Thanks Phil!
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@Mervin_Bitikofer asked after my initial post if I was inquiring about the possibility of sin influencing the universe or if was asking about sin possibility affecting our âfallenâ eyes. These are both ideas I have considered.
On the second point, is there any credence to the idea that our âperspectiveâ is impacted by sin? Is the practice of âscienceâ suffering under the weight of sin? If a scientist had lived in the garden before the fall, would he or she have had more tools in their toolbox for studying the Universe than we have? Should we see science as âlimitedâ by the ravages of sin?
Yes. But I would say no more than our ability to interpret Scripture, which is also a human endeavor whose perspective is limited by our fallibility and imperfection.
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As @jammycakes likes to point out, some parts of science donât really involve interpretation (which is subject to human fallibility and potentially corrupted perspective). They involve measuring things, and I would say measurement is pretty objective. You can count rings on a tree to find out how old it is. You can count layers in ice varves, you can measure red shift and the decay of radioactive isotopes. I donât really see how counting things could be affected by sin.
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That is a great point @Christy. Could our ability to measure or count be limited though? Could our âcountingâ be very different from Adamâs pre fall ability to count? In the same way a five year old may be able to count, but not in the same way Einstein could?
The problem is that this idea (in the OP) is really no different than the idea that the universe was created this morning with all our memories as they are. It is pointless for the simple fact that even if it were so, it makes more sense to live our lives according to those memories. In the case of science there is a memory in nature via fossils and light from distant sources and it makes no more sense to live our lives inconsistent with that memory any more than to live our lives inconsistent with our own memories.
The only time gap that makes sense to me, is that Adam was created on day six, but lived for 3 billion years. While EC makes more sense, saying that humans came billions of years later does not, because the apostle Paul even before the early church theologians said that Adam was a human, just like Jesus was a human.
The gnostics did view Adam as supernatural which is wrong. Humans were sons of God, but in a spiritual way, not a natural way outside of natural forces. Perfect being mature and having all the knowledge to a level God thought proper, not necessarily what we think proper. Satan was viewed as a talking serpent. It would be strange and out of Character if God created humans with a disavantage and then let Satan âbaby sitâ them. At one point humankind and satankind were on equal footing. Since humankind were given charge over the earth, they would have enough knowledge to carry out that task, but still capable of learning more and more knowledge as time progressed.
If humans lived for billions of years before death entered. They would not be found in the fossil record. We still have to figure out how the birth of offspring changed and when. Another thing is the fossil record is put down over time and still represents death. I do not think humans overpopulated the earth. They had the common sense of God. In nature we see checks and balances and humans are really the only creation that could âmess upâ these checks and balances if given the freedom to do so. Before sin and death, humans had to be more responsible. The struggle between God and man took 14 generations after Adam to get to a âboiling pointâ.
Did original humans live for billions of years without death, but nature itself had limited death which accounts for the fossil record? Did Adam live alone for part of that time before Eve, and how long? Did Adam loose a spouse prior to Eve and that is why God built a special Garden for Him? All we know it seems, is that God did not re-create out of dust a new Eve. God used a part of Adam to give Adam a female counterpart. I do not see Genesis 2 as restating how day 6 happened. I think It states Adam was created on day 6, out of dust along with a limited group of humans male and female. It was only after a long time that God provided a Garden. So Adam had a long life even before the advent of the Garden and a new direction in life was given to Adam. I get the need to view them as children learning new things, but that is not how Genesis states what happened. Such theology is just taking a truth, creating a figurative story, and then projecting the metaphor into the text of Genesis 1 and 2.
Well one of the aims of measurement is to quantify the limitations on our ability to measure (or count). Thatâs what error bars are all about.
It depends. Do you think Adam understood error bars, linear regression and p-values? Certainly youâd be hard pressed to find a five year old who understands these things.
Sinlessness is a state of innocence before God, not a state of super-human brain capability or biological perfection. I donât believe that the Fall fundamentally altered biology or plate tectonics or the weather cycle or any other part of creation. I think when Romans talks about the groaning of creation, it is speaking about the fact that it is still in the process of birthing the world God intends in the New Creation, not that it was somehow âuncreatedâ because of the Fall. Human sin certainly has a destructive effect on nature, but it doesnât make sense to me to see sin as a creative agent that can re-do or un-do Godâs fundamental handiwork or mess with DNA. It also doesnât make sense to me to imagine God as intentionally wrecking his creation because he was mad about humanityâs rebellion. I donât see that as consistent with Godâs character. The consequences of our sin are natural consequences of human vulnerability and removed divine protection, not things God creatively dreamed up especially to make life more miserable.
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Iâd agree there. The idea that nuclear decay rates, the speed of light, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or the fundamental constants of nature, could have been different before the Fall is science fiction.
However there is one thing for which we do have scientific evidence: the Holocene extinction. Itâs widely acknowledged by scientists that extinction rates started increasing about 11,700 years ago, and that theyâre caused by human activity. This makes me wonder. Could the Fall refer to some kind of event that happened at the end of the last Ice Age?
Dear James,
When I first read Rare Earth in the '90s was the first time that I realized the uncanny periodicity that the mass extinction had occurred, and that time felt that one was imminent based on the historical time series. The authors of the book suggest a celestial periodicity as the cause of this predictable pattern of extinctions. Humans could not have been the cause of any to the previous five mass extinctions, so they are not at fault for the Holocene either. For this reason, I doubt the Fall have anything to do with any of the extinctions.
I do not think placing the onus of the fall on humanity is proper either. The whole pitfall of viewing Adam as some figurative account of humanity as a whole is a logical mistake and the misuse of figurative writing. Using Adamâs account as a true event with a spiritual message is not wrong. Attempting to figure out how the account made it into the human record is complete speculation even if it makes sense.
The disobedience of Adam was the beginning of the end. However it was 14 generations before the final judgment. God gave all of humanity over 1000 years to evolve past Adamâs indiscretion. They did not. One bad apple naturally destroys the whole bunch. Evidently the rest of humanity in accordance with nature, could not get rid of the âbad appleâ. No pun intended.
Along these lines, I really do not see Adam and Eveâs sin as affecting the universe, and that leads to how I feel the Garden of Eden was not a physical place but is more an idealized world, inaccessible and separate from normal reality. God states in Genesis " Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed." I take this to indicate it was place outside of normal creation, somewhat like the Greeks had their gods on Mount Olympus. The fact that it was outside the normal realm of creation is supported by the two special trees, talking animals, and the origin of the worldâs rivers. Only after the fall was Adam returned to the normal toils of daily life and Eve to the reality of dealing with Adam and childbirth and such.
Now, I do not think that this scenerio was physically the case, but was mythologized for theological purposes.
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I think that is where I have a different view. I have always seen the fall as something that had universal ramifications. I think because I have a âhighâ view of man, originally called to steward the creation. I see every galaxy and every cell being instantly âinfectedâ when God pronounced judgment.
Granted I am not able to point to specific scriptures, but I do feel that throughout all of scripture there seems to be this idea that we should be looking forward to a new, restored world. I feel that restored world means something beyond simply the removal of our failed morality, but a broken world made whole again. I admit that this âpictureâ has been influenced by my church background, but it does make sense to me.
I guess that if I am comfortable with the idea that God designed a world where our actions have eternal consequences, it is not hard for me to accept consequences in the here and now.
In the EC community, what are the different views on things like birth defects, or cancer cells? Are those seen as things that would have existed before the fall?
Tumors in fossils:
https://phys.org/news/2019-02-bone-cancer-million-year-old-stem-turtle-fossil.amp
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Yes. And human genomes have retroviruses in the DNA. There is no such thing as theoretically perfect human DNA if you accept common descent. CT had an article on this last week you might be interested in:
Here is an article on cancer and the goodness of creation.
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Although it is pretty clear that Paul sees the death from sin coming into the world through Adam, I think it is a mistake to make this into a singular instantaneous transformation of everything. This is just too magical and over the top to put everything on the shoulders of one human being. Instead the more natural way of looking, fitting better with how the world works, is that ancestors affect their descendants by starting a ball rolling and yet the responsibility still falls upon all those who come after whether they resist that trend like Noah perhaps, or whether they give the ball another push like Cain and Lamech. So I would say that is another reason why we should discard this suggestion in the OP as well as the way many understand Original Sin as a change in human nature. The responsibility belongs to all of us. We all had a hand in nailing Christ to the cross with every sin, and this is why we must repent. Otherwise we are playing the same blame game as Adam and Eve ourselves.
You might be interested in a newly published book, âGodâs Good Earthâ by an erstwhile poster here, Jon Garvey. In that he makes the case that much of our present âfallen universeâ theology may actually trace its roots back to early reformers more than to an actual faithful [or even earlier historical] understanding of scripture. [His chapter 17 title: âCreation Fell in 1517â is a sample of his partially tongue-in-cheek turns of words, and delightful delivery.] I had the pleasure of early exposure to some of his work in its pre-published state and so I can tell you there is much of well-researched substance to his writing, and it comes from within a Christ-centered personal commitment of his own. What some might take as one more additional bonus: he isnât afraid to be seen as at odds with what has been taken to be various Biologos agendas as well. But Iâll recommend it here without reservation. You can read more of him (or find related articles) at his web site: the hump of the camel.
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Welcome, Steve. No matter how one interprets Genesis 1, the flow of the narrative makes it clear that the creation of humanity came after everything else â sun, moon, stars, fish, birds, animals, etc. Thus, if the fall somehow affected all of creation, including the laws of physics, there would be a pre-fall universe and a post-fall universe with some sort of observable âline of demarcationâ between them.
Now, remember that looking through a telescope is essentially looking into the past, so whether the fall happened 100,000 years ago or 6,000 years ago, astronomers and physicists should be able to detect a difference between the physics of nearby space and that of more distant, pre-fall space. The Milky Way galaxy just happens to be 100,000 light-years across, so everything outside the Milky Way surely represents the pre-fall universe. Does the universe outside the Milky Way behave differently than it does in this little corner? No.
âThe manâ of Genesis 2 is not represented as a superhuman Einstein, but as naked and unashamed, like a toddler.
Youâre absolutely right that we should be looking forward to the restoration of all things. I would suggest, though, that the trajectory of the scriptural narrative is not circular. The goal of redemption isnât simply to return things to the way they were before the fall. Rather, the new heavens and new earth are greater than the first creation, such that Isaiah can say that the former things will not even be remembered or come to mind.
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I would say that even the current solar system is the same after the fall. Now has the solar system changed at the point of Noahâs Flood? I am not sure it would be possible to figure out. Nothing has changed from the perspective of age. The solar system is the same age as if it were a closed system. There is not really any evidence of a phenomenon happening from outside the solar system. We do have evidence that there is an asteroid belt, that may indicate a planet may have formed there, but is not there now. We can figure things out by describing the gravitational attributes of planets in relation to the sun. I am not sure we can actually go back and âseeâ the solar system as it was before the Flood much less when Adam was in the Garden.
Here is a thought: Genesis and the heavens may only refer to the solar system. It may have nothing to do with the rest of the universe at all. The beginning was only the beginning of the Sun and the planets around the sun. I am not saying that is the way it is. I think the ANE thought any stars they could see with their eyes, were all actually part of this solar system. They did not have the means to know otherwise.
God did not even reveal such facts to Moses in Genesis. It was hinted at in the first few verses, and humans have been musing over them for years.