Off-topic spin-off thread: Wookin's ideas about interpreting various NT passages

So…you’re willing to ignore what scripture says in its immediate context for the sake of your systematic theology?

“Systematic thinkers tend not to question their primary assumptions, since these assumptions are the foundation on which their entire system rests; once these are questioned, the system collapses.” Victor Shepherd, The Committed Self, p. 160

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Evolution is full of blood, disease, death animals ripping each other apart?

I think you mean the Old Testament is full of God… well this is just a fraction of things:

  • God sending disease/plague: Num 11:4-35, 14:36-38, Num 25:9
  • Straight up smiting (death): Ex 12:29, Num 16:27-32, Num 16:49, 2 Kings 19:35
  • burnt to death by fire from God: Lev 10:1-3, Num 11:1-3, Num 16:35, 2 Kings 1:9-12
  • God commanding/sending animals ripping someone apart: 1 Kings 13:1-24, 1 Kings 20:35-36, 2 Kings 2:23-24, 2 Kings 17:25-26

But back to interpreting parables as we were of course!

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I think you miss the point @Wookin_Panub is making. According to evolution, “disease, death, animals ripping each other apart, etc.” is occurring during a time that God says is “very good” and sin has not yet appeared. The acts of God you are referring to are judgements on sinful people in a time where sin has already taken hold. Respectively, you are comparing apples and oranges.

That’s not according to evolution. Evolutionary theory includes nothing about the Fall. Yes, there is an obvious problem superimposing evolution onto a literal interpretation of Genesis. But not many evolutionary creationists are trying to work evolution into a literal six day young earth world. We understand evolution and an ancient earth don’t work with a literalistic Genesis interpretation. That’s not the issue. The issue is finding a Genesis interpretation it does work with. I guess what I’m saying is you can never come up with anything logical if you say, “Given a literal interpretation of Genesis” and “Given evolution as scientists describe it.” Those are mutually exclusive premises.

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I get that he believes the fall did all kinds of magical things, i.e.

I suppose I was writing in the sense that I don’t see why it’s such a strange thing for such acts to occur naturally in the wild vs. God doing them to people or using animals to maul youth, etc. I see your perspective though in regards to “it’s okay to have such barbaric acts since God is judging sin.”

There are some odd things like Numbers 31:17-18 where the Israelites get to keep the virgin women after slaughtering their families or other times kill everything even nursing infants like in 1 Samuel 15:3. Compared to being upset at animals being animals, this seems like a bigger deal.

Are you seriously using rational wiki as a credible source? There is nothing “magical” about God. Supernatural, yes. Magical? absolutely not.

You’re right Christy, I should have said “evolutionary creationism,” not evolution. However, even if one takes a less than literalistic interpretation (as you put it), you are still left with a God who used death and disease to build a “very good” world.

It’s definitely a topic people have thought about a lot. But it’s not some kind of deal breaker and it’s not like YEC solves theodicy issues. In the YEC interpretation not only do you have Satan running around tempting people and thwarting God’s perfect creation, you have a world that would have been completely unsustainable. The nitrogen cycle requires death. Certain organisms would have quickly overpopulated the world in the absence of death and predation, it would have been a nightmare. So you have to basically posit a second creation event that isn’t recorded in Scripture at the Fall, where God dramatically recreates the world and changes his creation fundamentally; institutes new natural cycles, alters the biology of all the herbivores to make them carnivores, proactively creates a host of diseases, pests, and other “not very good” stuff, all to punish the humans for sin. Theologically this sounds more problematic to me than the idea that God declared good a world that included death and disease. I find it easier to believe that a rose has thorns because it provides an evolutionary advantage and protects the plant (and God probably enjoys roses and wants them to stay pretty) than that God was so mad at Adam and Eve, he invented thorns to poke them and make them bleed.

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I never said it did. I’ve seen reasonable answers from both sides. However, placing death, disease, and suffering before mankind even existed (and thus before sin) seems to only put fuel on the fire.

The nitrogen cycle has to do with the decomposition of plants, right? Plant “death” is different from human and animal death, since they are not nepesh chayyah. YECs believe that there still was entropy before the Fall, since entropy is not always bad (ie. digestion). As for overpopulation, the purpose of reproduction was to “be fruitful and multiple and fill the earth.” Once there was enough of one kind of animal, they likely would have stoped reproducing since reproduction had fulfilled its purpose (see my posts on the “where did sin come from?” page for more details).

I wouldn’t call it a second creation event, but Genesis 3 makes it clear that some things did change. The Serpent lost its legs, Eve had increased pain in childbearing, Adam had to work harder to grow food, death entered the world, etc, etc.

Rational Wiki is not a source in the same sense that Wikipedia is not a source but a collection of ideas and sources. The sources listed can provide further research and investigation into the ideas presented which is always helpful. I grabbed this particular part of their wiki because it summaries generally what some Christians claim ‘supernaturally’ happened the second that the molecules of fruit entered into Adam and Eve’s mouth. But thanks for teaching me and dismissing the particular section of their website that I put a link to which was just a summary of the ‘supernatural’ things we pretend happened a few thousand years ago.

the nitrogen cycle works with organic matter, it doesn’t discriminate between plant and animal death. But I take your point that if there was no animal death, the nitrogen cycle could still exist using only plant matter. My point is that death on some level is foundational to the biological laws that allow for life, but maybe you don’t disagree.

The anatomy of an organism does not spontaneously and instantaneously change from being suited to eat plants to being suited to eat meat. Carnivores have different teeth, jaws, and digestive systems than herbivores. Tigers are “designed” to eat meat. So 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” powers (picture the Disney movies where the princess pricks her finger on the spindle of the spinning wheel and everything goes dark) or God 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. Sin affects how created things interact, it doesn’t create new things. Thorns, malaria carrying mosquitos, 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 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. 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 bad things as a punishment. That is more problematic theologically and philosophically. That’s saying God imagined and purposely created Ebola, because …sin.

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I don’t think I ever said the change to carnivory was spontaneous. Most YECs I know (AiG, CMI, etc.) would say that God created the animals with the ability to adapt to a sin-cursed world, thus He would not have to “recreate” them in the sense that you are talking about.

That said, the change to carnivory probably did occur relatively quickly, since by the time Cain killed Abel (a little less than 130 years after the Fall), God used a metaphor of a crouching predator in reference to Cain’s sin (Ge 4:7), suggesting that by that time some animals had become carnivores.

Well that’s fine to say that. How does it actually work? I want a model. Evolutionary adaptations require generations of environmental pressure working on populations. Clearly there is no time for those kind of adaptations. How did these organisms not starve to death in their lifetimes? Are these abilities miraculous? It definitely does require divine creative intervention, because “adaptations” at least as science defines them, don’t involve individuals developing new kinds of organs or jaw bone structures because it would be more suited to their environment. What about a sin-filled world makes a herbivore tiger want to adapt to start eating gazelles anyway? Plants are still around. Why would “sin” make herbivores want to eat meat, especially if they were not yet “adapted” to doing so? It makes no sense. And if they were really originally designed as carnivores and just had vegetarian diets until Adam and Eve sinned, how is that “very good” that animals were forced into a kind of existence they were not optimally designed for?

I don’t pretend to have all the answers. The Bible makes it clear that animals were not carnivores before the Fall, thus carnivory must have developed after the Fall. How exactly that occurred I don’t know.

I am no expert, but it is my understanding that adaptations can actually occur relatively quickly, depending on the genetic and environmental factors involved. For one example (among many), see this article at CMI.

I don’t think I said anything about developing “new kings of organs or jaw bone structure.” Take the bear for instance. Many bears use their sharp teeth for eating fish, but the Panda uses its teeth to eat bamboo. So even if the original bears ate only plants, that doesn’t mean they had to develop completely new teeth and jaw structure when they switched to eating meat.

I honestly don’t know.

It does? Are you saying that a literal reading of Genesis requires one to believe this? I don’t think it’s quite that clear.

Why would God be the first to kill animals for their skins if his ‘very good’ creation did not involve animals dying? That’s like saying Adam’s and Eve’s sin excuses God doing bad things. The fact is that God shows no squeamishness when it comes to killing animals in Genesis. Animal death is not regarded as sin.

Genesis 1:29-30 states: “And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so.”
It explicitly states that God gave only plants and fruit for food to mankind and all the animals.

The first animal death was to show Adam and Eve the result of their sin. “The wages of sin is death,” Romans 6:23. Adam and Eve sinned, so God killed an animal, the first sacrifice, to cover their sin.

I agree that killing an animal (in the context of sacrifice) is not a sin, otherwise the Levite priests would be committing sin whenever they sacrificed a lamb to atone for sins. Death is not sin, but a consequence of sin.

It does not. I don’t see the word ‘only’ in there anywhere.

What about fish? They aren’t mentioned at all! Could they be eaten? Could they eat non-plants? Could they even eat plants, since they were not ‘given to them?’ Obviously this is not an exhaustive list of things that were permitted to be eaten.

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The word “only” does not need to be there. God lists the food He gave to all living things (plants, fruit). If they were to eat something else, it would not be a food given to them by God, and I would think eating a food not prescribed by God would be a sin (like the instance of the forbidden fruit).

I should think that fish would be included in “everything that has the breath of life” in Ge 1:30 (fish still “breath” just not like we do).

No it doesn’t. It’s pure inference. Chapter and verse, please.

Even AIG’s kooky rapid speciation theories require reproduction and at least several generations. How does an organism reproduce if it can’t even catch, chew, or digest its food? It would die within days.

Bears are omnivores. Pandas are adapted omnivores who became herbivores over a long period of time probably due to deactivation of an umami taste receptor gene. What I was referring to was the very different physiology you will find in carnivorous animals and herbivorous animals. Herbivores like ruminants have compartmentalized stomachs. Obligate carnivores do not have the physiology to digest plants. They eat plants to induce vomiting. They have much shorter digestive tracts. They have teeth (or sharp beaks) and claws (or talons) and a certain kind of jaw for disarticulating prey. The idea that herbivores (picture a cow or goat or a deer) could start successfully hunting prey because they all of a sudden got a taste for meat is silly. The idea that tigers could live on salad until sin allowed them to be what they are made to be is silly. You have to posit a miraculous recreation of the animal kingdom at the Fall if you want to maintain that animals became carnivores as a result of sin, not because that is what they were created to be.

Plus, if no animals were created to be carnivores than why do we look at lions and eagles and other predators and see something majestic and beautiful and glorifying to God? Is it our own fallenness?
Shouldn’t our response to these animals be disgust and repulsion at the twisted monstrosities they are, corrupted by sin and thwarting God’s design? That wasn’t David’s response, he pictured carnivores and part of God’s beautiful creation and God as the provider of their food.

Psalm 104:19-30
You made the moon to mark the seasons,
and the sun knows when to set.
You send the darkness, and it becomes night,
when all the forest animals prowl about.
Then the young lions roar for their prey,
stalking the food provided by God.
At dawn they slink back
into their dens to rest.
Then people go off to their work,
where they labor until evening.
O Lord, what a variety of things you have made!
In wisdom you have made them all.
The earth is full of your creatures.
Here is the ocean, vast and wide,
teeming with life of every kind,
both large and small.
See the ships sailing along,
and Leviathan,[c] which you made to play in the sea.
They all depend on you
to give them food as they need it.
When you supply it, they gather it.
You open your hand to feed them,
and they are richly satisfied.
But if you turn away from them, they panic.
When you take away their breath,
they die and turn again to dust.
When you give them your breath,[d] life is created,
and you renew the face of the earth.

It wasn’t Job’s response either in Job 38-41, where various predators are celebrated as displaying God’s wisdom and following God’s command in their hunting.

Like here (39:26-30):
“Is it your wisdom that makes the hawk soar
and spread its wings toward the south?
Is it at your command that the eagle rises
to the heights to make its nest?
It lives on the cliffs,
making its home on a distant, rocky crag.
From there it hunts its prey,
keeping watch with piercing eyes.
Its young gulp down blood.
Where there’s a carcass, there you’ll find it.”

That just doesn’t sound to me like Scripture telling us all carnivores are a corruption of God’s original good creation.

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See response to @Lynn_Munter above. You will probably disagree with it.

It sounds silly, but there are lot of things in the Bible that sound silly. God had the Israelites walk around Jericho for a week to knock down the walls! That sounds silly, but the walls did come down (and we have the archaeological evidence to back it up!)

Question, have you never heard of the cow who suddenly had the urge to eat chicken? See here. Or perhaps the lion who did not eat meat? See here. Many animals, both herbivore and carnivore, do not always stick their usual diet.

I would say we should be disgusted by the death that comes from predatory behavior, but we can still recognize the amazing design God built into these creatures to be able to adapt to a sin-cursed world.

There you go adding your interpretation. “I would think.” Sin is doing things God said not to do, not things God said nothing about.

Tell you what: you may have this interpretation here, but only if you also apply it to Gen 6:17. “I am going to bring a flood of waters on the earth, to destroy from under heaven all flesh in which is the breath of life;”

Actually, based on your earlier argument, I should argue that Genesis only describes God giving the breath of life to Adam, not to any of the other animals, so that is all we should assume happened.

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