Continuing the discussion from https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/jay-johnson-problems-with-adam-and-eve/6997/33, I’d like to address one specific objection by @Jay313 in his article for an Adam and Eve created de novo.
To focus on just one discipline: special creation ignores what we know of childhood development. Human beings primarily learn by a process variously called “mimesis,” “social learning,” or “enculturation.” As philosophers from Aristotle to Wittgenstein have observed, we watch as others play the game, we infer the rules, and we attempt to imitate what the others are doing. The same process accounts for how children learn language, the norms of social behavior, and the numerous traditions and social rituals that collectively we call “culture.”
Now, imagine two people deprived of all that information and suddenly thrust into existence. How did Adam and Eve learn to walk and talk? How did they learn socially appropriate behavior? How did they learn to obey a rule? When God warned them not to eat the fruit, how did they know what “death” was? Between birth and maturity, we literally learn how to be human, and the way we learn is by observation, inference, and imitation. The de novo , special creation of Adam requires all of that basic knowledge be implanted in Adam’s and Eve’s minds directly by God in the form of false memories. It’s the omphalos hypothesis again.
My response is this: while it is true that we learn to speak and write by imitation, when I form words, I do not consciously draw upon any memories. For example, at some point, I learned to use the English phrase “for example”, probably by imitating a tip in a book about English writing and style, or subconsciously absorbing it from reading people who use that phrase. Yet, when I chose to write the phrase “for example”, I did not draw upon any such memories. (In fact, I have forgotten when I started using the term and where I first encountered it.) Instead, I use the phrase like a reflex. I simply have the capability to use the phrase as part of my expression. You could say it’s wired into the neurological software of my brain. The same goes for my general use of the English language. The experiences I’ve had are only the means by which I acquire the capability, not the capability itself.
I am an avid musician, and my skills in playing cello and piano are similar. I had to acquire these skills by practice and imitation, but I have little memory of those practice sessions. Instead, I know that when I sit down with a cello I can just play any tune I want. I know what finger position my left hand needs to be in to play a middle C on the A string. It is more like muscle memory, some sort of higher-level neurological connection between my brain and my fingers.
I would also like to bring up the case of Derek Amato:
In October 2006, Amato suffered a serious concussion after hitting his head in a swimming pool.
According to a blog post he wrote for the Wisconsin Medical Society, he lost 35 percent of his hearing and suffered some memory loss.
But when he visited with a friend a few days after the accident, Amato said he felt inexplicably compelled to sit down at the keyboard.
“It was one of those moments when you just know. It was just drawing me to it,” he told TODAY.
Placing his fingers on the keys, Amato began to play — dexterously, beautifully.
“As I shut my eyes, I found these black and white structures moving from left to right, which in fact would represent in my mind, a fluid and continuous stream of musical notation,” he wrote in the blog post.
There are also cases of people who forget a large chunk of their personal memories, such as Benjamin Kyle. Kyle only had a few scattered memories of his childhood. Yet he did not instantly revert to the intelligence level of a child. He could still speak and act like an adult.
Applying this to the case of a de novo created Adam and Eve, it seems that their language and other abilities could have been similarly implanted miraculously and instantaneously by God. God would not need to have implanted false memories to them - only a set of neurological abilities to reflexively be able to express what they wanted in whatever language they spoke. They would be like Derek Amato or Benjamin Kyle, but in respect to the ability to speak and move and do other human things. Thus, Adam and Eve’s ability to do these things would present no more of a problem than the fact that they had adult bodies and appearances. I think this significantly lessens the blow of the Deceptive God Objection (DGO).
Interesting! I was dimly aware that there’s a unique sign language where I live, but I didn’t know that there were so many unique forms. Apropos of nothing, I came across this, which may be of some interest