To be real honest with you, I used to read Genesis 3 the same way but the more I study the text the more I realize Adam’s fall couldn’t have changed the physics. The scriptures are showing that mortality was a reality from the beginning and natural selection is part of the design that serves the cycle of life.
Genesis keeps saying it if we listen. “Dust you are” God says, therefore Adam was a mortal creature before he ever sinned, which is why the tree of life was in the garden at all, because it appears physical creatures don’t own immortality natively, they need access to it. That’s something the fossil record agrees with, thorns before man, predation, decay and a world running under transience from the start.
Personally I’d hold the two apart, the cosmic fall (likely related to Lucifer, though I’m still weighing the Manichaean slippery slope there) and Adam’s fall with the former happening before there was an Adam. Romans 8 never says nature fell, we learn it’s a condition the world was made to run under for a time. Adam’s fall is a moral, spiritual one and the death the Bible is talking about affects the living soul, not the decaying body.
And scripture says the same about the predators. Job has God pointing to the bird of prey as his own work, Psalm 104 talks of the natural order where mortality has a purpose. Such purposeful design in Scripture leaves no room, it seems, for predation as a post-fall corruption. So of course there has to be another explanation of the fall and the best one I have for now is a spiritual fall, a loss of purpose and a wounded will. That’s honestly the part I’m searching out.
Yes that’s the YEC read and by the way, it’s worth saying plainly that my “therefore” doesn’t stand on it. I mean, yes in absolute terms we’re made of stardust,
but “Dust” is how the scriptures speak of the mortal frame everywhere.
In Psalm 103 God remembers that we are dust. Elsewhere in scriptures it says if God gathered his spirit back, all flesh would perish and man would return to dust. It’s the idiom for the finitude of life shared by all creatures, the ANE context of scriptures isn’t teaching biochemistry or biology.
I always had the intuition that a YEC hermeneutic causes lots of trouble with the scriptures whenever we try to give an honest account of the natural order. Sometimes by imposing a false Augustinian approach, not even Augustine himself proclaimed. A literalist gets literal dirt, where the meaning in most scriptural contexts always suggests mortality. I believe a mortal frame before the fall is the whole point of the reading, and quite frankly it’s the only honest one where we don’t need to ignore the book of Nature and claim the world’s history is false.
@Roy When I say I considered it, I mean that I’ve been thinking about it and mulling over any truth in it. I don’t know how long I’ve wrestled with these things, but I’ve always been intrigued and fascinated by the extreme detail in biological function. I think I first felt this awe when I took my genetics class, probably 2013 or 2012? I remember being struck by the incredible details of how DNA was replicated and how there’s a number of things that go wrong before cancer happens. It was like it’s harder for these things to happen than it is for them not to. At the time, I was an atheist, and remained so for many years.
Now I know God is real and that Jesus died on the cross so that I could have a relationship with God. It’s been completely life changing. I’ve seen things happen in my own life that stump my doctors. I’ve seen things that can’t be explained in other’s lives as well. I have learned to question everything I thought I knew
@Arvis Again, I need to read and research before I can say much. I like where you’re going with this. It does seem to resolve a lot of the issues. One of the things I’ve noticed before is that Adam was formed outside the garden and then brought into it. When they receive the curse they are banished from the garden and return to where Adam was made. The garden is where Heaven meets Earth, and now that place is in our body when the Holy Spirit dwells in us. I’ll follow back up soon!