Why would God create animals with diseases and why would he let them die?
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What would have happened if he didn’t? Rabbits alone would have overrun the world long before now. That’s one of the tricky things about wrestling with these ideas – as terrible as death is, we who are alive today wouldn’t be here without it – animals and people have had to die for a long time in order to make room for new ones.
But it is interesting to think about what a “very good” world would look like. Many of the young-earth creationist views I have been taught tend to equate “very good” with “perfect.” That scenario seems to depend on a second, “re-creation” of the world after Adam and Eve ate the fruit, in order to make it full of suffering and sin.
I would think of “perfect” as more like a spiritual, heavenly realm, but it’s interesting to consider whether perfection would even be possible in a material world, or at least the one that we know. I would still consider our world to be “very good” in many ways – just marred by selfishness and suffering.
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But wouldn’t God have known that there would be a fall that brought death into the world? Therefore, he could’ve created the animals without death, right?
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The presumptions I don’t accept are
- That the results are independent of the means
- That God’s omnipotence means He can do whatever you say by whatever means you care to dictate.
Those may be true in a dream or a book you write, where nothing has to make any sense because none of it is real. The omnipotence in 2 is the omnipotence ANY dreamer has in the dreams he creates. If that is all God’s omnipotence means then how can I be impressed. It seems a complete joke to me.
Life is a process not a magical element and such a process is built upon the automation of natural law. And we learn from evolution is that life requires death and suffering or it simply would not exist. It part of what life is.
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He didn’t @Rohan. Not directly. If He created anything at all, it was nature itself. It does all the creating after that.
There was no fall. Not in the real world.
What would a very good world look like?
You are in it… mostly.
When God finished creating everything, God said it is very good.
Of course that was before man used what God had given him in these self-destructive habits we call sin, such as slaughtering anyone who makes us feel bad or gets in the way of our desires. When God saw that multiply throughout the world, He was sorry He created man after all.
So the very good world wouldn’t have these self-destructive habits.
And God is back at work seeking to correct that problem.
…maybe right there is the biggest problem with the YEC myopia that cannot see more than a few thousand years into the past… this expectation that God can fix things with a snap of His fingers in no time at all. I don’t think so.
If you mean he could have created them without death to begin with, knowing that it would not last very long because they would soon be experiencing death once Adam and Eve sinned, then that is the belief that many (probably all) YEC hold – but the fossil record shows millions of years of physical death, so it seems unlikely that that’s what God did, unless the Garden of Eden was a separate place that was cut off from the rest of the earth.
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I don’t think God intentionally designs people (or animals) with genetic diseases. God created life and that process by which life reproduces allows for mutations. Without mutations we wouldn’t have the beautiful diversity of life that we see on earth and we wouldn’t have people. In creating a process that fulfilled God’s design for creation, all the creatures that have evolved and filled the earth, God opened up a door for mutations that also can cause disease and disability. That’s just part of the natural world that supports life, same as plate tectonics that sometimes cause earthquakes and volcanoes that kill life.
Death is a natural and necessary part of the life cycle. Eternal life is a special gift offered to humans as God’s children, it’s not some kind of right all living things get because they exist if God is good.
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Dear Rohan. What you are witnessing above are biased Christians answers about the natural world and the same old ignorant argument about"it’s part of nature" as if God didn’t create nature. Anyway I won’t dwelve much into this.
What would a very good world look like? Well very good might as well be perfect. Well it would like like heaven . But"God" for some reason didn’t deemed it to be like that
As to why God did these things(for example and to be more specific about the animal suffering you raised above) everyone has their biased opinions. Christians will tell you because of X y z reason . Atheists will tell you the same. I’m no different . So I won’t answer this one.
But in the end nobody truly knows. That’s the only correct answer here which I hope everyone agrees on.
Sorry if this wasn’t very helpfull
“Therefore know for certain…”
Acts 2:36
This is not the thread to argue. However you are trying to argue something and use the Bible for justifying your argument. I suppose you have the iq and the intelligence average to understand that what you are doing is plain ignorant
It’s really something to see how OT narrative, historical evidence and what may be called a spirit hermeneutic come together in the passage, so that Christ, the hope of the world, may be known certainly.
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Does letting your kid skin his knee learning to ride a bicycle make you a cruel parent? He doesn’t know how to ride, you knew this would happen.
What is death but a scratch on the knee?
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Ultimately we do not know what death is. But one might conclude that there is little point in fearing something you know nothing about. To be sure, many have guesses about death. Some think there is nothing but an end to our awareness of anything. Others think there is something after but nothing to fear – like a scratch on the knee as you say. But some think that what follows is very much connected with how we have lived our life and in this there may be cause for fear.
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Nice reply. I am personally listed as your last two items.
[This one.]
Again and again and again, assuming God, He did not create life. He designs nothing at all apart from His designs: incarnations and those others of the Spirit. He grounds being. If anything. By the Spirit. If anything. Natural being, the being of nature, nature, fully autonomously, does the rest. Abiogenesis and evolution are entirely natural, billions of years after the threshold quantum perturbation (possibly containing all the energy of the universe) - a door - that God, if anything, grounded as with the infinity of others from eternity.
Aging and death are entirely due to what the great biologist genius (one of many) Peter Medawar worked out in the '40s: evolution inevitably front loads advantage, that comes at a price. Once your job is done, so are you.
A Very Good World Would Look Like this. We live in the best of all possible natural worlds. If God then there are unnatural ones. How that works we cannot begin to imagine.
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And what do we learn from it?
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Lmao.Yeah better let my kid run into a road full of cars.If he survives he survives.He doesnt know better but im not gonna prevent him because im a good parent.He should learn from his mistakes.
You guys here sometimes are hilarious.Like the arguments on these threads really makes me wonder if my assertion about Christians is true
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