Word Burglars

Much of my work involves trying to inspire people through words. Part of the difficulty of that task is it's not always easy to know if the language you are speaking holds the same meaning in the mind of the hearer, both in the basic meaning and in the subtle nuances. You may think you know what the word simple means, but do I mean easy or unintelligent? Do I mean that distilled simplicity that can only be the result of long experience or the naive simplicity of youth?

It's often good to adjust your language to fit your audience, but you also need to retain your authentic voice, because nothing sounds worse than a forced attempt to mimic the language of your audience. Perhaps the greatest struggle is when the morphing and transforming of language over time makes it impossible to pin down meanings and some ideas become almost impossible to express. Anyone involved in Biblical translation will be familiar with those moments of elusive meaning. But it happens today and it's happening increasingly within the many variations of the language we call English. I have much affection for America and have many good American friends, but the Americanisation of the English language sometimes causes me some frustration.

However, few things in the Americanisation of the English language bug me more than the invention of the word 'burglarize'. A burglar is someone who burgles. The noun burglar is a role derived from the verb 'to burgle', in the same way that beggar is derived from the verb 'to beg'. Of course these days, there are many more examples of this where the ending is 'er' rather than 'ar'; a runner runs, a singer sings and a fighter fights, but the principle is the same. You can't then turn the role back into the verb by adding yet another suffix. A runner cannot runnerize, a preacher cannot preacherize and a beggar cannot beggarize.

The ize ending on burglarize is particularly problematic as it seems to be treating burglar as if it were an adjective like secular, familiar, regular, popular or vulgar. A regular is not someone who regs, to popule is not a thing and secular folk do not go around seculing all over the place.

Some Americanisms are simply nouns being used for different objects in a different world. Language always moves on and the meaning of words will always change, but burglarize signals a potential failureization of language. A demeanification of words and a chaosing of the landscape for the worderizers of our generation. There are many funs you can have with language (depending on how many languas constitute the full measure of your language) but if you're going to mess around with the grammatical construct of the English language then you really need to understand the elements with which you are messing. No one has ever burglarized a house because that would mean turning the house into a burglar.

OK, so I should say that most of my rants about small details come from a place of humour and affection, both for the subject and the people on both sides of the argument. This occasion is no exception, but it holds within it a serious point. We live in a world that is increasingly bound by not one, but many languages of division. Though the truth of the arguments are important, people are rarely that different on one side of an argument from another. Yet it is increasingly difficult to communicate across the divides, because the nuances of language remain untranslated. More than that, the subtleties of the language we hear day in, day out, can begin to reshape the people we are through the ideas that our language equips us to express.

When an American says 'our house has been burglarized', they probably mean something that belongs to them has been taken from them and the safety of their home has been violated. What I hear is that they have been made into burglars; thieves of culture and language, by the very culture and language they have inherited. I am reminded of the irony of people who rightly feel violated by someone invading their house, yet it's a house built on land taken forcibly from the indigenous people who once lived there. I am reminded of how the language carried with their ancestors to this new land can on the one hand be so poorly treated as to invent nonsensical words through misunderstanding, yet on the other hand can often be used as a test and a cultural stick to beat others who would choose to come and live there.

It is easy to pick on the visible inconsistencies of American culture, but every culture is made into thieves by its history; we are all 'burglarized' by our cultural past, we all speak nonsense that feels like it makes sense to us and misappropriate bits of culture we don't understand. But true meaning only comes when we stop and ask ourselves what we really mean by what we say - and where do the words of those who seem to be our enemies, actually mean the same as our own words?

Evolution is not Science.

Ok let's begin with a couple of warnings or perhaps reassurances depending on where you’ve come from to arrive here;

1. Science is great - this is neither an anti science nor an anti evolution article.

2. This is not an article that pits science against religion, though it does engage with the conversation between science and theology.

This article is primarily about clarification and definition; gosh, that sounds exciting doesn’t it? Hey, but wait a minute, on this occasion the clarification and the definition may just mess with your head.

So let's get to the main and possibly controversial point of this article - Evolution is not science.

‘How can this be’ I hear you cry? Well, science is a methodology or a collection of connected processes. The Oxford dictionary defines science as "the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment." The key words in there for clarifying the limits of the discipline of science are "systematic study" and "observation and experiment." Evolution is a process that is inherent within the way that living organisms have developed on this planet. Science has been instrumental in discovering and analysing this process, scientific processes have allowed us to observe, collect information, compare and of course scientists had the privilege of naming the process of evolution. So evolution's association with the world of science is entirely reasonable. However evolution itself is not science, the clarification should be that it is a process that was discovered and subsequently named by science. This may seem like a pedantic clarification, but it’s essential for understanding the position of science in our culture.

If evolution is as most scientific studies suggest, then it is something that was inherently part of the universe before the process of scientific study ever existed. Let’s be fair, this is true really of all scientific discoveries, but for evolution there are a number of reasons why this is even more significant.

·    Firstly evolution has gained a deep cultural association with arguments in the 21^st century between extreme viewpoints about religion, theology, science and atheism. So understanding what we are arguing about is essential.

·       Secondly, unlike say a galaxy, a fish or penicillin, evolution is not a thing, it is a process.

·      Thirdly, and here’s where it get’s exciting, if we understand science as a process by which we observe study and experiment upon aspects of the world around us, it is essential to understand that evolution is the process being observed and studied, not the process by which it is studied. That is to say the process being studied (evolution) and the process by which it is studied are two different processes.

That in itself is enough to change the way we ought to frame many arguments, but here is the thing that we should realise when we get down to the nitty-gritty of these two processes. Evolution is a highly unscientific process. Evolution is trial and error, random; it has no observers, except the survivors who weren’t there to witness the beginning of the experiment. It makes no effort to collect data or keep records of the results or the conditions of its experiments. There are no control groups with which to make comparisons and no clear delineation between one set of experiments and the next. Evolution as a process would make very bad science.

But why is this so important? Well it’s vital when we look at how we talk about science in our culture and even how educated people talk about things like evolution. Just click on the Science and technology tab in the trending subjects column on Facebook; every time an interesting animal is spotted somewhere or an unusual event in the weather has been noticed, it’s labelled as science, when no scientific analysis is being done. This use of language permeates into arguments that say ‘you can’t deny evolution, it’s science!’ Well I have no interest in denying evolution, but it’s not science. this kind of thinking bypasses both the scientific process and the reality of what evolution actually is. It's important when people say, 'you have to believe in evolution, but you can't believe in God because evolution is science but God isn't'.

There are those who will attribute everything in the natural world to science before anything scientific has been done with it. This is actually more like bad theology than good science. It is a mixing of an unconscious belief in a human capacity to understand and control our surroundings through intellect with what we call science. If these things are science, then so are we and so is all that we do. The oddest thing about this cultural attitude is that it primarily sees the natural world as science, and us observing that world as science, but sees most human endeavour as something other than science, something different. Darwin’s ‘Origin of the Species’ offered no shock to the majority of the religious world in terms of evolution in general as this had been discovered by Christian botanists and was well known to many Christians at the time. The challenge that Darwin offered was that we as human being were perhaps not so special in God's creation as we also evolved from other creatures.

In reality, reading Genesis and other books of the Old Testament in the original language reveals that there has always been an understanding that human beings and other creatures of God’s creation share the same breath and the same life force. But, for Christians, as for many religions, there is thought to be a special relationship between God and humanity. In parts of Christian history that relationship has been seen in terms of a harsh and cold division between humanity and the rest of creation. In the post Darwinian world that division has been softened and the Church’s relationship with the environment has been improving. It is not as good yet as perhaps it ought to be, though we are in general heading in a better direction. However, the scary irony is that this new tendency to use of the word ‘science’ to refer to natural things as opposed to human activity is anti scientific to the point of re-establishing that false ‘special’ relationship of humanity that sets us apart from and above the rest of creation.

Evolution is not science any more than a thunderstorm is God. And God is not theology or religion any more than the sea is a fish. Until we understand that as a culture we are unlikely to be able to have a healthy conversation about any of these things together.