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

*I fear you're missing the point of my earlier post*.

Dave -- so the word translated "according to their kinds" in Gen. 1 ("*miyn*"),
just means "every variety of?"

Strong's compares miyn to min, defined by Strong's as

properly, a part of; hence (prepositionally), from or out of in many senses
(as follows):--above, after, among, at, because of, by (reason of), from
(among), in, X neither, X nor, (out) of, over, since, X then, through, X
whether, with.

Brown, Driver defines miyn as follows:

kind, sometimes a species (usually of animals) ++++ Groups of living
organisms belong in the same created "kind" if they have descended from the
same ancestral gene pool. This does not preclude new species because this
represents a partitioning of the original gene pool. Information is lost or
conserved not gained. A new species could arise when a population is
isolated and inbreeding occurs. By this definition a new species is not a
new "kind" but a further partitioning of an existing "kind".

http://www.searchgodsword.org/lex/heb/view.cgi?number=4327

This is curious in the Brown Driver definition: "*Information is lost or
conserved not gained.*" Would this ancient Hebrew word really have carried
a notion of information entropy, or is that reading an argument against
evolution back into the word?

I'd prefer Roger's approach: *miyn* is essentially a phenomenological usage
concerning what we observe in ordinary human experience (cows give birth to
cows), not what may happen over deep time (different "kinds" arise through
natural selection and genetic drift). Anyone know of an exegete who takes
this kind of approach?
On 10/10/06, D. F. Siemens, Jr. <dfsiemensjr@juno.com> wrote:

>
> 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 Wed Oct 11 10:43:42 2006