That is pretty much what I say to argue that God’s good creation could have included death and predation pre-fall.
You know the tree of life comes up again in Revelation, as part of the new creation where we don’t physically die? I think that is interesting. I also think the tree of life is symbolic, maybe of God’s life-giving power and presence. In the garden, God walked and talked with Adam and Eve. He was present with them in a way the rest of humanity did not and would not experience. It was their rebellion that made it so he could not live with them anymore. In the imagery of the temple and the tabernacle, God can dwell with his people because of the sacrificial system. In the Incarnation, God dwells with his people by taking on humanity. Post-Pentecost God dwells with his people by uniting his Spirit with every believer to form his Body in his “physical” absence. In the New Creation he promises to live with us in “physically” again in all his fullness, and the tree of life reappears there in the middle of God’s city for the healing of all the people groups. That makes me think that immortality is not tied to DNA or to any aspect of material creation, but to God’s sustaining power and presence.
Your response is a carefully crafted one. But it responds to the wrong question. Adam was not created IMMORTAL … or God would not have have needed to keep Adam from the fruit of that tree.
Adam was not immortal before the transgression. But after the transgression, he lost access to the fruit that would have made him so.
Considering that God gave us a world saturated with evidence for the latter and not for the former, the latter is not weird at all. Instantaneous “poofing” of the sort Morris & Whitcomb taught us was always a lot weirder (and arbitrary) than slow/gradual evolutionary processes operating over many millions of years which God used to diversify life on earth and to create HA’ADAM from the dust of the ground, just as the Bible states. [Biological life from the non-living ingredients found in the earth’s crust is what the Bible describes in multiple OT passages, and scientists of our day continue to investigate how that abiogenesis might have taken place. Of course, not only does abiogenesis find no conflict in the scriptures, even most Young Earth Creationist ministry leaders today speak of some sort of “hyper-evolution” after the flood which produced many many species from an original ark manifest of just 1500 or so “kinds”. They insist that the gradual evolution described by the Theory of Evolution is impossible but have no difficulties believing in a supersonic high-speed evolution generating new species far faster than any evolutionary biologist ever described! Ken Ham says that diversification took no more than 200 years. Of course, the fact that there is zero scriptural evidence and zero scientific evidence for such doesn’t bother him.]
And what is truly weird is the insistence of many Young Earth Creationist leaders that God SUDDENLY altered the DNA of individual organisms, including individual herbivores on the ark which had to survive in the post-flood world, yet there is ZERO EVIDENCE for this in terms of physical/scientific evidence nor in terms of scriptural evidence. The sudden alteration of teeth, digestive systems, intestinal tract bacteria, and the sudden introduction of many many other anatomical and physiological change is a fabrication out of thin air which has no other purpose than to try and salvage a cherished TRADITION which some are desperate to preserve.
Did God give us a creation full of misleading evidence for a history which never happened? I’ve yet to see an evidence-denialist even begin to address the huge theological problems of their fairly recent “creation science” invention of the 1960’s. (Obviously, they are very wise in their refusals to even attempt an honest appraisal of their Hail Mary shot in the dark.)
At least in the 1950’s and 1960’s there were preachers honestly admitting that all of the scientific evidence weighed against many of their Young Earth Creationist views. I knew of several who said from the pulpit, “God put dinosaur bones in the ground to test the faith of his people and to confound the godless scientists.” They were quite open about the idea of a creator who uses deceptive evidence to test both believer and non-believer.
Of course, the Bible says nothing about “instantaneous poofing”. It is a product of tradition and even Hollywood movies. I prefer the evidence for the biosphere’s history which God gave us in his creation and in his scriptures.
Exactly! And clearly that is what all the evidence tells us God did: God used evolutionary processes to change the DNA in populations of organisms over time. Why invent arbitrary “miraculous events” which neither scripture nor creation itself testifies while IGNORING all of the actual evidence God gave us in his creation?
Of course, if every time our favorite cherished tradition can be salvaged by inventing arbitrary “instantaneous poofing” miracles out of thin air, there’s really not much of anything to discuss.
This is exactly how “flood geology” works, every time the lack of evidence and the logical nonsense in it was identified, they resorted to “God miraculously solved this problem.” Even the allegedly “scientific” R.A.T.E. Project resorted to these “multiply both sides of the equation by zero” miracle-on-demand solutions when the science academy inviscerated their nonsense. (For example, they claimed God intervened and “poofed away” the enormous heat arising from the events which thought had happened, because even they realized that the oceans would have been boiled away and all life incinerated.) Indeed, they basically admitted that their project was nothing more than a propaganda stunt to sustain a philosophical/theological stance, not science. (I’m thinking of the comments of the Discovery Institute Board of Directors member who before the project even began stated what their “findings” were going to be. It never occurred to him that scientific research was not just ideologues intent on defending their philosophical position by cherry-picking evidence and misrepresenting the science.)
Young Earth Creationism has long been known for resorting to arbitrary miracles to solve what doesn’t make sense. If someone actually feels comfortable with that, it is certainly their right. I just wish they would be as honest as those preachers I recall and just say, “I have no scriptural evidence nor evidence from the created world itself for this position, but this is what I have chosen to believe because it allows me to sustain the cherished tradition of my church that I was raised in.” That’s actually a very very common position and I would defend their right to that religious belief. (Of course, when they call it a belief supported by scientific evidence, other factors come into play.)
For myself, I don’t consider personal preference all that relevant. I like to deal in scripture evidence and scientific evidence regardless of my personal preferences for a particular conclusion.
Thanks to all who contributed. This thread has been just as good as the original I featured—perhaps even better. Welcome to @JohnD, in particular!
The issue of how to understand death and suffering in light of evolutionary science is one that I have been passionate about for a long time. In fact, my master’s thesis in seminary was on this topic, from the angle of biblical interpretation. The way I see it, there are two parts to the issue: hermeneutics and theodicy. Roughly, we need to figure out what the Bible actually says about death and suffering in creation, and whether it actually serves as an answer to the question of why a good God allows bad things in his creation (theodicy meaning a defense of God in the face of evil, more or less). YECs think that their perspective accomplishes both; as a correct (they would say obvious reading of Scripture), and a defense of God’s goodness. In fact, both of these features are in full evidence in this recent article at Answers in Genesis.
I think YECs are seriously wrong on both those points. I’ll work backwards and deal with theodicy first. As others have mentioned before here, the argument that “death and suffering and earthquakes and parasites are Adam’s fault, not God’s” is hardly a satisfactory answer to death and suffering in creation. @OldTimer is right that what YECs are suggesting is a complete and catastrophic shift in creation equal in scope to the first creation event in Genesis 1-2. The only way to get around this is by saying that the broken creation was, in some sense, “pre-planned” inside of the first one, like a poison gas bomb in the center of the garden. But if someone was a director of a summer camp and put a giant poison gas bomb in the center of the camp, the parents would hardly be assuaged when they find all their children dead at summer’s end by the director’s explanation that “it’s not my fault, Susie pushed the red button!” Also, even if all death and suffering is attributable to Adam and Eve’s sin, you’ve still got to deal with a massive planet-wide genocide several chapters later, and multiple smaller genocides several books later. And that still doesn’t deal with the lingering question of why God doesn’t intervene more frequently to stop egregious suffering of children, dead babies, etc. So I just find it baffling that AiG and other YEC organizations paint the God of evolution as a moral monster, but maintain that God’s goodness is neatly preserved in their own view. I’m not saying that evolutionary creation has a simple explanation for all this, but I don’t see how evolution makes God look substantially worse than he already looks, given perfect goodness and perfect power. Theodicy is, at some level, an unsolvable mystery, only made bearable by the hope of the Resurrection.
Of course, the YEC folks might fall back on the scriptural necessity of this view. It might not make total sense, they say, but we’re still stuck with it because that’s what the Bible says. I respect this, but again I think they’re wrong. Their view of biblical narrative as Perfect Creation ruined by Fall and restored to Perfection by Christ is built on scant biblical evidence that takes several passages (most notably Romans 5) and builds an entire biblical metanarrative around them. A better hermeneutic, in my opinion, starts with a fuller understanding of Genesis 1. This chapter is all about dynamic tensions: light/darkness, sea/dry land, night/day, heaven/earth, fertility/infertility, and so on. The very good-ness of creation refers to the correct and well-ordered balance between chaos and order that is superintended by the one true and sovereign God. But Genesis 1 does not explain the ultimate origin of chaos (the “sea” of 1:2) and why God allows it in his creation. (Similarly, Genesis 3 doesn’t explain what the snake is doing in Eden, and how he got there.) When Job asks God about the very question of chaos and destruction and why the world seems unjust, he gets a “Genesis 1” lecture from God: “I made the world, including the sea and its monsters, and they respond to me. And that’s as much as you need to understand.” These dynamic tensions are a part of the structure of “this age” and this creation, and God maintains this tension to his ultimate purposes.
This helps explain episodes like the calming of the sea by Jesus. By commanding the wind and the waves, Jesus demonstrates that he bears the power of the Genesis 1 creator who first separated sea and dry land (in ancient times, the sea was the ultimate symbol of chaos). That’s it. It does not mean that storms and hurricanes are objectively bad or evil, as an AiG writer recently suggested, nor does it mean that these features of creation only began after Eve ate a piece of fruit. This (quite ironically) is man’s fallible theological inference run amok.
Furthermore, the “new creation” in Revelation 21 is not a restoration of the Genesis 1 world. In fact, it’s substantially different. The “sea” is gone (vs. 1). The light of God eliminates darkness, night, and so on (vs. 23-25). And, I would argue, the elimination of death is also a difference between the old and new creations. The defining characteristic, though, is God’s immediate presence in the midst of his holy people. My belief is that this current reality, with its dynamic tensions, has some sort of necessary purpose for bringing about this final reality, and I’m positive the Incarnation has something to do with it. But there’s a lot of mystery. Every time I try to “solve the equations” in my head about all this, I confess I come to a place of hopeful resignation.
OK, so this has turned into a blog post of its own. I’m starting to take after @eddie and @OldTimer!
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If God would need to create tools to punish he would have failed to create the perfect reality so he would not be perfect. Who is to tell if in the judgement of God a human has not equal rights to exist compared to his beloved parasite. We were told to reign over the world but not to eradicate it
And Brad’s post certainly deserves to be featured prominently in that way. This topic is so absolutely fundamental to the entire origins debate and surely both sides can agree on that. Does everyone agree? (Truly, if any Young Earth Creationist disagrees, I would love to learn more from them about this.)
Ken Ham constantly reminds his readers: The Theory of Evolution demands a world full of dead things and millions of years of terrible suffering, predator attacking prey—and that’s hardly a perfect world before the fall! I can just see all of the elderly members of my congregation in the 1960’s nodding heads up and down as I preached similar nonsense in the early 1970’s. Even before the “creation science” movement began, the unscriptural tradition of a perfect world was firmly entrenched. **The reasoning was always "Would a perfect Creator produce anything but a perfect creation? Surely not!"
I’ve found it very difficult to convince a lot of my Young Earth Creationist friends that “very TOV” (“very good”) does not mean the same thing as “perfect”. Moreover, even when the Bible actually uses the Hebrew and Greek words for “perfect”, it is usually with the idea of being complete and fully suited for its purpose. Is biological death truly perfect in that sense? Absolutely! The nutrient cycles depends upon it.
Every time I see Ken Ham and his peers get so very worked up on the issue of death before the fall, I can’t help but notice that there seems to be a strong element of frustration and desperation. After all, it is very difficult to pretend that death is not part of God perfect plan (!) for mankind when Torah Law was based on animal sacrifice and it pointed to the ultimate sacrificial death of the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, on the cross! Is not the cross the very heart of our faith? And the cross is the very most obvious symbol of that atoning death and resurrection that is the entire basis of salvation through the Gospel message.
Indeed, how did that serpent get into that “perfect” garden? I’ve never heard Ken Ham explain what snakes ate before the Fall but I’d sure like to be around when some Young Earth Creationist tells a comparative anatomist that snakes used to graze on grass. [As Buddy Davis wrote into the script of the “Creation Adventure Team” video for kids: “Scientists only know that dinosaurs had sharp teeth. That doesn’t tell us what they ate!” Unbelievably, he descends into the silly “Sharp teeth are great for cracking open coconuts.” Apparently, there were lots of coconut trees in ancient times to feed so many dinosaurs. That’s yet another advantage of tossing out the geologic column and the fossil record: you don’t have to wait on angiosperms to provide food for all of those vegetarian carnivores! Of course, Young Earth Creationism of that sort is also much easier to swallow if you don’t stop to consider that a fruit-based diet might be short on protein, especially essential amino acids which the body can’t manufacture. But that’s why “creation science” is a lot easier to affirm if one knows as little knowledge about science as possible. That’s especially true if your pastor ascribes to the no Laws of Thermodynamics before the Fall brand of YECism, because a creation subject to things wearing down and wearing out and even succumbing to heat death is certainly not a perfect creation! See FOOTNOTE.]
Many anecdotes come to mind which could reinforce @BradKramer’s observations here. Yet, before we find it all too easy to marvel at the science-ignorance and logical incoherence of the “creation science” strain of modern day YECism, it is wise to remind ourselves that we are all vulnerable to these kinds of human foibles when one of our most cherished traditions is at stake. I remember a funny essay by a Grace Brethren pastor who told of how he came to realize that their doctrinal tradition which demanded that water baptism must consist of three dunks in order to be valid (one dunk for each person of the Trinity, “I baptize thee in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost”) showed all the characteristics of Pharisaic legalism. He said that they even played the traditional game of “No, you don’t have to be dunked exactly three times in order to be a genuine Christian™—but as an adult Christian, if you fail to correct that error by having a correct baptism, you are claiming that the Bible is not your inerrant guide to Christian living and you lead us to question what other doctrines of the Bible you have casually rejected on your own authority.” In other words, a lot of the common human foibles found in American YECism arise in countless other arenas of evangelical culture and discourse.
FOOTNOTE: Even when I was “creation science” speaker, I got very nervous around some IFCA pastors who told their congregations that Adam didn’t have to worry about his shoes wearing out. (Things don’t wear out or break down in a perfect creation!) I finally asked a YEC speaker in the 1970’s (whose name I can no longer remember) how Adam could avoid falling down when climbing a hill, since the lack of friction (which wears down the soles of shoes and creates heat) in a universe where the Laws of Thermodynamics don’t apply, would not be there to give him sure footing. He looked at me with a frown and said, “Do you think a perfect garden in a perfect creation is going to have a lot of hills to climb? That doesn’t sound like paradise to me.” Believe me, just as the Pharisees found all sorts of imaginable ways to make Torah Law as harsh and tediously detailed as possible over the centuries of working hard at that, you’d be amazed just how far my YEC peers could go in working out every implication of what a “perfect creation” would be like, including [I’m not joking! These are totally for real!] odorless excrement, slip n’ slide birth canals, no food would ever spoil, all oranges were easy peel, and you could use chalk to write on slate without any fear of that that dreadfully unnerving “screeeeech!!!” sound. (I was also once told that pre-fall peaches had no fuzz on them, but when I tried to track that one to its source, it turned out to have been a tongue-in-cheek quip by a YEC pastor. Somebody included it in their notes on the sermon, which always got printed up and passed out to one of the adult Sunday School class the following Sunday. So it got retold as a “Biblical truth”. Advice to young pastors: after the laughter subsides, do not assume that you don’t need to say “That was just a joke, folks.”)
Yikes! I would definitely have a doctor take a look at that as soon as possible.
(That was just a joke, folks. See how that works?)
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PERFECT! Well done effort to bring us back to the UNIFYING aspect of our beliefs… that God DID have important things to do with our natural history!
In a debate like this, death needs to be defined, is it spiritual or physical? In Genesis, God told Adam that he would die the day he ate the fruit of the tree, but he, and Eve cleary indulged in the fruit and did not physically perish. They did die spiritually when they ate, they were separated from fellowship with God. The rest of the Bible is about restoring fellowship between God and Man, so the only death in view is spiritual separation from God, and not physical death. Now I realize that this is the context of God dealing with man in a covenant relationship, that the Bible is in fact dealing with sin, and separation from God. We get caught up in thinking about physical death, when this is highly unlikely the death talked about at the fall, everything is appointed to die, even before the fall. The death that God is concerned with is spiritual, we are dead in our tresspasses and sins until God raises our spirits to life, allowing us to make a conscious, living choice about our sin. From that point, we are eternal beings, our spirit will never die again!! When we pass, our physical bodies will return to dust, but our spirit returns to God, it never dies!! Our spirit transitions from its earthly home, to its heavenly body!! Where we will forever be with God!!
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delighted to see you having the same understanding as I expressed above (comment 10). it’s just logic
actually having faced the possibility of changing sides a couple of times when having brain surgery following my head injury I would think our spirits can burn out on reentry into the spiritual world. Consider love as the heatshield of your spirit. If you die with hate on your mind the frustration of being unable to enact your hate when you go is the ultimate burnout as once void of acoustic and visual input your brain goes into overdrive. Just consider how much all those data hold back your core processor. Cut them out and you suddenly have all the time you want at your disposal. I was lucky to have incredible feeling of love and peace in all those occasions which tremendously helped my recovery each time. I can only imagine how it would be to have unfinished business at that time regarding a battle you still want to win or a hate of someone. If that routine takes over burnout is to me the logical consequence or an eternity of hell in what may only be a couple of minutes for those standing at your bedside.
I agree. We do not know whether they did eat from the tree of life. It is speculation to state either one way or the other. The point is that we make these observations after eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as well as after banishment from the Garden.
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The title of the thread is wrong. The Fall is not a good description of the Eden story.
In addition to this, if we follow the narrative to its logical conclusion, since we live after exile from the Garden of Eden, there is no possibility of access to the Tree of Life at all. Death is the resolution outside of Jesus Christ, imo.
The story of the Garden of Eden is either pure genius … because it is a theological Rorschach Test for each new generation searching for God…
… or because it is so garbled, no one can untangle its various rhetorical feints and jabs…
I take the side that Genesis is genius!
The problem with the phrase “the Fall” is it has become over-loaded with magical fantasy. While, yes, any Hollywood producer can write a tragedy where a man full of promise and future glory comes to “a fall” (!!!) … humbled by his own flaws and the petty superfluities of life.
And so, it is because of all the other elements religionists try to pack into “the Fall” that I think it is fair to say a new phrase should be substituted - - one such phrase I have frequently endorsed is “The Eviction”… though a more helpful phrase would be “the Humbling”.
But let’s visit my sentence from my last post - - where I refer to the jumble of the story, with feints and jabs. You say you’ve never seen them - - but of course you have!
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God says they will die that day if they touch the fruit; they do not.
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the story embodies Adam’s “Original Sin”… but of course it is Eve who sins first. But nobody wants to say it is Eve’s sin that changed the Cosmos.
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And who could blame Adam for eating of the fruit after seeing that Eve is not dead at all. Is Adam’s participation even a sin? It’s certainly not as grave as Eve’s, right?
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Then there is the whole problem of judging the couple … and billions of their descendants … on their ability to follow instructions righteously … when God intentionally prevented them from knowing Good from Evil. Isn’t this the equivalent state of a human toddler? Do we gravely punish a toddler for “innocently breaking a moral practice” that he doesn’t even know? Isn’t that the very definition of “innocence”?
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Then there is the temper tantrum God throws with the flaming sword. He throws the couple out of Eden … when he could have simply moved the Tree of Life somewhere else… or put the flaming sword outside the tree’s perimeter…rather than the entire confines of Paradise.
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And lastly (though there are probably a few more I can’t remember at this time) there is God pointing out that the Tree of Life would still work for Adam - - despite his sin. This is not how most moderns remember the story - - they are quite convinced that Adam is physiologically or divinely changed to mortality with his sinful choice - - rather than God not wanting to have Adam and Eve as his immortal peers, both knowing good from evil and having immortality!
I just noticed the very first sentence of this thread.
Why did Christ need to defeat death? Humans have sought immortality for eons. Avoiding death is the very essence of humanity… no doubt placed into our genetic code by God’s simple plan of natural selection - - all life forms that are cavalier about avoiding death tend to drop out of the system…