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To: King Prout
Language to a great extent defines and limits what can be conceived and communicated.

Yes, but the six-year-old kid has learned English already, so it doesn't take all that long. And during the next 10 years of his education, he will learn many more words to expand his vocabulary. We can take a child from a primitive tribe in the rain forest and raise him to be quite functional in our society. So the younger generation of a bronze-age group of people could have been trained to be scientifically literate, if that had been desired. (They would have had some problems inter-acting with their neighbors, but that's okay. We have trouble inter-acting with tribesmen from Afghanistan.)

186 posted on 08/22/2003 5:48:56 PM PDT by PatrickHenry (Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.)
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To: PatrickHenry
Um. Perhaps I failed to make the illustration clear.

YOU go back in time some 3500 years, and in Aramaic endeavor to explain to a bone-headedly ignorant goatherder how a thermonuclear bomb works in sufficient detail that he can actually build a functional one.
Good luck.

That's the problem God faced - assuming, for the sake of this digression from the main topic, that God did indeed inspire Genesis and intended it to be a fact-based explanation for the existence of the universe.
194 posted on 08/22/2003 7:29:33 PM PDT by King Prout (people hear and do not listen, see and do not observe, speak without thought, post and not edit)
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