Wednesday, May 04, 2005

The semiotic argument for God's existence

It occurred to me there was one. Probably it's a variety of the argument from design, but I liked it. :-)

Semiotics is the study of sign systems. They come in all sorts of ways: on doors, by streets, design of catalogs, what one wears, and (the big one) language. Pretty much anything that conveys meaning is a sign and therefore a proper thing for semiotics to study.

The interesting thing about semiotics is that it's all about signs and things signified. However, if you don't have someone making the sign, it no longer has meaning and therefore is not longer a sign. It's just a thing. Further, signs can't fulfill their function unless there's someone on the receiving end.

There are a lot of sign systems out there that work, but humans just didn't put in place. Language itself is probably one. Current evolution theory tries to call human language a more developed form of ape language, but that just doesn't fit the research. They've never been able to get monkeys to bridge the gap--and that's with a human teacher leading the way. It also doesn't fit with Chomsky's work on language acquisition and universal grammar.

If there is even one sign system in existence which humans did not invent, then there must have been Someone to make it.

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