Why I Believed: Reflections of a Former Missionary

by Kenneth W. Daniels

In a prior language survey class, I had learned of dialect chains where speakers of dialect A could understand speakers of neighboring dialect B; dialect B was mutually intelligible with dialect C; C with D; and so forth to F; but speakers of A could not understand speakers of F. So how many languages are there, and which dialect should be the target of a new Bible translation? I had no trouble believing that language dialects evolved from a parent stock, so it seemed that something comparable could have happened with biological species, which disturbed my notion of the fixity of species. I realize that many creationists accept limited evolution even outside the species level, but for some reason I was shaken by the parallels between linguistic and biological evolution, to the point that I began to suspect evolution might be true. Almost out of the blue,