Questions in Genesis: Death before the Fall

On Death before the Fall

            One of the theological reasons Young Earth Creationists hold to a young earth is because of death.  The logic of this position goes as follows: before Adam and Eve sinned, there was no death; therefore, any position that holds to ages and death occurring prior to the sin of Adam fails to understand the consequence of sin as presented in the biblical text.  This is an erroneous position for several reasons the foremost of which is that there is an implicit understanding that when God created the world and called it very good what God meant was that the world was created perfect.  The world could not have been created perfect, or else perfect means capable of breaking itself.  However very good implies that things were made the way that they were supposed to turn out and that things are operating as they should.  This is not perfection.  This is very good.

            The assertion that there could not be death and suffering before Adam and Eve ate from the tree is awkward on several different levels.  First, it operates as though the death God spoke of was physical death.  This either a) makes God a liar because on the day they ate of it they did not physically die or b) means that “day” refers to all the years that Adam and Eve lived after they ate of the fruit.  Neither one of these are good options for a Young Earth Creationist perspective.  Second, it makes God seem absurd since He threaten Adam with a punishment that Adam could not understand.  However, if Adam had seen other creatures die, the threat of death would be a real and comprehensible threat.

            Allow me to suggest that “death” is not speaking of a physical but a spiritual reality; a reality of being separated from God.  This happened when they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Physical death appears to be the consequence of being separated from the tree of life, which is why we are told that a cherubim with a flaming sword guards the entrance to keep Adam and Eve from eating of the Tree of Life.  This then should cause one to question “Why, if Adam and Eve were made perfect and there was no death, was there a tree of life in the middle of the garden?”  Perhaps it would be better to understand that Adam and Eve were not created immortal but that immortality was conditional on their continued access to the Tree of Life which is also then seen to be conditional on keeping God’s commands not to eat from the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil. 

            This then gets to the heart of a very important matter.  Since the death which Adam was warned about is a spiritual state, then it is right to affirm that there was no death anywhere in creation prior to Adam and Eve’s disobedience?  What of plants?  What of microbes?  What of viruses?  What of insects?  Imagine a world in which plants never died and bacteria never died.  You are now in a world that is very different from the world we are in now.  This then profoundly undermines the Intelligent Design argument for observing the order and function in the created order as proof of a divine/intelligent creator.  Because the world was not created in the way we can observe it.  Pause for a moment and consider how much of life requires at its most fundamental level the death of other creatures.

Example 1:

            Baleen Whales are perhaps one of the most destructive creatures on our planet.  In their lifetimes they kill untold millions/billions of living sea creatures which we collectively lump into the term “krill.”  Indeed, even a young earth creationist will argue that they were perfectly created to eat krill.  Yet, krill are living creatures.  And so, for the baleen whales, who from a human perspective are peaceful creatures, their life requires billions of living creatures to die.

Example 2:

            Imagine a world where the creatures upon which nearly all other creatures prey would breed without predation.  Grasshoppers would eat every plant upon the face of the earth given enough time.  That is unless the mice and rats got there first.  (And one can only shudder at the thought of immortal mosquitoes…)  If this were the case, then it is a very good thing that Adam and Eve disobeyed God and brought predation into the world or the plant life would not have sustained such continuous and exponentially growing predation.  This would certainly have destroyed life as we know it on the planet.

            From this order of life requiring the cessation of life in other entities, we can arrive at the conclusion that either: A) God created a world in which entities would cease to exist for the sake of other creatures to live and this by design, B) God recreated the natural order after the sin of Adam and Eve (and there is no textual support for this assertion beyond the function of thorns and thistles), or C) With the introduction of death, creature evolved in profound ways (from not requiring the cessation of life in another life form to exist to fully requiring the cessation of other life forms to exist at all) into the relationships we now see.

            From a creationist perspective, the concept that creatures would evolve in such ways so as to adapt new physiological features to consume new types of food that they were not created to consume is irreconcilable.  Likewise, from a biblical perspective, the idea that God reworked creatures to now consume other creatures is without any biblical support whatsoever (let alone fossil records).

             This leads us to an even bigger problem.  If animals did not die before the fall, then we cannot argue for intelligent design from our observation of the world around us.  If God did not order the world so that animals would die, then one cannot look at the world where the death of creatures is seen to be fundamental to the continuance of life and affirm that God designed it.  Rather, we would see death in creation and recoil in how utterly wrong these creature are in their very function and design that they live off of the death of other creatures.