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

David,
I repeat my earlier statement:
All I can say ultimately is that /min/ has been equated with descent so
often that most people believe the nonsense.

It is amazing the extent to which even scholars absorb the commitments of
the milieu.

In justification, I ask you to look at the identical usage in Numbers 11
and Deuteronomy 14, where it applies only to those terms which cover more
than one entity. In modern usage, we distinguish ravens and crows, with a
term to cover both of them (and some other smaller black birds), corvids.
But Spanish has only one term for both, though other European languages
apparently make a distinction. There is also a matter of curiosity of how
"after" may be used of the first specimen of a species or genus.
.
I would note that my early edition of NIV has a footnote on Genesis 1:1
that "was" could be understood as "became." This is not in any of the
other recent translations I have, and does not occur in the Spanish
version. I take it that NIV is giving a nod in the direction of the old
Scofield version for those who hold to the gap theory. As far as I could
look, "became" has no justification in Hebrew.
Dave

On Wed, 11 Oct 2006 10:42:41 -0400 "David Opderbeck"
<dopderbeck@gmail.com> writes:
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 16:40:18 2006