1:29
¶ And God said, Behold, I have given you
every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every
tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for
meat. 30 And to every beast of the
earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the
earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it
was so.
This
is one example of how vastly different things were on the early earth. Notice what
God said to Noah after the Flood.
Genesis
9:1 ¶ And God blessed Noah and his sons,
and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. 2 And the fear of you and the dread of you
shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon
all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your
hand are they delivered. 3 Every moving
thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given
you all things. 4 But flesh with the
life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.
There
are various possibilities. Perhaps God did not create predators until after the
Flood or perhaps all creatures, even meat-eaters today, were capable of
surviving on vegetable matter then. Even
today everyone has known of a house-cat who liked green things so it is not
that a predator cannot eat such things but that, as cats are obligate
carnivores today and must have meat, so the original cat-creatures had to not
have that need for health and survival. The point is that the entire ecosystem,
lush and tropical as it may have been, did not require killing for survival.
With
regard to the conditions under which we live a famous atheist scientist noted;
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; others are running for their lives,
whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping
parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease.
It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will
automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of
starvation and misery is restored….In a universe of blind physical forces and
genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going
to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice.
The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if
there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but
blind, pitiless indifference.[1]
But, is death necessary at all in biology? Another
evolutionary scientist acknowledged that it is not.
Humans on rare occasions may survive to 120 years, some turtles to
200. But all animals eventually die. Many single-cell organisms may die, as the result of accident or
starvation; in fact the vast majority do. But there is nothing programmed into
them that says they must die. Death
did not appear simultaneously with life. This is one of the most important and
profound statements in all of biology. At the very least it deserves
repetition: Death is not inextricably
intertwined with the definition of life.[2]
Nevertheless, here we have a clear statement that both
man and beast’s diet consisted of non-animal matter in the early earth.
“Dentition suggests an omnivorous diet, in which nuts
and fruits, grubs, and perhaps some kind of vegetable shoots were more important
than animal flesh.”[3]
Note
Paul’s statement;
Romans 5:12 Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the
world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have
sinned:
The question we have to ask ourselves is this. Is
this, in Romans, the world of men or the world as in the earth? There are two
distinct usages of world in the Bible, based on context. One might be
considered the people that dwell upon the
earth and one the earth itself.
Revelation 3:10 Because thou hast kept the word of my
patience, I also will keep thee from the hour of temptation, which shall come
upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth.
Job 37:12 And it is turned round about by his counsels:
that they may do whatsoever he commandeth them upon the face of the world in
the earth.
[A third possible meaning can be the world system of
things; philosophy, entertainment, and politics and trends.
1John 2:15 Love not the world, neither the things that
are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in
him. 16 For all that is in the world,
the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not
of the Father, but is of the world. 17
And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the
will of God abideth for ever.]
In any event, the early earth was a vastly different
place, at least until the time of Adam and Eve’s downfall, than it was after
that or is now. Of course, the question also hinges around what we, in this
modern age, regard as life or living. The Biblical definition will be important
for our consideration in a few chapters. As there is some philosophical
question today over whether or not something that replicates itself is alive,
such as a computer program, or, by strict definition, whether a virus, which
does not have its own machinery for reproducing but takes over the host’s
equipment for that, is a living thing, the question of what constitutes life is
important for our understanding here.
[1] Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New
York: Basic Books, 1995), 154-155.
[3]
William H. McNeil, Plagues and Peoples (New
York: Anchor Books, 1976), 36.
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