Explaining too much?

The Kingdom of Speech, by Tom Wolfe, addresses the weakness of the evolutionary theory.  According to Wolfe, the problem with evolution is not that it fails to nearly explain where things came from but that it is too neat, too tidy.  It explains too much and ends up overplays its hand. It tries to do too much; it seeks to explain everything.  In the end, it hangs together so that if one of its arguments fails, it all falls down.  By trying to explain everything, it ends up explaining nothing.  

According to Wolfe:  “Darwin had fallen into the trap of cosmogonism, the compulsion to find the ever-elusive Theory of Everything, an idea or narrative that reveals everything in the world to be part of a single and suddenly clear pattern.”  Lacking not merely clear and convincing evidence but nearly any real substantive evidence, the evolutionist is at a loss to find even the faintest semblance of corroborative affirmation.  For Darwin,, this meant using his dog as a stand-in for actual research (other that observation).  So for Darwin, “If my dog were left on an island…” or “even my dog has figured out how to…” supplants evidence to support his all encompassing need to explain everything.

Wolfe hits the whole thing in the explanation for the origin of language.  The evolutionist can “explain man’s opposable thumb, upright stature, and huge cranium” but can’t find “one shred of solid evidence that human speech has evolved.”  According to Wolfe: “Speech, language, is something that existed quite apart from Evolution. It has nothing whatsoever to do with it. Man, man unaided, created language. It’s an artifact, every bit as much as a light-bulb or a Buick.”

The problem of language, how it got there, is the question that ends up causing serious problems for the whole of evolutionary theory.  Now to be sure, Wolfe is not ready to suggest that God placed speech within man but the Christian must find the whole thing rather delicious since this is the God who spoke things into being, the God who is the Word made flesh, and whose Word remains His living voice that returns to Him having accomplished His purpose in sending it.  Christians cannot help but giggle a bit that speech (its origin and development) ends up being a hole in the whole evolutionary theory.  Now you do not have to be Christian to have questions about the evolutionary theory and its need to explain everything through one basic lens but if you are a Christian, it does provide a certain amount of justice for those who are often portrayed as hapless, witless fools for disagreeing with evolutionary theory.  The reality is that Genesis explains nothing about creation at all except that God made all things by speaking them into existence and that all things are ordered by His design and were created for His purpose.  To this Christian, anyway, this is less of a stretch than the latest evolving explanations of the evolutionist.