On Thu, 21 Mar 1996 09:02:46 -0500 you wrote to Norm Smith:
NS>...To me it seems that a God who would tolerate tooth and
>claw, violence, death, pain and agony for at least a good part of a
>billion years and think of it as business as usual would not be the
>kind of God that I would hope for, if that makes any difference. It
>would be easier to live with the thought of a God who would tolerate
>these things for a few thousand years as a "temporary" situation
>necessatated by His careful response to a rebelion made possible by
>His granting of a high degree of freedom to His creatures.....
BH>This issue was, initially quite a problem for me. I don't claim to
>have a preferred solution fo it, but there are some possibilities:
>1. There have actually been two falls: The fall of Satan and the fall of
>man. As a result of his fall, Satan was banished to earth. We don't know
>when Satan's fall occurred. If it was billions of years ago, then Satan
>could be responsible for billions of years of suffering and death. In this
>scenario Eden was the first piece of territory God took back from Satan,
>and Adam and Eve were to be the first of His army for taking the remainder
>of earth back.
Thanks Bill. There is a lot of merit in this. Satan was already in
existence when Adam and Eve were created (Gn 3:1; cf Rev 12:9; 20:2).
While the Bible doesn't say it, it may be that he was a corrupting
principle in pre-Adamic life. But it could not explain animal death.
It is simple arithmetic that the world would be knee deep in flies
(let alone bacteria) within a very short if nothing died. Ramm says:
"Barrels of ink have been used to describe the effects of sin upon
animals and nature. It has been categorically stated that all death
came from man's sin. When Paul wrote that by sin death entered the
world (Romans 5:12) it was presumed that the word world meant
creation, not just humanity." It was argued that before Adam sinned
there was no death anywhere in the world and that all creatures were
vegetarians.
But this is all imposition on the record. Ideal conditions existed
only in the Garden. There was disease and death and bloodshed in
Nature long before man sinned. As we have shown in the chapters on
geology, we cannot attribute all this death, disease, and bloodshed to
the fall of Satan. Certainly the Scriptures do not teach that death
entered the world through Satan. There is not one clear, unequivocal,
unambiguous line in the entire Bible which would enable us to point to
the vast array of fossil life and state that all the death here
involved is by reason of the sin and fall of Satan.
Life can live only on life. All diet must be protoplasm. Are we to
believe that the lion and tiger, the ant-eater and the shark, were all
vegetarians till Adam fell, and that the sharp claws of the big cats
and the magnificent array of teeth in a lion's mouth were for
vegetarian purposes only? One might affirm that such a creation could
hardly be called good, but that is pre-judging what good means. The
cycle of Nature is an amazing thing, and the relationship of life to
life sets up a magnificent balance of Nature. Unless a very large
number of certain forms of life are consumed, e.g. insects and fish,
the earth would be shortly overpopulated with them. Some fish lay
eggs into the millions and if all such eggs hatched the ocean would
shortly be all fish. Carnivorous animals and fish keep the balance of
Nature.
Outside of the Garden of Eden were death, disease, weeds, thistles,
thorns, carnivores, deadly serpents, and intemperate weather. To
think otherwise is to run counter to an immense avalanche of fact.
Part of the blessedness of man was that he was spared all of these
things in his Paradise, and part of the judgment of man was that he
had to forsake such a Paradise and enter the world as it was outside
of the Garden, where thistles grew and weeds were abundant and where
wild animals roamed and where life was possible only by the sweat of
man's brow."
(Ramm B. "The Christian View of Science and Scripture",
Paternoster: London, 1955, p233).
BH>2. A second possibility is that in passages like Gen 2:17 and
>Romans 5:12 _spiritual_ death -- by which I mean being put out of
>fellowship with God, which of course ultimately results in physical
>death -- is meant. That would make the phrase "for _in the day you
>eat of it_ you shall surely die" in Gen 2:17 a more meaningful
>warning. Punishment is always most effective when administered
>immediately.
While Adam and Eve did die spiritually when they sinned against God,
this does not exhaust the meaning. To die spiritually *must* also mean
to die physically. The process of physical dying began on that day.
BH>3. A third possibility is that human death is meant by the above
>passages. I'm not trying to say that God doesn't care about
>animals. I'm sure He loves them. But just as He intended them to
>meet the needs of men -- including as food [Gen 9:3] -- He may also
>have intended them to serve the needs of the rest of creation: food
>for other animals, fertilizer, etc. If you don't accept that, then
>you have to presume a radically different ecology prior to the fall.
>I'm not saying it couldn't be, but the most reasonable approach IMO
>is to be willing to admit that just as we do not totally understand
>nature, we don't totally understand from Scripture the conditions
>that existed prior to the fall.
Good thoughts Bill! The Bible nowhere depicts the death of animals as
bad. In fact it says that we were *designed* to eat meat:
"Meats for the belly, and the belly for meats..." (1Cor 6:13)
Strangely enough, Gish indirectly confirms this:
"A creationist would also expect many biochemical similarities in all
living organisms. We all drink the same water, breathe the same air,
and eat the same food. Supposing, on the other hand, God had made
plants with a certain type of amino acids, sugars, purines,
pyrimidines, etc.; then made animals with a different type of amino
acids, sugars, purines, pyrimidines, etc.; and, finally, made man with
a third type of amino acids, sugars, etc. What could we eat? We
couldn't eat plants; we couldn't eat animals; all we could eat would
be each other! Obviously, that wouldn't work. All of the key
molecules in plants, animals, and man had to be the same." (Gish
D.T., "Creation Scientists Answer Their Critics", Institute for
Creation Research: El Cajon CA, 1993, p277)
BH>Finally, I think we have to remember that time and quantities don't
>look the same to God as they do to us. If animal death is something
>God wished not to occur on earth, then I suspect one animal death
>would grieve Him as much as billions over billions of years.
Another good point! If it was bad for God to let billions of animals
die over millions of years, then it is just as bad for God to let
millions of animals die over thousands of years, or indeed even *one*
animal die over one day.
Much of the problem is that we anthropomorphise the death and
suffering of animals. While the higher animals feel pain and in some
sense suffer, the vast majority probably don't, at least not in the
sense that we humans suffer. Much of pain and suffering is
psychological. Ommanney says:
"Anyone who has ever fished or watched a fisherman has wondered
whether fish feel pain. This is a very difficult question to answer
satisfactorily; pain is psychological as well as a physical reaction,
and there is no way of learning from the fish just what it feels. We
may be fairly certain, however, that fishes do not experience the
psychological component of pain; there is little evidence that they
learn by experience or association as we do. Do they, then, feel pain
physically? Pain is experienced by the brain as the result of
information conveyed to it by the nerves. In the human brain it is
the cortex which integrates the messages conveyed by the sensory
nerves and those conveyed to the motor nerves; and it is the cortex
which produces pain. But fish have no structure comparable to the
human cortex, and there is no other part of their brain which appears
to perform this function. The amount of sensory stimulation required
to produce pain is called the pain threshold. It is much higher in
some animals, and in some individuals than in others. The lower we go
in the evolutionary scale the higher the pain threshold becomes, the
more stimulation is required before a pain reaction can be observed.
We may be pretty certain that it is high indeed in fish. They seem to
react to excessive stimulation merely by moving or trying to move
away. This is why a fish can swim off apparently unconcerned with a
hook in its mouth or a harpoon in its back, and a wounded shark will
continue to attack even while its companions are tearing at its
bowels." (Ommaney F.D., "The Fishes", Time/Life Books: Netherlands,
1964, p44)
Dawkins states this argument from suffering in his inimitable
style:
"The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond
all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to
compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive,
many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others
are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands
of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease. It must be
so. If there is ever a time of plenty, this very fact will
automatically lead to an increase in population until the natural
state of starvation and misery is restored." (Dawkins R., "God's
Utility Function", Scientific American, Vol. 273, No. 5, November
1995, p67)
What Dawkins overlooks is that no animal experiences "the total amount
of suffering" in the world. Only *individual* animals experience
their *individual* suffering, and even that is debatable. But if
Dawkins is going to consider the pain, suffering and death of each
animal as an argument against God, then he should consider that in the
vast majority of an animal's life it, in a sense, *enjoys* life. The
balance sheet is weighed overwhelmingly in favour of God's *goodness*
for the vast majority of an animal's life, with only a brief and
mostly merciful death at the end of it.
God bless.
Steve
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