Adam was created speaking, and this means that every aspect of language needs to be treated as a gift of God, and not as an achievement or accomplishment of man. Man did not invent direct objects, or verbs. They were given to us, grace upon grace. In the same way, and for the same reason, the ability to generalize or speak abstractly was not an invention of the philosophers. And this means that postmodern relativism is, as this philosopher would want to put it, out to lunch.
Richard Rorty said this: “There would not have been thought to be a problem about the nature of reason had our race confined itself to pointing out particular states of affairs — warning of cliffs and rain, celebrating individual births and deaths. But poetry speaks of man, birth, and death as such, and mathematics prides itself on overlooking individual details” (Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 38).
But the first words spoken to man by God also overlooked individual details. In the creation account in Genesis 1, we read this: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth . . .” (Gen. 1:27-28).
And Adam interrupted, saying, “What do you mean ‘fish of the sea’? You can’t mean Stanley. Don’t you mean the particular trout I saw this morning?”
And the Lord spake unto him. “What do you mean by ‘trout’?”
“I mean ‘concrete water thingy'”
In the second creation narrative, God speaks to Adam in a way that implies that Adam was fully expected to know the meaning of “tree” (Gen. 2:16). And then God brought all the animals to Adam for him to name them, categorizing them (Gen. 2:20). Adam gave names to the animals, but we are not given the names of all the species that he applied. But we are given the names of the broad categories — cattle, fowl, beasts of the field. Moreover, we have every reason to expect that Adam was naming species (or kinds, to use the biblical terminology); no one thinks that he was naming individuals. “And I name you Bob the pony. No, scratch the ‘pony’ part. Just Bob. And you are not a crane, partaking of ethereal cranehood, but rather Mary. And you are not a member of an abstract category of hippohood, but Tiglath-pilezer.”
Now Adam knew how to categorize because God created him that way. Abstraction is therefore a grace from God. Like all graces in this fallen world, it is much abused, and the philosophers and schoolmarms have done their damage. But the postmodern reaction to this is simply a lunatic response. Rorty wants to persuade us to stop thinking of the mind as a mirror of nature, and so he holds up his book — a mirror of the history of philosophy — to persuade us how silly it is to look into mirrors of this kind.
But the “mirror” of thr mind does not depend on philosophical extrapolations. It was a gift of God. Adam opened his eyes, blinked a couple of times, and God spoke to him (and he understood). One of the things God told him was to stay away from a particular tree, a member of that set of objects that stick up out of the ground, and is bigger than a bush. And when God did this, Adam did not say, in faux-humility, “Lord, if indeed you are Lord, there are so many epistemological issues here. How am I supposed to know what ‘a tree’ is? Just ten minutes ago, according to the account I have received (which is also problematic, btw), I was just dirt. How is former dirt supposed to know anything?”
Look. Just shut up and receive the gift. Call it whatever you want — naive realism, if you like — but that won’t slow me down. I prefer to call it what it is . . . gratitude. How do I know that the hassock holding my briefcase right now is really “there”? Because the triune God is not a liar, that’s why. I trust my senses, not because I am an empiricist, but because I am a Christian. I trust God. I trust the ability of my mind to understand, not because I am a rationalist, but because I am a Christian. I trust God. I believe what I read in the Bible because I trust God. I am a Christian. Not a modernist. Not a postmodernist. Not a Melanesian frog-worshipper. A Christian.
Evolutionary assumptions creep into everything, and they do damage everywhere they creep. Man did not “develop” or “invent” language over time. We did not begin our history as a race by grunting and pointing, and trying to stand upright. The first recorded words that Adam spoke were poetry, the speech of a civilized man, and the kind of speech that makes men like Rorty nervous.
Men can sin with nouns and verbs. They can sin with abstractions, and with concrete particulars. They can sin with language. But none of this changes the fact that every aspect of language, considered as such, was originally a gift from the hand of God. And this means that every form of individual autonomy — modernist individualism, and that particular form of individualist hyper-modernity that styles itself postmodern — is to be rejected. Not only rejected, but rejected with loud shouts of enthusiasm. While reading Rorty, I am reminded of Dorothy Parker’s apropos comment. “This is not a book to be lightly set aside. It should be thrown with great force.”