I don’t see how the conclusion necessarily follows from the premise here.
(I’m going to cut and paste some things I’ve written elsewhere on other threads to save myself some time here)
The Bible never actually claims creation was ever perfect. So, I would say, no, we can’t say that.
I would say the questions and problems are different when you get rid of this idea we have imposed on Scripture that God created the world perfect and sin (i.e. human choice) completely corrupted God’s perfect creation. I have lots of theological problems with this concept.
In the YEC scenario you have a ‘perfect’ world, but somehow Satan is on the loose, actively trying to ruin God’s creation. You have an entirely different creation than the one we have now, if there is no animal death and no animal predation or carnivory. (Leaving aside that such a world would be unsustainable and quickly become “imperfect” since the life cycles that keep nature healthy and population levels in ecosystems in harmony depend on death and decay as part of the cycle.) You possibly have no tectonic plate activity and a different weather system, since there would be no ‘natural evils’ like volcanoes, earthquakes, and hurricanes, which cause death. To get from that hypothetical ‘perfect’ world to what we see now, essentially, you have to posit a second, unrecorded, creation event where God recreates or un-creates many of the herbivores into carnivores and scavengers and invents crop blight and stinging nettles and malaria, just to punish humans and make their lives difficult. You have God instituting new natural cycles, changing the weather and geology, fundamentally altering the biology of creatures (carnivores have different teeth, jaws, and digestive systems than herbivores), and creating diseases, pests, and genetic defects.
In that scenario God is proactively creating every way the world is currently imperfect or contributes to death, and you have him going about the act of special creation in an apparently degenerate way, motivated not by love and holiness and artistry, but by the need to curse his fallen human children for their sin.
Theologically this sounds much more problematic to me than the idea that God declared ‘good’ a world that included death and disease as part of its natural order.
Some people make it out like God did not actively create these imperfect things, they just “happened” as a result of sin, but that in untenable in my book. God is the source of all creation. Evil and sin are not creators. When creationists insist that when Adam and Eve ate fruit there was this “change” that radically impacted the structure and function of all creation, either they are saying sin has “magical” creative powers (like in the Disney movies where the princess pricks her finger on the spindle of the spinning wheel and everything gets scary) or God himself purposely changed and redesigned his creation.
I affirm that God is the creator of all that is. I don’t know how anyone ascribes creative power to “sin.” Sin is a state of rebellion, not a personal entity with agency. Sin affects how created things interact, it doesn’t create new things. Thorns, malaria carrying mosquitoes, Ebola, poisonous snakes, these are all part of God’s creation. Sin did not design them or bring them into existence.
So that leaves us with God proactively re-doing creation to make it cursed. This brings in problems with the character of God. If natural evil is something God allows to exist in his creation, that is one thing. It has its theological and philosophical problems. (That’s why we call it “the problem of evil”) But if natural evil is something God did not intend for creation, but puts there on purpose, because he is forced to or because he wants to, all based on a human choice, that means either God’s hand is forced by humans or God created all bad things as a punishment. That is more problematic theologically and philosophically. That’s saying God imagined and purposely created Ebola, because …sin.