Distasteful...The Implications Of Evolution Before The Fall

@Christy
Consciousness…Yes, I think that is the term I wanted (unless that is shot down too)…

Johnathan,
Re #1, 3 4, and 5.

All of these terms I bolded above, are all words laden with emotional content . It is our “Sapience” which is causing us to use these kinds of words because they reflect the internal feelings we have over things that we consider to be “bad” or at least the inverse “not good”.

Death to a non-sentient being has no emotional feeling to awareness. Sapient beings from cats and dogs to dolphins and whales appear to have some perception of loss at the death of another. Whether this attached to instinct or sentience and where the boundary is, of course we don’t know.

But if we are implying death in the evolutionary world is bad is a non-sequitur. It is a function of the life-cycle.

The same is applied to killed, disaster, disease, and certainly suffering especially if being applied to non-sapient/sentient beings. If there is no recognition or loss to death, then the terms disaster, disease, and suffering are moot points.

Instead of disaster perhaps cataclysm is a better word as it denotes a violent natural event.
I don’t have an alternate word for disease, but if we can use it without the emotionally bad overtones, it will work. (the word itself is constructed from dis(not)-ease which carries its emotional content).

Killed as a word is often used as a synonym of “murder” – when it is applied to people. And the moral agency is certainly applied because of it. However, that must be distinct from “murder” as killing someone (manslaughter) by a human, has a lesser penalty than murder (in both Biblical and secular law).
As for organisms killing is technically correct, but not with any moral agency to make it bad.

It is easier to assign these words to venues where moral agency is in effect (as @gbrooks9 has pointed out). The problem is at what point does this apply to “living” evolutionary hominids and cetaceans et al.

Good topic! Thanks!

Ray :sunglasses:

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@RLBailey
Are you trying to insinuate that these things are “good” or at least, “not bad?”

Why are you ignoring Gen. 1 which says that God created them male and female, and, presumably, concurrently. Why not accept Gen. 1 in a literal sense and Gen. 2&3 as figurative? Its a distortion of science to claim that Eve was literally created from Adam’s rib, and that the human female was created as an afterthought.
Al Leo

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Jonathan,

I am not insinuating anything. I am proposing.

If you read my post carefully, you will see that they are bad (or not good) when they are applied to humans. But NOT to any animals and organism prior to the Genesis account of a “real” Adam and Eve (in my opinion).

There is a difference between a human, which can make a “moral” decision (al la Adam & Eve) and all else living.

By using the words I bolded above, you are reading “moral distaste” back into the pre-adamic world where there is no morality.

Death is not an evil thing until God said that he would hold mankind accountable for his actions. And that is why in Revelation the last thing to be cast into the Lake of Fire is “death”. Human Death is the death that is finished, as all the non-believers are destroyed and the only people left are living everlasting lives in Christ Jesus. Hence no more “death”.

Ray :sunglasses:

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Just ask any woman about that! :grin:

Ray :sunglasses:

The land of Canaan is also called “very good” in Numbers, but I’m pretty sure there were predators, suffering and death in it at the time.

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How can a time independent omniscient being have afterthoughts? As an omniscient being he must have created man in need of a helper for a reason.

close, but not there yet. Death does not become evil due to the fall. God does not threaten Adam and Eve with death but he tells them, like you tell your child when you touch that high voltage cable you will die, that they will suffer death when they realize their self in eating from the tree of realisation of good and evil. Suffering death, as you correctly notice, is a consequence of a realised self. If you see your self in God / creation you return to creation again, so it is in your nature. Only once you realise your self in your material body you become finite / time dependent. So God does not say: “if you remove yourself from my authority by doing your own thing I will kill you” but states the logical consequence of their action.

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I have never really understood the rationale for the position that there was no death before the fall and that all death is bad. When Adam realized that he was naked and God gave him an animal skin to cover up, if death was so bad, why not give him a pair of cotton shorts? or do you look at the fall as killing the animal, and it was sort of like tying the albatross around his neck?

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Quincy, I think you have hit on what is of primary importance for the EC camp to consider when addressing the question: "When in the process of Evolutionary Creation did the concept of “Natural Evil” (vs. Moral Evil) become a reality?" Certainly the concept of sentience deserves careful consideration. For at least a billion years when life on earth was mono cellular and procreation was through some sort of ‘budding’ process, death had not the theological implications that it has to us humans. The evolution of nerve cells in sponges and jellyfish, or in colony organisms such as corals, did initiate the potential for some kind of sentience, but even in the currently more ‘advanced’ forms, does a jellyfish feel pain and revulsion when being eaten by a sea turtle? Does it mourn the loss of its individuality?

In my view, the Cambrian era was unique, not only in how many new body plans were introduced, but it was then that Predation became prominent in how life forms interacted and competed with one another. It would seem that this facet of Natural Evil was NOT considered Evil in God’s eyes. True self-awareness is a concept that seems to have grown gradually over the past 100K years, but it is only since we have become human (and realized our obligations as stewards of our planet) that we appreciate the other self-aware beings, such as dolphins, whales and chimps. Given the Gift of Conscience, we can gain a little of God’s perspective, and we can struggle against selfish instinct–struggle to live a life more in the Spirit–farther along in the journey from Alpha to Omega.
Al Leo

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If death is not “evil” then why consign it to the Lake of Fire?
Does death become evil through corruption of humankind? Why does Nature “…groan to be released”? There is something that has changed Death. Somehow not all of our theology about death can be inaccurate.

Ray :sunglasses:

Note what I did not do: Ignore Genesis 1, say that Eve was created from Adam’s rib (as opposed to the vision of her being created from one of his halves), and assert that female Homo Sapiens were an afterthought.

Note what I did do: Point out the mention of ‘not-goodness’ in the Genesis 2 narrative which takes place prior to the temptation/fall/expulsion from Eden; not-goodness in God’s originally righteous creation.

Beautifully said, Al. I would say that God likely does not view natural death as a form of evil. Rather, I believe it is seen as simply how the created order of things works right now. I don’t know this for sure of course, as I’m not God. But this is my speculation, and perhaps someday I’ll be enlightened in heaven or the New Earth about God’s true perspective on this.

I always find it intriguing that many assume that a prey animal suffers when being preyed upon. We often only think of vertebrates when we think of animals, but there is much more than that. Does the fly feel pain whilst its insides are dissolved by the venom of a spider? Does the earthworm know anxiety when it’s dangling on the end of a fish hook? You brought up the jellyfish, another good example here. It’s hard to measure subjective things like pain and feeling, but what little science has been done on this topic would suggest that they don’t. Beetles still put their full weight on a crushed tarsus, suggesting they don’t feel pain in their damaged appendage. Crabs won’t avoid non-lethal electric currents like animals that could feel the pain of the shocks would. Even mammals seem to have a way of mitigating suffering during predation. Anecdotally, victims of wild animal attacks consistently report that they felt very little pain or fear whilst being attacked. Some even report it as a relaxing experience. (That is while the attack is occuring. The pain and fear comes afterwards they say.) Knowing these facts, animal predation doesn’t seem so evil in the long run, especially for animals lacking self-awareness.

Also, as a minor scientific fix, I don’t believe that sponges (Phylum Porifera) possess nerve cells by definition. In fact, sponges are the only multicellular animals that don’t have any sort of nervous system.

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Or when made into a supplement to improve the memory? (That commercial always makes me smile when they brag about the miracle supplement being made from jellyfish, as if jellyfish are the superstars of memory.)

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I look at the fall as a poetic description of puberty, e.g. the rejection of authority over the self to become your own self and understand sin to be the problem of selfishness, e.g. to generate self centered desires that are in the interest of your own self and not that of the overall self,e.g. God. From puberty onwards we try to give away our self, initially for the partner we love e.g. for each other and later for the one flesh we have become, e.g.our children. Eventually I came to understand the word of God, to love thy neighbour like thyself - as it always addresses the third person- that it is about selflessness. If you were to take your love for yourself as a standard it would prevent you to do the ultimate sacrifice of love as to give your life for those who you love. It is that same law that drives evolution, th who deletes those who fail to love thy neighbour, e.g. do not contribute to their ecosystem but are a drain on it.
Theology becomes inaccurate if it leaves the logic behind and turns into an irrational philosophy that consists of wishful thinking and confuses the supernatural with the magical. If it takes an act of magic to make someone believe in an omnipotent God, that God would be impotent as he could not follow his own will.

Supernatural means beyond the material or metaphysical and not irrational/magical. The true miracles are what we consider normal, like the birth of a baby. So logically, if in death you are returning to God, what could be evil about that?

But if you accept Gen. 1, then Adam was NEVER alone, and thus when you state that: “Consider that it was “not good” for Adam to be alone”, there should be no question whether there was any “not-good-ness before the reign of Sin and Death”. To me, what is inconceivable is that God would create Adam separately (and thus ‘alone’), then create all the animals before creating Eve. When a literal reading of Scripture is inconceivable, does it not make sense to you to seek another interpretation? In that reinterpretation I am open to a similar non-literal meaning of "temptation/fall/expulsion from Eden" while most fundamentalist Christians are not. God bless.
Al Leo

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You are probably right. The information I read indicated that the fossils of some species indicated that some proto-nerves might be present, but they definitely were not connected in any sort of system. I enjoyed your observations.
Al Leo

  1. I do not think you have much a sense for how I take Genesis 1-3… Case being such, don’t be afraid to ask. Also, your use of the category “fundamentalist” is very unhelpful here. Not that you’re calling me one explicitly. But you might be, covertly :sweat_smile:

2.What there is no question about is that the Hebrew text deposits a not-goodness prior to the temptation/fall/expulsion from Eden… Sooooo there’s that to deal with in the text, no matter what. Where there is a question is what demands this not-goodness places on our theological understanding of God’s creation pre-humanity’s fall, even if you take the story of Eden and the fall as metaphor or myth or some other inappropriate 21st century genre you might place on it. I, for my part, happily say Adam and Eve were just as real as you or I, that Eden was as tangible a location as New Jersey (get the joke?), and that the fall was as real an event as that one time I wrote a response to aleo on logos.org. Were Adam and Eve the only humans alive at the time? Not necessarily for good theology, and adamantly no inasmuch as good science goes at present. Was Eden, wherever it might have been located in Mesopotamia, the place humans first came into existence? See my response to the first question. Was there physical death/pain/loneliness/not-goodness before the fall/spiritual death of Adam/reign of Sin and Death? See my response to the first question. Hardly “Fundamentalist”, though happily, proudly, and hopefully traditional, orthodox, and confessionally respectful.

3.Your ability (or lack thereof) to conceive something is hardly the measure of good or correct theology and biblical exegesis. Respectfully. For example, I cannot conceive how God can be born and die but in the person and work of Jesus we rightly say God was born and God was crucified. But Scripture and its faithful interpreters throughout history would assert just this humanly inconceivable truth.

This is a broad and unhelpful oversimplification. See my example for point 3.

Only if the very first cell was created on its own would have been not connected to another one, ever since they are. Even within our body most cells are connected without nervous intervention.

We get on a very slippery slope if we define the existence of a nervous system or the absence of sentience to conclude about the moral implications of death and suffering, particularly if the suffering might be caused indirectly / as a consequence of a death.

It is not clear what @J.E.S calls distasteful, as food chains existed before the fall and the death of the prey serves the survival of the predator thus one dies for the benefit of others - a very tasteful justification for ones existence. It only becomes distasteful for humans who care more about their own existence than that of others by becoming their own moral authority and making conscious choices.