The fossil record fits best with progressive creation

I’m aware of the Bible passages you cite and I believe all of nature is affected by human sin and awaiting redemption and the culmination of the re-creation initiated by the Incarnation and Resurrection.

What I don’t believe is that there is anything in the Bible that supports the idea that there was a second creation event post-Fall in which God fundamentally altered the existing perfect creation to the degree that would turn herbivores into carnivores (that requires new jaw and teeth structures, different digestive tracts, and predatory capabilities, not just a different appetite), invent billions of new harmful and parasitic species of plants, animals, and micro-organisms, design genetic mutations for birth defects and disease and proactively insert them in the genome. Or a second creation event that would alter the foundational systems of earth science and institute a new system of plate tectonics and weather that before did not cause any death with natural activity like earthquakes, tsunamis, or volcanoes, floods, wildfires, avalanches, and hurricanes, but because of sin, is now “unleashed.” How exactly would plate tectonics be unleashed? Either we live on a crust that floats on a molten mantle, or we don’t. Crust that floats on molten mantle means earthquakes and volcanoes and tsunamis.

YECs say we have an issue with death existing in God’s good world before sin, but how is it not more concerning that God cursed the world by initiating a second creation in which he proactively created all sorts of nasty stuff as a punishment for a sin event?

And I think it is a cop-out to pretend that there was this magical transformation and God simply “allowed” these things to “come about” because of the curse. YECs have no natural mechanism that explains that. It has to be God. Evolution proposes actual mechanisms for how animals adapt and become predators and how birth defects just “happen.” Creationism doesn’t have a real explanation other than “The Fall did it,” which is really “God did it,” because it was God’s curse and only God can radically re-design life in the way that is described.

It’s pure imagination to say “Maybe the genomes were such that something was triggered with the Fall and bada-bing, bada-boom, herbivores into carnivores.” We know a lot about genomes, and they don’t ever work like that. The fact that some creationists have agile imaginations and it sounds “plausible” to them, isn’t anything close to a working model. Plus, you still have God putting those “evil” futures into the genomes, just waiting to be triggered magically by sin, so God does not get off the hook as the creator of the bad stuff. There are even Scriptures where God takes delight in the predators he has created, and there is no hint that he only created them that way because of a curse.

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