We now know that death and suffering were around for a very long time before humans ever stepped on the scene, why then would God allow the ancient Israelites to erroneously believe that death and suffering only entered the world after the fall of man? One can still argue that evil only entered our world after Adam and Eve sinned but you definitely can’t say that death and suffering are humanity’s fault.
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Or rather, why would anyone conclude from reading Genesis that this was the case? Sure, you can read that into the text, but reading it as it is the most that can be concluded is that death and suffering for humans entered after the Fall.
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Agreed. Our idea of “death entering through one man” tends to come from Romans, which the ancient Israelites weren’t reading.
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We know God exists because he tells us He exists in the Bible…and yet here you are claiming what He tells us is false because “we know death and suffering existed long before Adam and Eve”
- You only know Adam and Eve existed because the bible tells us they did.
- If we know Adam and Eve existed because God told us, then why ignore the biblical theology that death and suffering only enterred this world because of sin? (Dont bother with the defense “its only spiritual”…Christ died physically on the cross and then theres him appearing to doubting thomas with the physical statement “look at the scars on my hands…put your hand in my side”)
- What is the purpose of salvation? Does not the Bible clearly tell us its redemption from the wages of sin?
- what is the biblical outcome of redemption? Isnt it the Second coming of Christ and restoration of corrupted things back to their former glory and eternal communion with God?
There is absolutely no sound Christian logic to this questions premise!
Finally, the writers of the bible were given the task of recording Gods words and wishes in the language of common men. They recieved this revelation via a number of methods…
God spoke to them directly…in Moses case face to face
God spoke to them in dreams and visions…Daniel is a good example
God wrote with His own hand …ten commandments, and writing on the wall in Babylon the night of its downfall to the medes and persians
The ministry of Christ on earth.
The Holy spirit
Our conscience…the second covenant recorded in Jeremiah 31:33, 400 years before Christ(“i will write my laws on their hearts and in their minds”)
Now you see given the biocycle affects everything scientifically, you just kicked yourself in the guts there. One cannot separate death and suffering in humanity with death and suffering in all other living things…the biocycle proves that cannot be the case scientifically. Climate change is an example of that.
For you to make that claim is highly problematic scientifically and religiously.
I wonder, are you an indivudal who believes humanity has no impact on climate change because of this notion of yours? That the death and suffering our pillaging of the environment through demolition of native forests, pollution and waste…for the Darwinian evolutionist, that this ongoing habit of ours before the fall of Adam and Eve didnt cause pain, suffering and death to other living things in nature…that we didnt have any responsibility for it back then?
The problem is, if you claim we didnt have morality as such, how about instinct? Animals clearly have instinct which enables then to remain in harmony with the natural order.
If we are evolving into a more intelligent amd advanced people, why the incresse in pain and suffering in society and the environment? Thats the opposite direction which funnily enough is exactly what the bible predicts! The bible states things began beautifully, sin enterred the world and stuffed it, the ultimate goal is to restore it back to former glory without pain, suffering and death
Revelation 21:4, which states, "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away
These sorts of problems all come up whenever the modern fundamentalist assumptions have hijacked the story and pressed it into service as a pseudo-scientific apologetic. If we can credit the ancients as having more profundity, though, and grant that bigger things were going on in that messaging, then one can begin to appreciate and delve into where the narrative invites its readers. There are great questions about death (is it only physical? or are there spiritual aspects too?), and about sin (is it possible to love without having the capacity to choose otherwise? - did freewill exists before that? does it now?.. What is a loving God’s or a loving parent’s appropriate response to a seriously wayward child who is showing no interest in receiving such love?") Those and so much else are great questions that one can begin using the scriptural narratives to explore once when lets go of the disrespectful need to pretend that scripture can and must only be about satisfying modern historicity tests before it is allowed to speak to or about anything else. Most of us here are more interest in engaging with scriptures in those deeper ways, just as Jesus and his apostles did - creatively weaving their own stories into the continuation of that narrative.
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And het here you are attempting to facilitate that there is no direct correlation between pain and suffering and climate change. Given that from our current experiences, pre Adam and Eve humans must have had direct consequences on the wellbeing of the rest of the natural order of things…its impossible to claim they didnt and that is because we seek to climb up Maslows hierarchy…its an innate desire we have always had. The fact we used tools and made weapons is proof of my claim there. I know i am right on this point because i can look around me right now and actually see its consequences which have accelerated in just my own lifetime!
Our impact on climate change started the very day we began to cause pain and suffering…which is highly problematic given our current reality proves that climate change is now worse than it has ever been and its our refusal to do the right thing that is to blame…thats the science right. So how do you rationalise your ignorance of that in your theology there?
I dont have that problem…my religious belief follows the biblical model …that humanity is responsible for pain and suffering both socially and environmentally and its getting worse and not better. the bible has that part 100% right and I am able to determine that the bible is right on that point via a normal reading of language…no interpretation beyond a normal understanding of plan language is required!
Your heuristic follows the modern fundamentalist model, which tries to squeeze everything into stark black and white, wooden literalisms.
Why are you assuming I’m ignorant of that? We weren’t even talking about that or climate science. I do have views about it - which probably even intersect with yours in that I agree humanity bears much responsibility, and increasingly so as tech has amplified our impact to ever larger scales.
And there’s the problem. While there is something to be said for infants being granted important insights denied even to lofty intellectual sorts; nonetheless we don’t hear scriptures (as a whole) extolling the virtue of never growing up. Yes, there is the “you must be like a child if you want to enter the Kingdom of God” - we should always keep that reminder close at hand, but Paul also reminds us that when he became an adult, he put away childish things. One doesn’t fully respect the scriptures, I suggest, if they think they’ve already mined them for all their worth on just their plain first-reading face-value. Scriptures are much deeper than you give them credit for. I’ve read the Bible through many times, and yet I’m still highly dependent on (and still learning from) scholars who have spent much more of their professional lives studying them much more than I have. I’m not naïve enough to think that my understandings of scriptures are somehow independent of an army of scholars and translators (both contemporary and historical). And for all that, I don’t pretend that I’m now in possession of all there is to glean from scriptures.
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do you not understand the correlation there Mervin? This isnt about climate science, its about the scientific fact that what we do directly impacts on the Biocycle and because of that, the claim that the start of morality and sin has nothing to do with the Theistic Evolutionary dilemma in aligning with Darwinian scientific belief!
Let me give what some would consider a really insignificant illustration:
I have a hive of bees in my brick chimney. Now i could simply just light the fire underneath those buggers and smoke/burn em out. I do not do this why?
- bees are an important part of the pollination process and given the significant challenges wild bee populations have been experience in the last few decades, we need to be very careful in the way we interract with them.
NOTE do not confuse the “managed bee hive” with “native bee” population…most people are confused by the statistics there and think we have nothing to worry about and that is categorically false - what i do as an individual matters. Its no different to the well known water saving slogan used for years by governments “every drop counts”
Now i make my point again Mervin…
It is because of the fundamental science behind how the Biocycle works that the notion of pain, suffering and death can be separated from it is false. Now i know that you are going to attempt to make the usual claim that bacteria must have existed immediately after creation. I have no problem with that. However, we do not know how the biocycle worked in a world without sin…there is no model for that with which to make comparisons, i am not aware that it can even be tested.
What we do know is that the Bible very explicitly states that God made a world without weeds and tares. It had the capacity to survive without pain, suffering and death…so i would state that its highly likely that the way in which soil was fertilized was very different from today. if humans are capable of ruining the environment, and if the bible says that all creation was corrupted by sin, then that means that what existed before sin worked very differently to what we see today.
Im not sure of your academia achievements Mervin, however, Im only barely above the bottom of the ladder with a lowly bachelor degree. The thing is, even a dumbass like myself is easily able to make the direct connection there, so im really surprised at your response but then again, perhaps im the only one here who was fortunate enough to paraglide above the east coast of the city of Sydney during the COVID lockdowns and notice that all the smog we usually see was gone!
The point is, God didnt need to correct Israel’s supposedly errant beliefs about:
Creation,
Noahs Flood,
the Exodus,
conquest of Canaan,
destruction of Sodom and Gomorah,
the apostle Paul being bitten by a poisonous snake on the isle of Malta (science says that there are no deadly snakes on that isle nor have there ever been)…
the reason he didnt have to is because they are all real historical events illustrated in 66 books of the protestant Christian Bible, and the claim its a modern view is just plain silly because the individuals who wrote those books were neither modern nor Darwinian).
Ill make a note here at this point…almost every individual claim about YEC being a modern view never justifies that nonesense with any biblical evidence. Strangely enough the evidence cited is someone else’s claim its a modern view…thats playing pass the parcel and is ridiculous and should be a red flag to anyone who has concerns about TEism’s arguments in support of woeful theolgoical ideas where the bible isnt even used referenced to support said beliefs! I think this question highlights the dilemma there…its just a shame the premise the O.P presents is biblically false in the first place.
Where is the scriptural testimony about this? Where is it taught that sin had the power to remake God’s good creation to work differently now?
You give good examples of how we can have bad effects on creation, but nobody here would (or ever has) disputed this. What is disputed is that creation ever worked differently. Even if there had been a curse that caused nature to work differently before, that curse was revoked (Gen. 8:21-22). And as for creating the world “without weeds” - a weed only exists because we’ve decided we don’t want something there. One man’s invasive weed can be another man’s crop in
some other part of the world. And besides that, the Creation account speaks of a special garden where things would get tended. There was the wider world outside that garden (where the man and woman got banished to when they were exiled.) So your narrative just doesn’t hold within scriptures. You are right that we do impact the climate and our biocycles. But that is not a point of difference with anyone here. Evolutionary creationists here acknowledge all that, and are glad that you do too. You should take your message back to some of your fundamentalist brothers and sisters who are still in denial about it.
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Fir a stat that is a specific and erronious understanding of the narrative. The death involved is traditionally a spiritual one not a physical one as in jesus saying
Leave the dead to bury the dead
And besides, the bible charts the growth of understanding. If you read it you should find that God does challenge that belief… The fact that some people take all of Scripture at the same value is hardly God’s fault, neither can He be blamed how you inter[ret it.
Richard.
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One thing to keep in mind with this discussion is that pain (and death) are inevitable, but suffering is not. If pain is accepted as a useful part of our physical being, we endure it but don’t suffer. We suffer because, being human we find pain an affront.
Here is the dictionary definition of suffering
he state of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship
Suffering
I would say that endurance is just a euphemism for suffering or maybe a synonym .It just describes the attitude rather than the symptom or cause.
Richard
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I don’t agree with your premise in general.
Yeah, why would God allow anyone to learn anything for themselves? …choose anything for themselves? …breathe for themselves? Why give us brains to think or muscles to move, when God can just do all of that for us? Why would God create living things when they make such poor tools? Why isn’t God a total control freak?
These are the questions of someone who cannot comprehend love and the desire of a parent to give life to child, who learns for themselves, and lives their own life.
I am once again reminded of the eloi of H.G. Wells “Time Machine” – a people with an idyllic existence with everything provided for them so they become like sheep (food animals) incapable human responsibility.
BUT that raises the question of why some think that God has given them a creation for dummies book in Genesis 1… as if God somehow had to make sure we didn’t have to figure out how the universe came to be as it is, by providing an answer to that particular question, when He didn’t provide the answers to so many other questions. Why give an answer to such useless question when so many other questions are clearly far more important – ones which could save the lives of children suffering. This is another reason why I couldn’t possibly believe in that sort of Christianity. It doesn’t make any sense at all. It seems far far far more likely to me that this is the invention of people twisting Christianity into a tool of power over people.
BTW… I am not granting your claim about what the ancient Israelites believed. Just because we tell a story to teach certain things doesn’t mean we believe everything in the story (or a childish understanding of the story). Just because we make a film like Walt Disney’s Robin Hood with talking animals, doesn’t mean we believe in talking animals. And just because we don’t, doesn’t mean we think there was no such person as Robin Hood. I for example do believe in an historical Adam and Eve, just not as the beginning of the homo sapiens species (let alone as golems of dust and bone made by magic). And like Richard it see the fall having to do with spiritual death rather than physical death.
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In communication, to get the key message understood and not rejected, you have to minimize less important information that competes from the attention of the receiver and you need to tell your message in a way that the receiver can understand and accept.
From this starting point, I would say that the way how God communicated to the ancient Hebrews followed the basic rules of communication, assuming that the key message was about the relationship between God and humans, not about science.
The receivers had their own worldview and filtered all information through that worldview. If the messages would have included ‘modern’ information that did not fit to their worldview and understanding, the attention of the receivers would have gone to the ‘odd’ claims that did not seem to fit to what ‘everybody knew’ - the key message would have been lost beneath the less important details and probably rejected because of the odd and apparently ‘false’ claims about the world.
From this viewpoint, we can deduce what seemed to be the key messages and what was not as important. The Hebrew Bible (OT) seems to be fundamentally a book of the covenant between God and the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob(Israel). It focuses on and describes in detail matters that are relevant to that covenant and skips or only passingly describes matters that were not as important for the covenant.
That does not mean that the other matters were not important, it only means that these other matters were not the primary focus in this book of the covenant.
If you search for a good recipe for making a soup from a cookbook, you do not (and should not) find a thorough description of the start and development of the universe from that book. The scientific descriptions of the universe, Earth and life are the focus of other books, they should not burden the cookbook that is intended as a practical aid for cooking. The same principle can be applied to the scriptures in the Hebrew Bible.
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There was a tremendous amount of literature from 200BC to 200CE about Adam and Eve and some of it is even scripture to most non-Protestant Christians today.
It’s not true that belief in death through Adam comes from Paul. Rather, Paul exists in a stream of diverse thought and represents a view many ancient Israelites were familiar with. Our Sacred Scripture, however we interpret it, took a side in this debate. Regardless of what all these authors thought specifically about death, in most cases A&E;s sin was considered catastrophic for creation in ways that look very physical to me.
Vinnie
Well you see… Santa Clause had a workshop at the north pole with elves and all. Then the invention of aircraft sent out a reality altering wave through the universe and all the elves and Santa vanished into nothingness as if they never even existed.
In this way, we can make any fantasy immune to the evidence. And that makes it pretty hard to take any of it seriously at all. Now if you argue for the existence of Santa as something non-physical instead, that would be very different.
Thus I can only see this nonsense about sin transforming the universe as something which effectively transforms the Bible into pure fantasy.
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The text does not redact the curse at all. Its stating that God has recognised that men’s hearts seek evil even from youth and that He wont add to the existing curse!
Study Bible…
elliots commentary…
Pulpit commentary…
How do we know the above is the correct understanding of scripture here? Well, that’s easy…
- are there weeds still in your garden, are there still thorns on plants? The answer is obviously yes…so you have visual proof that the curse hasn’t been lifted.
- predation still occurs in nature…the bible tells us that in the New heavens and New Earth that will not be the cast…“that the lion will lay beside the lamb” and that “nothing unclean will ever enter the New Jerusalem”.
- What was the promise given to Adam and Eve about restoration? The bible goes to great lengths in the Old Testament to prophecy to coming Messiah who would reverse the scourge of sin in all Creation. He would die for sin, then eventually return in the Second Coming…culminating in Revelation 21 stating,
Revelation 21 isn’t just a mythical fairytale of morality, its prophesying a literal future event and there is absolutely no other way to read this text in the second last chapter of the Bible. Clearly God is going to rebuild the planet because sin has ruined this one…I’m not sure how it is you don’t seem to understand the implications of that bible text?
We know that the curse of sin is still with us in this world, im not sure how it is that you can think otherwise…especially given you agree that we humans have a direct influence the biocycle. If humans who are sinful cause harm to the environment, how is it you think that the curse is gone? We are still causing the damage as we have always done since Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden of Eden!
The problem here is that you are convinced by the Darwinian interpretation, that sin does not physcially impact on both humanity and the world around us. That is a delusion and it proves that sin is both spiritual and physical and those things affect ALL creation! This idea God must be lying is Darwinian propaganda and nothing more and it stems from the refusal to accept any other scientific conclusions other than those aligned with the notion that we are evolving into something better. The human destruction of the environment at an ever increasing pace proves this notion is wrong…interestingly enough, sci-fi movies i think have it right that eventually we will be forced to leave this world because we are making it a wasteland.
Some thoughts.
Today we know what the evidence says but when Moses, the Priestly and Yahwists writers wrote only what they thought or knew… There was little evidence available to them Today we know there was death and suffering among the Pre Adam people.
was present in the world before Adam because the people at best were polytheistic and did not know the God. But God revealed himself to Adam and gave him a law to not eat of the tree. Adam and Eve did and sin enteredt the world. Remember that in the absence of the law there is no sin (Romans 4:15) Also note that sin is defined (Oxford) as the commision of evil against a divne authority.
Re death and suffering perhaps Genesis is talking about spiritual death to eternal life (Because Jesus had not yet come) and the suffering would take place in the absence of eternal life through Christ. We all have eternal life after we die but only some will heve it in God’s realm with Christ. The rest will serve life in eternal hell.