Re: [asa] Re: Cosmological vs. Biological Design

On Tue, 10 Oct 2006 20:57:29 -0500 (CDT) "Roger G. Olson"
<rogero@saintjoe.edu> writes:
> <snip>
> It's always been clear to me that "after its kind" is in one
> generation,
> that parents of a certain species give birth to an offspring of that
> same
> species. Even the most ardent fundy atheist evilutionist would
> agree to
> that. Why do some believers feel they must interpret this concept
> in a
> way to create unnecessary conflict with scripture and reality?
> There's
> already enough of that. Is it just to build a strawman to attack
> biological evolution?
>
> Roger
>
> P.S. The YEC apologists are always yammering that Genesis should be
> read
> in a "simple plain clear manner obvious even to a child" (SPCOETAC).
> It's
> interesting that my SPCOETAC exegesis is in no conflict with modern
> science regarding this "kind" business.
>
Roger,
I fear you're missing the point of my earlier post. "After his (their)
kind" in the Hebrew has no connection to procreation. The reference to
fruit trees in Genesis 1:11f simply means that every kind of tree bearing
fruits with pits was produced. It has nothing to do with peaches becoming
nectarines or the crossing of plums with apricots, etc., or whether
poisonous bitter almonds are the same species as those we eat. The
reference in v. 21 is to every possible variety of bird, whether they
bred true or not, or came from barnacles or other form of life. The
evidence for this is in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14, where the phrase
is used only where there is recognition that the term used had more than
one exemplar. The phrase is not used of camel, hare or coney (hyrax), of
which only one species each was recognized. There are no Bactrian camels
in the Near East, and I believe that there is only one species of hyrax
in the area, though there are other species in Africa. I don't know if
there is more than one species of lagomorph in the area, but they would
look so much alike as not to be counted separately.

All I can say ultimately is that /min/ has been equated with descent so
often that most people believe the nonsense.

Let me also emphasize the point that occurred to me when it struck me
that I had to think like an ancient to grasp the ancient notion of
fixity. What a thing is is still usually a matter of recognizing its
characteristics. Right now there's a question whether we got a good
enough look to identify an ivorybill woodpecker. And we're depending on
description rather than on definition, which had very definite
strictures. On a different note, a frog is a frog whether we believe that
it was generated from mud, had a momma and a poppa, was produced by a
self-fertilizing hermaphrodite or parthenogenetically.
Dave

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Received on Tue Oct 10 23:08:34 2006