Okay, but here's the thing.
Human beings are so different than animals.
Now a lot of people will try to play up
the intelligence of animals, won't they?
Oh man, dolphins, I mean, they have so much to say
if we could just communicate with them.
Yeah, I'm sure that dolphins are just gonna explain to us
the mysteries of the universe if we could just crack the code.
And people are trying to figure out
how to communicate with animals.
Let me explain to you, animals don't have much to say.
So you can crack the code, you can learn the language,
you're gonna be real disappointed
because it's not gonna be Shakespeare.
It's gonna be something real basic.
And in fact, animals do not use language.
Now, animals communicate.
But there's a big difference between communicating
and actually using language.
Now, if you actually study linguistics,
even just from a secular point of view,
I'm not talking about a Christian view,
even from a worldly point of view,
just go pick up a worldly linguistics book,
it will tell you that animals don't use language, okay?
In fact, just right before the service,
I pulled a linguistics book off my shelf
and wrote down some of the differences
between animal communication and human language, okay?
And some of the differences are
that language has the feature of displacement,
meaning that we can talk about things
in the past and the future.
You know, your dog doesn't come
and bark about stuff that was cool an hour ago.
You know what I mean?
And tell you about how cool yesterday was.
And it doesn't bark about things
that are gonna happen in the future either.
That's called displacement.
Also, arbitrariness.
Where basically there's no reason in the world
why we call things the things that we call them.
I mean, this is called a pulpit.
Is there anything about this shape or this object
that has anything to do with a P, a U, an L, a P-o-l-p-it?
This is arbitrariness.
You could call this anything, right?
You could just make up a combination of letters
and then, okay, that's what we're gonna call that now.
And a lot of new words, that's where they come from.
People sometimes just make up words.
And that's how they come into the language.
Arbitrariness, duality, cultural transmission.
I'm not gonna spend time talking about all these
for the sake of time, but the one I wanna focus on
is what's called productivity.
And this is the most important one.
The difference between communication of animals
and actual human language is that human language
has no boundaries.
It's productive, meaning that we're constantly coming up
with new sentences, new words.
Think, this sermon that I'm preaching right now,
if you took all the sentences in the sermon,
most of these sentences have never been spoken before
in the history of mankind.
Like the sentence that I just spoke was brand new.
Nobody's ever said that exact combination of words before.
Does everybody understand what I'm saying?
So throughout my sermon, 99% of the sentences in my sermon
were sentences that have never been spoken
by anyone in the history of mankind
because human beings are constantly coming up
with new ways of saying things.
They're taking the raw material of words
and they're arranging them in an infinite number
of possibilities to come up with new ideas
and new thoughts and new sayings
and there are new stories being written
and new poems and new sentences being composed all the time.
Whereas animals will just have a set number
of noises that they make
and they don't come up with a new noise.
It's like these are the noises we've got to work with guys
and they've got like a danger noise,
they've got a mating noise,
they've got an I'm hungry noise,
they've got just a certain set number of noises
and they're not combining these in new avant-garde ways
to create these new sentences of, you know,
hungry mating danger, huh?
You know, and that has some deep meaning, you know?
And then another dog's kind of like, ooh, ooh.
I'm like, oh, I wonder what she's getting at, you know?
So, because they don't know,
they're not creative like that.
They just make noises.
(dog barking)
Only I knew what that meant.
You know, we gotta crack the code.
(dog barking)
These are just simple noises.
They're not language.
They're communication, yes, but they're not language.
See the difference?
Say, well, I saw where the chimpanzee was taught
sign language and whatever.
The chimpanzee would never use those signs
to create new creative sentences or new creative thoughts.
There's no productivity.
It's just repeating the sign that it was taught,
push the button, the light bulb comes on.
I go like this and somebody hands me an apple,
so I'm going to keep going like this because I want an apple.
You could teach someone how to use a vending machine
without them knowing any language.
You could just be like, huh, huh.
You don't need any language to teach someone
to use a vending machine.
You can teach a chimpanzee how to ride a bicycle.
Chimpanzees cannot use language.
OK, so that-- and look, I could go on all night explaining
the differences between humans and animals.
Hopefully, you know the difference.
But people are not even close to animals
as far as their level of understanding,
the way that they think.
Not to mention the fact that we are spiritual beings,
you know, that we communicate with God.
We're in the image of God.
We communicate with God.
We seek God.
Animals aren't even seeking God.
They're not out in the field just, you know,
there's got to be something more than this.
There's like-- [ROARING]
Just like, I just feel like my life is so empty, you know?
I'm looking, I'm searching for meaning.
I'm searching for my purpose.
No, they're just putting out a lot of methane
and eating a lot of grass, and they just live and they die.
They say, well, what about my dog?
What about the dolphin?
Folks, they're light years from humans.