> With respect to mans mortality there
>would be two options:
> A: Man created immortal
> Reading archived material with respect to the
>origins of man it seems that some are willing to allow for
>the immortality of man upon his creation (by whatever
>means) and at the same time say animals could die and
>that then sin brought "death" to Adam. I think that to be
>consistent one would have to say that going from a state
>of immortality, while at the same time having a fleshly
>body and then entering into a condition allowing death
>constitutes a fundamental biological change which is so
>profound it must be one of the real "mysteries" that we
>cannot understand.
One question keeps coming to mind about this: If man was created
immortal, why was there a Tree of Life in the Garden? Wouldn't it be
unnecessary? That tree seems to imply that physical immortality was
something attainable through God's grace, rather than being a "natural"
physical trait.
>Why if sin can enact such a
>fundamental change in the way matter and energy works
>cannot it be used to say that all of nature could have
>been fundamentally changed in the same way.
>Given this
>argument the following argument (of YEC connection)
>seems valid: that we cannot extrapolate back before the
>fall because everything in our experience has been
>changed in such a way that we cannot even imagine what
>it was like before.
Well, we can't logically exclude that possibility, but I don't find it
very helpful. Suppose, just for fun, we _try_ to extrapolate back, and in
doing so we find absolutely no evidence for a fundamental change in the
way matter and energy works, as far back as we can extrapolate. If there
WAS such a fundamental change, God labored mightily to make it look like
there wasn't. As someone once said, "If God went to all that effort, the
least we could do is play along."
Thanks for the post.
Loren Haarsma