1 Ronald P. Millett, “Joseph Smith and the Origin and Progress of Life,” Meridian Magazine, http://meridianmagazine.com/ideas/090526origin.html . May 26, 2009.

Ronald P. Millett, “Joseph Smith’s Views on the Origin of Life,” Meridian Magazine, http://ldsmag.com/ideas/090818origin.html.  August 18, 2009.

See also:  James E. Talmage, Jesus the Christ, Salt Lake City, 1915. Pp. 148-149. 

“Miracles cannot be contravention of natural law, but are wrought through the operation of laws not universally or commonly recognized.  Gravitation is everywhere operative, but the local and special application of other agencies may appear to nullify it … Achievements made possible by modern invention … --these are not longer miracles in man’s estimation, because they are controlled by human agency. … We arbitrarily classify as miracles only such phenomena as are unusual, special, transitory and wrought by an agency beyond the power of man’s control. 

“In a broader sense, all nature is a miracle. … 

“In the contemplation of the miracles wrought by Christ, we must of necessity recognize the operation of a power transcending our present human understanding.  … To deny the actuality of miracles on the ground that, because we cannot comprehend the means, the reported results are fictitious, is to arrogate to the human mind the attribute of omniscience, by implying that what man cannot comprehend cannot be, and that therefore he is able to comprehend all that is.”

2 We learn from the creation account that Adam systematically gave names to the animals. Although modern linguists would claim that the naming was arbitrary, we learn that Adam taught his children to read and write by the `spirit of inspiration.’   If so, then the names which he recorded were not arbitrary, but reflected the natural organization of things captured by the Adamic Tongue – like the scientific naming system, only complete and far more descriptive. The truth be told, what Adam did was write an encyclopedia for life on earth, and bequeathed it to his righteous posterity as a textbook and linguistic foundation for them to build upon.  This sacred archive was no doubt withdrawn at the time of transgression upon the plains of Shinar [tower of Babel] and represented perhaps the most precipitous and greatest loss of knowledge ever suffered by mankind.

Ronald P. Millett, “In Search of the Adamic Language,” Meridian Magazine, http://ldsmag.com/sci_rel/010808adamic.html.  August 8, 2001.

3 Hugh Nibley, “The Genesis of the Written Word,” New Era, Sep 1973, 38.

 “If Joseph Smith was right, books and writing are a gift to man from heaven, … The art of writing was a special dispensation, an inestimable boon, enabling the righteous to retain the memory of divine visitations and communications ever fresh before them, and assisting them in coordinating their earthly activities with the heavenly order: ‘The immediate will of heaven is contained in the Scriptures,’ said the Prophet Joseph. The earliest records of the race have much to say ‘about the miracle of writing, which the Ancients regarded as a gift from heaven.’”

“Many scholars have pointed out that the alphabet is the miracle of miracles, the greatest of all inventions, by which even the television and jet planes pale in comparison, and as such, a thing absolutely unique in time and place; they also agree that it was of Egyptian or West-Semitic origin.  It is also argued that by the very nature of the thing it can only have been the work of a single inventor.  ‘The gulf between the idea and the written word,’ writes H. Schmitt, ‘could only have been bridged once, by a miracle of invention.’ ”

See also:  Howard W. Hunter and Boyd K. Packer, “That They May be Redeemed,” Regional Representatives Seminar, April 1, 1977.

Although nonreligious scholars might consider inventions to not be the same as “a gift to man from heaven,” Elder LeGrand Richards admonished:  “Brethren, the Lord has inspired men to invent these great tools. Now if we don’t use them to teach His gospel, Satan will use them to lead the people astray.”  Elder Boyd K. Packer added:  “The airplane did not come as an accidental discovery to wicked men who were groveling to conquer one another.  Revelation was involved.  It came precisely when we could use it to move across the world to restore the gospel.  It was given to us!”

See also: Justus Ernst, “‘Every Man … in His Own Language’,” Ensign, Jul 1974, 23

“President Spencer W. Kimball summarized this feeling when he spoke to the Regional Representatives at their seminar on April 4, 1974: ‘he Lord will lay in our hand inventions which we can scarcely conceive whereby we will be able to bring the gospel to the peoples of the world.’”

4 Eldon G. Lytle, “LANGUAGE In Capital Letters,” eBook available at http://www.language-icl.com. 2009,

Inscription is when mind language imposes form upon reality and is the connection between MIND and the realization of the idea. Inscripted constituents represent themselves rather than something else, but are structured by an originative formula just the same. Prescription is the governing principle, either in the form of law, formula, mold, plan, etc. The angels who are ‘silent notes taking’ are describing what people are inscribing in their lives for later assessment. Sometimes we have ‘bad hair’ days. Far worse is to have a ‘bad inscription’ day.

Some prescription is born with us (instinctive); other prescription we have to develop for ourselves through trial and error – like riding a bike. The task of the scientist is to discover and record the prescription which is governing the effect under investigation. Mathematical notation is merely a specialized form of linguistic expression.

Natural law is the body of prescription put into effect by our Creator to govern the natural world. Regardless of domain or form, it is all ‘language’ in one mode or another.

“What could be simpler than a grand unifying theory which generalizes from recipes for cakes, to blueprints that raise up skyscrapers, to scripts that structure space stations, to LANGUAGE which informs worlds, solar systems, galaxies, etc. … This account of things is in perfect harmony with the progression of order and control observed on every hand in nature, from moss and skin mites, to wood ants to groundhogs, all conforming matter to their needs . . . a system which, by the way, we daily exploit for ourselves!” [page 53]

5 “Butterfly Emerges from Stellar Demise in Planetary Nebula NGC 6302,” Images from Refurbished Hubble, NASA official web site,   http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/multimedia/ero/index.html, September 9, 2009.

“This celestial object looks like a delicate butterfly. But it is far from serene. What resemble dainty butterfly wings are actually roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The gas is tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour -- fast enough to travel from Earth to the moon in 24 minutes!”

6 For more on the Rosetta stone see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone.

See also:  Simon Ager, “Ancient Egyptian Scripts,” Omniglot Writing Systems and Languages of the World web site, Retrieved 9/13/2009.

“The Demotic or popular script, a name given to it by Herodotus, developed from a northern variant of the Hieratic script in around 660 BC. The Egyptians themselves called it 'sekh shat' (writing for documents). During the 26th Dynasty it became the preferred script at court, however during the 4th century it was gradually replaced by the Greek.”

As an example of the great invention of the alphabet, the Egyptian Demotic glyphs represented single consonants:

7 The first form of writing was ideographic (visible mind). Visible speech came later (after Babel), first in the form of ideographs supplemented by articulation cues, next as syllabic writing and finally as alphabetic writing. All alphabetic symbols can be traced back to iconic forms. Indian rock writing is noteworthy because it is strictly ideographic and for that reason was freely understood by Indians of all language families and dialects.  –EGL

See also:  Ronald P. Millett, Eldon G. Lytle and John P. Pratt, “Petroglyphs:  Rock Art or Rock Writing,” Meridian Magazine, November 27, 2006, http://www.meridianmagazine.com/sci_rel/061127writing.html.

LaVan Martineau, The Rocks Begin to Speak, KC Publications, Las Vegas, 1973, and The Southern Paiutes, KC Publications, Las Vegas, 1992. His daughter Shanan has a website with updates, comments and links to where books are available at www.rocklanguage.com.

www.answers.com entry for alphabet:

"A system of writing, theoretically having a one-for-one relation between character (or letter) and phoneme (see phonetics). Few alphabets have achieved the ideal exactness. A system of writing is called a syllabary when one character represents a syllable rather than a phoneme; such is the kana, used in Japanese to supplement the originally Chinese characters normally used. The precursors of the alphabet were the iconographic and ideographic writing of ancient man, such as wall paintings, cuneiform, and the hieroglyphic writing of the Egyptians. The alphabet of modern Western Europe is the Roman alphabet, the base of most alphabets used for the newly written languages of Africa and America, as well as for scientific alphabets. Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, and many languages of the former Soviet Union are written in the Cyrillic alphabet, an augmented Greek alphabet. Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic all have their own alphabets."

http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozideas/writalfa.htm:

"The reason for the great advantage of the alphabet is that in most languages the number of phonemes (speech sounds) is only around forty, with a range of between twelve to sixty, a limit probably due to the restricted range of sounds that humans can distinguish in listening or articulate in speaking. It defines the maximum number of letters needed to represent them, that need to be learnt. Since the necessary letters are so few in number, they can be simple and distinctive, and easy to write and to copy. In a consistent spelling system, any unfamiliar word can be written down by analysing the speech sounds, and it can be read by combining the written symbols (graphemes ). A writer may misspell, and still communicate in an alphabetic writing system, whereas logographs are not so immune to misinterpretation through human error or memory lapse in writing or reading."

8 “blueprint for 777,” the-blueprints.com, online.www.the-blueprints.com/search/boeing+777/

“The-Blueprints.com - The largest free blueprint collection on the Internet, more than 33000 blueprints.” 

9 JAL Boeing 777-346(ER), Flickr shared photos web site, http://www.flickr.com/photos/sabian404/3915811187/in/pool-boeing_777.

“Anyone can see your public photos anytime, whether they're a Flickr member or not.”