If you would like to learn the basics of Mendelian genetics perhaps you could start a thread on the topic.
I have learnt Mendelian genetics.
If it was purely upto Mendelian genetics then there would be no adaptation relative tot he environment.
That would be a great topic for a new thread. However, it is off topic here.
If the idea that “sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin” is just somehow poetic or metaphorical, and doesn’t reflect actual reality, then we must recognize that those beautiful promises of eternal life that “death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore” may well be just as metaphorical or poetic.
So I would suggest you may want to get used to seeing such brutality and cruelty and torture… you may well be seeing it all throughout eternity future… This kind of thing must apparently be what the Bible means when it refers to a world without “death” that is “very good”
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So are you saying predators did not exist before the fall? And all predators came into existence after the fall?
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The answer is, “No, God could not declare the evolutionary process as Darwin explained it as Good., and Darwin realized.” Thank you @Scott_Coyne for raising this question that O have been trying to raise for some ti4. I am very concerned that the people at BioLogos so not have a reasoned response to this most crucial question of “natural evil.”
First let me set something straight . Pain and suffering and even death is NOT evil. It is natural and in that way good. I can say that because of these facts. God is infinite, but people are finite, which means they have a beginning and end, birth and death. If we were infinite, we would be God and there is only one God, so we are finite and moral or we would not exist.
Pain and suffering are the product of our nervous system. The same nerves that bring us pleasure and awareness of our world, bring us pain and suffering. Pain is a warning against danger. Most people are are willing to exchange a lifetime of happiness far some hours of pain, and today we have medicine to trat pain.
The birth of a human being is a painful process. Gen 3:16 makes reference to this as does Jesus. We know now that it is esp. painful and dangerous because the
head of the baby must be lar5ge enough to hold an enlarged brain. But God gave humans the spiritual power to overcome the pain of childbirth and the fear of death
so that we might live. As Jesus pointed out, the pain of childbirth was overwhelmed by the joy of a new life. See my essay God and Freedom on Academia.edu.
That is one reason that God does not approve of Darwin’s version of evolution, because real evolution is not based on fear and death. Instead it is based on symbiosis, which is a kind of ecological cooperation. Evolution is not based on evil, but good. It is not based on war, but sharing.
There is no real natural evil. Yes, there are challenges in our lives, but they are to be met and overcome, not avoided as real evil is.
Then is it good to cause pain and suffering in others?
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As for my part, I am not especially claiming anything… just observing that if predators existed before the point at which the Bible says death entered the world…
…Then we probably have no good reason to believe predators will not exist after the point that the Bible claims death will depart from the world.
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I’m addressing this response to more than just you because many responses seem similar to yours. That view doesn’t seem consistent with Rev 22:4. The old order of things will pass away with no more…death, weeping…
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Scott, I’m not sure if you are following my observation…
Of course the Bible says that there will be no death after the final judgment And the marriage of the lamb, but it also says there was no sin, corruption, evil, or death before Adam’s fall.
If there was in fact death, torment, agony, corruption, etc., before Adam’s fall, then we must interpret the Bible’s words about “death entered the world” in some other way than literally, no? Poetically, metaphorically, spiritually, etc.
But if the Bible’s words don’t mean there was literally no death when we look backwards in cosmic history, then on what basis should we believe that the Bible is promising there will be no literal death when we look forward into the future?
In other words, if we don’t take the Bible literally when it says there was no death before the fall, on what basis do we take it literally when it says that there will be no death after the judgment?
It can be such as when the USA declared war on Japan and Nazi Germany…
O my, a world without death but with reproducing tribbles… terrifying!
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I don’t think it’s a case of “not taking the Bible literally,” but simply understanding that there can be more than one kind of death. I think it makes sense to interpret that reference to death in more of a spiritual sense. A world without physical death would be unsustainable, and it seems silly to me that Adam and Eve would have to rely on the Tree of Life in order to stave off mortality if they had already been created immortal to begin with.
Someday, the physical will pass away, and so any reference to life or death in that future time should also be read as spiritual, I would think, which seems perfectly consistent to me.
my goodness, our resurrected bodies, the promise that we will have resurrected bodies as Christ did… the new heavens and new earth… all of this is to be allegorical and spiritualized??
i mean, the resurrection of the body is right in all the ecumenical creeds… Do we allegorize or spiritualize that as well?
i’m not trying to be combatative or argumentative, just asking so i can understand and be clear… as this answer really shocked me… do you actually deny the future physical resurrection of believers?
So death means eternal life in the Killing Fields?
That’s part of the puzzle with understanding scripture accurately. Because some parts are poetic and others literal. Understanding which is which is the difficult part. Especially when modern culture is so drastically different as is also people group culture.
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I believe we will be resurrected, but it will probably be very different than how we now think of “physical” – maybe that’s not the best word, and what I meant was more long the lines of that things as we know them now will change.
For me the major point is that if death came through sin, and that death is referring to spiritual death, or separation from God, then the biggest problem we are faced with as people is not just that we’ll physically die someday, but that we are separated from God spiritually. When I read futuristic scripture (which is admittedly hard to understand), I get a sense that there will be less of a separation from what we now think of as “spiritual” and “physical,” but that the most important part is that we will no longer live in separation from God spiritually.
Was the Holocaust good because of how much pain, suffering, and death it caused?
I quite agree, it is a challenge. But not without basic principles, one of the most important I think is basic consistency. Hence I find it unwarranted to simply interpret “death” as in a spiritual or allegorical sense when referring to the past, but then shift and insist it must be understood in a literal sense when looking at the future. That seems to me wishful thinking, rather than biblical interpretation.
quite correct, but that just returns to my main point… So let’s agree thus far for the sake of argument:
we will not have spiritual death into eternity, just as apparently there was no spiritual death before Adam’s fall.
But if God could create a “good” world “without spiritual death” that was nonetheless “red in tooth and claw” before the fall, chock full of torment, pain, misery, and physical death, then why exactly should we expect him to do anything differently in the future? Why shift and interpret those same concepts to be literal in the future when they were “spiritual” when referring to the past? We can be sure, I suppose, that there will be no “spiritual death” in Christ’s kingdom, granted, but there may well be in his “good” kingdom just as much physical death as there was before Adam, no?