions of dinosaurs based on the fossil records that supposedly replaced Medieval superstition with solid fact. Eventually you arrive at the modern understanding that dinosaurs were basically...dragons with wings, feathers, scales, and horned beaks.

You see this effect a lot. I ran into it in writing my last book, about the history of science. You get all these quantum physicists and relativity theorists sitting around, working out their beautiful ideas, and at some point they turn to each other and say something like,

Gee Albert, do you know?

Vaht, Niels?

It vould seem zat logically the universe vould have to begin vit some...ultimate act of measurement...

You mean as in, say, a prime observer beholding a formless void?

And before you know it you’ve got the book of Genesis, just with a lot more math.

I’m finding the same thing now as I write my new book on how language makes us human and sets us apart from AI. You start out with Dante reading the Bible, looking around at the languages of Europe, and saying from-a the power of our reason we can-a deduce that all humans and only humans are capable of using-a language, and from-a Scripture we learn that the one original language spread out across the world-a into the many languages we speak-a now. It’s-a me, Dante!

Then the Enlightenment happens and we realize that’s all hooey, until you get to Noam Chomsky and Robert Berwick in the 21st century, arguing from rigorous evolutionary logic and universal rule-based grammar that...all humans and only humans are capable of using language, and the one original language spread out across the world into the many languages we speak now.

And before you know it you’ve got the Book of Genesis, but with a lot more biolinguistics.

I’m coming to think that the Bible tells you what’s true, and human reason gradually fills in the way in which it’s true. Lots of people find it tempting to just skip to the end and save the time—if we already know the shape of the thing, why bother with all the details and the doubts they introduce?

But your exchange with McGilchrist suggests it doesn’t work that way. History is obviously a process we have to go through, or there would be no point to us living at all. Saying you have to “show your work” is another way of saying we have to work out the truths of God afresh from within the world as it appears to us, with all its troublesome specificity and periods of confusion. This stage of things—in which the intellectuals rediscover what the simpletons knew all along, while the middle of the bell curve trails behind—is part of the journey too.

Love,
Spencer