Not to mention that Jesus cooked up a nice fish fry breakfast for his disciples, in his resurrected body. (John 21:9) If we are all about inferring things not in the text, here’s mine: If Jesus is the “first fruit” of the coming New Creation, this passage shows it doesn’t involve us all becoming vegetarians. If eating meat is cool with resurrected king Jesus, there isn’t anything broken, sinful, or corrupted about it.
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All those passage use different Hebrew phases. In Genesis 1:30, it is nepesh chayyah, while in Genesis 6:17, the phase used is ruah chayyah. So there is a difference between the two. The phase used of Adam in Genesis 2:7 is nishmat chayyim. They all have to with life (chayyah), but they use different words for breath.
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All right, I hadn’t looked at the Hebrew. Now I’m wondering: fungi were not ‘green plants’ nor ‘plants yielding seeds.’ Are they nepesh chayyah, too? Are fungi allowed to eat or be eaten? Or did they simply not exist before the fall?
Salt isn’t a plant, yet many animals besides humans will seek out salt licks. Is that sinful? Some plants aren’t green, or reproduce only by runners and not seeds. Are we to differentiate there, too? Is algae a plant?
Does Gen 1:29-30 mean that all plants so described are nontoxic, to people or animals, or were nontoxic before the fall? Does “ruling over” the other animals mean we can kill them regardless of whether we want to eat them?
Or is the language here only supposed to be broadly general, not scientifically detailed, as befits a hymn to creation?
I don’t think the Bible give us enough information to know if fungi are in the plant category or nepesh chayyah category. If spreading spores is analogous enough to “yielding seeds,” then I would say they are “plants” (category-wise, not biology-wise) and were available for food. I found this article on Answers in Genesis explaining some possible answers. They point out that it may depend on the type of fungi and their association with certain animals (ie. symbiosis). The same can be said about algae.
Since eating salt does not result in death, I would be open to the possibility that animals could have licked salt, though I find it highly unlikely that humans and animals would have suffered from salt deficiency (or deficiency of any essential mineral) before the Fall.
Yes all plants were nontoxic before the Fall, either because the toxics performed different functions or the adaptations that produced toxics came after the Fall. Our dominion over the animals is as stewards of God’s Creation. Yes, after the Flood we were given permission to kill to eat and to sustain ourselves, but that doesn’t mean we should abuse that responsibility by killing indiscriminately…
I know of very few YECs that actually believe that Genesis is a scientific textbook. Rather, it is scientifically accurate, but does not necessary mean to teach science. While I admit Genesis 1 has a few poetic aspects that do fit very well with the marvelous event being recorded, I would call it exalted prose, not a hymn.
Attack/Defense structures: Many of these structures could have been used for another task before the Fall (Stanhope even brings up the YEC explaining of sharp teeth used for cutting fruits). Other things like toxics/vemons etc. would have been from adaptations after the Fall. This is not evolution, but basic natural selection as animals adapted to the new world. There is plenty of YEC literature that covers this, just search “toxic”, “poison”, “attack structures” etc. at CMI or AiG.
In a way, he kind of makes a point supporting YEC. We don’t know what animals looked like before the Fall. All of the Fossils we have come from the time of the Flood or after (1,657+ years after the Fall). Animals can change a lot in even a few hundred years, just look at all the different breeds of dogs (again, this is not evolution, just natural selection).
Narrative function of the Tree of Life: Stanhope claims that the Tree of Life was the source of Adam and Eve’s immortality. I do not believe this, and I don’t think many of the main YECs do either (I may be wrong about this). I believe that the Tree Life provided nourishment, but Adam and Eve were already immortal because they were created perfect and death did not exist yet. The Tree of Life became the source of Immortality for them only after they sinned and their immortality was taken away, so God kicked them out of the garden so that they would not eat from it and live forever in their sinful state. The Tree always had the power to grant immortality, but it could not give it to Pre-Fall Adam and Eve because they already had it. So this is not a problem.
Population Regulation: Again, this not a real problem, since the purpose of reproduction, as stated in Genesis 1:28 was to “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” Once the earth was filled, either the animals and humans would stop reproducing (as it had fulfilled it purpose), or God would devise some way to make more room (such as bringing people and animals up to heaven without physically dying first, like He did with Enoch and Elijah).
kabash and radah: A quick look and I was able to find this brief article on CMI. It doesn’t have much, but it does point to a few instances in which these words are used of benevolent rulers, for example Solomon in 1Ki 4:24, and kabash is used in Micah 7:19 in reference to God’s compassion by subduing our sins. So while there is a largely negative tone to these words, it does depend on context. The context of the Pre-Fall world is no sin and no death.
Subduing Brid and Fish: Apparently Stanhope has never heard of messenger pigeons, a non-violent way of subduing birds that does not involve killing or eating them. He does have me wondering about subduing fish and sea creatures, though given humanity’s creativity they probably could have thought up ways to use them.
Animal skins as clothing: Stanhope states that Adam and Eve exploited creatures for their skin to make clothes. This not in the text. The use of animal skin as clothes in the pre-Flood world was for all we know a one time deal when God used the skins to cover their nakedness. Animal skin clothes are never again mentioned in these chapters. They could have made later clothes from wool, which would not involve killing the sheep, or from plant material. He also implies that Abel ate the meat of the sheep he sacrificed, but that is not in the text either.
Overall, I am not convinced by his arguments, but that may just be me.
Behold the saber toothed grape eater.
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Oh my, you’ve completely debunked my beliefs!
(just kidding 
)
Since that fossil is from an animal that died post-Flood, you are attacking a straw man. No informed YEC would say that skull belonged to an animal that lived at a time when saber-tooths were vegetarian. As I clearly stated above, all fossils we have come from a time when the adaptation to carnivores had already taken place. Perhaps this cat’s ancestors who lived in the Pre-Fall world had shorter teeth.
No known mechanism of natural selection would explain how tigers went from little teeth to saber teeth in a couple thousand years. Do you think it was a miracle?
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No you are just making things up. There is no evidence that this animal only appeared in the last few thousand years. It lived much longer ago.
Again, this is just making things up.
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No, a miracle would not be necessary. One possible scenario is that the ancestors of saber toothed cats had the genetic potential for both short and long teeth (which would make sense if they shared an ancestor with “normal” cats, though some YECs think they are separate created kinds), and by the Post-Flood era only genes for long teeth remained in saber-tooths.
The idea that they lived tens of thousands or even millions of years ago is based on assumptions that I do not hold. I do not appreciate people telling me that I am “making things up.” You are essentially calling me a liar, and I find that to be lacking in the gracious dialogue that this forum is supposedly known for.
No it’s not based on assumptions, it’s based on verifiable facts.
No I am not calling you a liar. Ad hoc reasoning is not lying. You are using ad hoc reasoning, making things up to try and explain something which contradicts your beliefs. It’s important that this is called out, especially given the huge sweeping claims you’re making, which necessitate that nearly everything about basic science is wrong.
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I don’t think you have a realistic concept of how adaptation and genetic selection for traits actually works. There is no “gene for saber teeth.” And what selective pressure of a fallen world and the sudden desire to eat meet made them lose their tails compare to their other ancestor cats? (Or why did the tigers and lions get tails in a few generations, whereas the saber tooth cats did not? That involves different vertebrae structure.) Speciation that involves dramatic skeletal changes takes much longer than several generations. Creationists lose a lot of credibility when they imaginatively talk about what “could have happened” when these scenarios have no basis in any observed scientific realities and require that well-known and observed processes work in an entirely unpredicated way. (And then in the next breath talk about how the same processes they have appropriated for no good reason for one scenario definitely do not apply in another scenario like whale evolution.) This is one of the major problems with rejecting whole swaths of scientific knowledge because they require assumptions and realities that don’t fit your worldview. You can’t just then appropriate certain features of that knowledge (hey, “genetic potential,” hey, “speciation”) when it seems convenient to your imaginary history, and just plug them in. That doesn’t work. You would be better off just positing miraculous divine intervention that re-created animals willy-nilly. Of course that has theological problems and no Scriptural support, but it would make more sense.
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This is exactly the problem I have making sense of how people can believe that animals all fall into distinct created ‘kinds’ that could never ever evolve into each other. You would think if this was the case, it would be trivially easy for everybody to agree on what modern species were related to each other and what were not. There should be zero edge cases where you can’t be sure. But that’s not what you see: you can’t draw a line at the genus level or family level or any other level and not have cases that may or may not qualify. How do you say a tiger can be related to a housecat, but a deer and an antelope couldn’t possibly be related? Or any other line you pick?
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