One of the central objections young-earth believers raise against the idea of an old earth is the abundant evidence of disease, decay, and death found in the fossil record, demonstrating that pain and death were a fact of life on earth long before the appearance of humans. They believe this record is inconsistent with Genesis 1:31, which declares: “God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good.” They insist that pain, decay, and death could not have been part of a “very good” creation but must instead be a result of the Fall of Man.
“You said, ‘Believe in millions of years as long as God did it.’ But if you’ve got millions of years, you’ve got death, diseases that you see in the fossil record, animals eating each other. You know what Genesis 1:29 and 30 says? Adam and Eve were to eat fruit and the animals were vegetarian. Genesis 9:3, after the flood, God says, ‘Just as I gave you the plants’—emphasizing that they were vegetarian—‘now I give you the animals. Now I give you everything’…You’ve got a fossil record where you’ve got animals eating each other, bones in their stomachs, evidence of abscesses, of cancer, of brain tumors. In fact there’s even a science called paleopathology, the study of diseases in bones in the fossil record. How could all that exist before sin? God said everything was very good. That’s after sin, and I suggest to you most of your fossils are the result of the flood. You’ve got the graveyard of the flood crying out to us that God has judged sin. He judged sin with death.”[1]
Another prominent young-earth author, Dr. Terry Mortenson, puts the objection into even more stark language:
“To accept millions of years of animal death before the creation and Fall of man contradicts and destroys the Bible’s teaching on death and the full redemptive work of Christ. It also makes God into a bumbling, cruel creator who uses (or can’t prevent) disease, natural disasters, and extinctions to mar His creative work, without any moral cause, but still calls it all ‘very good.’”[2]
These issues of pain and death are aspects of what is broadly referred to in Christian theology as the Problem of Evil. Atheists often appeal to the Problem in their attacks on theism in general and Christianity in particular; and as we have just seen, young-earth teachers also appeal to it in order to set old-earth creationism at odds with scripture and the character of God. As I hope to demonstrate, however, this argument by Ham, Mortenson, and others, is based almost entirely on inferences, on their opinions of what God would or would not do, what he would or would not consider “good,” and how he would or would not order his creation.
Now, there is certainly nothing wrong with drawing inferences from scripture, but young-earth teachers tend to base their inferences on a handful of passages they interpret selectively. In considering the issue of animal disease, predation, and death before the Fall, I will point out much in scripture that challenges their inferences, beginning with some common misconceptions about the Garden of Eden and the larger pre-Fall world.
Misconceptions of Paradise
The Borders of Paradise
Young-earth teachers argue that the whole of planet Earth was one vast paradise prior to the Fall of Man, but a closer look at Genesis casts doubt on this.
Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there He placed the man whom He had formed. Out of the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that is pleasing to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Now a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it divided and became four rivers… Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. – Genesis 2:7-10, 15
There are several details to note here.
First, contrary to common assumptions (and as mentioned previously) Adam was not created in the Garden of Eden. Genesis 2:15 tells us that God had to relocate him to the garden sometime after his creation, meaning that he was created elsewhere. Genesis 3:23 underscores this fact when it tells us that, following Adam’s sin, God “sent him out from the garden of Eden, to cultivate the ground from which he was taken.” Thus, Adam was not created from the soil of the garden but from the soil that lay outside of it.
As to the garden itself, Moses tells us it was located “toward the east, in Eden.” This passage clearly shows us that Eden was not the entire world. It was an identifiable region, known to the learned people of Moses’ time. Further, the passage shows us that the garden did not comprise the entirety of Eden but was merely a part of it.
Why is it important for us to know where Adam was created and where the garden was located? These facts demonstrate from scripture that the Garden of Eden was a special place, distinct from the rest of the world. And what made it distinct? Apart from the geographic details that limit it to a specific location, Genesis 2 tells us that the garden was well watered and that God had caused “every tree that is pleasing to the sight and good for food” to grow in it, along with the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The necessary implication here is that other locations did not possess such an abundance of trees that were attractive and good for food. The fact that God planted a garden in Eden means that the rest of the world was not a garden environment; the garden was a blessed place in contrast to the world that lay outside of it.
The Nature of Paradise
To this day, the Garden of Eden perhaps best embodies man’s ideal of paradise. Or rather, I should say that the popular conception of the garden embodies this ideal. The actual biblical description of the garden is quite different than the popular conception, and I fear falls short even of the vision many young-earth creationists entertain when they think of the pre-Fall world.
The reality check begins when you consider that Genesis 2:15 tells us Adam was placed in the garden to “cultivate it and keep it.” The Hebrew word translated “cultivate,” is ‘abad. Gesenius’ Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon defines this word as meaning “to labor, to work, to do work,” and “to till” when used in reference to land.[3] This is the same word used in Genesis 4:2, where Adam’s son, Cain, is described as “a tiller of the ground.” The King James Version translates this word as meaning “to dress.” The New King James translates it “to tend.” The NIV and ESV translate this word as “to work.”
Moving on, the word “keep” is translated from the Hebrew word shamar. Strong’s Hebrew and Chaldee Dictionary defines this word as meaning: “properly, to hedge about (as with thorns), i.e. guard; generally, to protect, attend to, etc…beward, be circumspect, take heed (to self), keep(-er, self), mark, look narrowly, observe, preserve...”[4] The same word is used in reference to the cherubim who were sent by God to “keep” (meaning to guard) the way of the Tree of Life in Genesis 3:24. It most often appears in the Old Testament where someone is protecting something, paying close attention to something, or being especially mindful of something.
Indeed, according to Gesenius’ Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon, the Hebrew word translated “garden” (gan) does not just refer to a place where cultivated plants grow, but to one that is “protected by a fence.”[5] It comes from the root word ganan, meaning “to cover, to cover over…protect.”[6]
Ganan appears eight times in the Old Testament, always in reference to places and people defended by God against an enemy of some type.[7] These terms not only underscore the nature of the Garden of Eden as a place that was set off from the rest of the world, they also strongly imply that it was a protected place. As we have seen, God’s commission to Adam to shamar the garden allows for the aspect of guardianship. The garden was thus under the protection of God through the stewardship of man.
The natural question that follows here then is: What did the garden need to be guarded from? The answer that most immediately comes to mind is that it needed protection from animals, although one might reasonably ask why animals would have been a threat to it given young-earth assumptions about the nature of animals in the pre-Fall world. If animals were prevented by their God-given, “very good” natures from harming one another in those days, as young-earth teachers assume, why did their divine programming not hinder them from venturing into protected places or overeating and damaging vegetation? Why would they not take their food in exactly the right places and in exactly the right proportions—in perfect harmony with the natural environment, especially since the world’s human overseers were then so few in number and limited to one small patch of ground?
Beyond the question of animal activity, however, it is also possible that the garden may have needed protection from other intelligences. For instance, the “serpent” may have gained access to Eve in the garden because Adam had failed in some way to either keep it out or to expel it once it entered.[8]
Thus, we see that the garden required close attention and maintenance. Adam and Eve were its caretakers. Note that God had placed the garden where it was watered by a river (Genesis 2:10), so it had to have water. It did not supernaturally sustain itself, nor would it continually offer its fruits to Adam and Eve on demand. They had to cultivate and maintain the garden to at least some extent, and this strongly implies that it would have fallen into despair had they not done so. After all, there is no reason to maintain something that has the capacity to maintain itself.
The tendency toward disorganization and decay in nature is a principle we call entropy, an aspect of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is one of the fundamental laws of nature. In short, entropy is why things break down and fall apart. For this reason, some young-earth creationists argue that the second law—and the accompanying principles of disorganization and decay—could not have been a part of God’s initially “good” creation but must instead be a corrupting influence that resulted from Adam’s sin.
Not all young-earthers agree, however. Dr. Danny Faulkner, a staff member at Answers in Genesis, acknowledges that the laws of thermodynamics and the principle of entropy were active prior to the Fall. In his article, “The Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Curse,” Faulkner explains that the process of digestion functions “in what amounts to a heat engine,” and even the act of moving around produces friction, which “dissipates energy.”[9] Faulkner also notes that heat flow from the sun and other stars is a function of the second law.[10]
Thus, we see that even in paradise the natural processes that result in decay were at work, to both beneficial and detrimental ends. Adam and Eve had to work against the influence of entropy in order to maintain the garden in good condition. At the same time, however, it was also entropy that allowed them to do that work, to move, to digest food, and to benefit from the sun’s light and warmth. Some young-earthers have speculated that the second law may have existed in a different form prior to the Fall, or that some entirely different physical law might have been in operation then, but as Faulkner states, “this idea is just further conjecture to salvage what was conjecture to begin with.”[11]
There is no compelling reason to argue that processes we readily know to result from the operation of the second law once somehow operated without it. There is no scientific evidence that this was ever the case, and nothing in the text of Genesis even so much as hints at it. The Garden of Eden was not a Walt Disney-style fantasy land that existed independent of the laws of physics. God had blessed it with abundance, but he had also left it vulnerable to the forces of nature and dependent upon the stewardship of man. Entropy was at work in the creation, and where entropy is at work physical things will degrade and living things will decline and ultimately die.
The World beyond the Garden
It seems clear enough that the text of Genesis describes a garden that was different than how many creationists envision it, but does it tell us anything about the world that lay beyond the garden in the days before the Fall? As it happens, the text does not delve into this subject to any real degree, but there are some things we can reasonably infer about it from the details that we do have.
As I mentioned previously, the biblical description of the Garden of Eden requires that the rest of the world was not a place of such concentrated abundance. It was not a blessed environment, at least not in the way that the garden was. Genesis 1:26-28 sheds a bit more light on this:
Then God said, “Let us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female, He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Theologians have long debated what scripture means when it says that man was made in the “image” of God. Without wandering too far afoot here, let me say that I believe the context defines what is meant by it in the broadest sense.
Humans are made in the image of God in that, as a class of being, we were created to be divinely-ordained rulers, stewards of creation. The words “rule” (“have dominion” in the old King James Version) and “subdue” underscore the divine intent here. “Rule” or “dominion” is translated from the Hebrew word radah, meaning “to rule,” “have dominion,” “dominate,” “tread down,” “subjugate,” and “prevail against.”[12] “Subdue” is translated from kabash, which Strong’s defines as meaning “to conquer, subjugate, violate:—bring into bondage, force, keep under, subdue, bring into subjection.”[13] Kabash appears fourteen times in the Old Testament apart from Genesis 1:28, and always refers to taking and exercising forceful control or rule over something. In twelve of those fourteen instances, it is used to describe the military subjugation of peoples and territory. In one instance (Esther 7:8) it is used to reference rape. In Micah 7:19, it is used to speak of God “subduing” the iniquities of the people when he finally determines to have mercy on them.
Notice the contrasting commissions given to human beings where the garden and the earth (Hebrew – erets, “land”) are concerned: the garden was to be “cultivated,” “watched over,” and “preserved,” whereas the earth was to be “subjugated,” “prevailed against,” and “tread down.” These are very different commissions, and they imply very different circumstances. The implication here is that the Garden of Eden was a blessed, comparatively tame environment that simply needed to be protected and maintained, whereas the earth beyond it was disorderly and untamed. Humans were not told to maintain and protect the earth but rather to forcefully subdue it and rule over it.
This language is very difficult to reconcile with the view of planet Earth as one vast paradise where the animals lived in perfect harmony with man and with one another. God speaks to man here as if the earth and its creatures will resist him. Furthermore, consider that God’s punishment of Adam and Eve by expelling them from the garden loses a good bit of its force if they were simply expelled from one part of paradise to another.
Remember that Adam was created outside of the garden and then later moved into it. Why this is, I cannot say for certain; but I get the impression from the contrasting commissions given in Genesis 1 and 2, that God may have wanted to give Adam experience outside of the garden so that he would understand what the rest of the world was like. This would naturally have given Adam a greater appreciation for the garden environment, and a greater desire to preserve it. This is speculation on my part, but it makes sense in the context.
Young-earth advocates might respond to what I’ve pointed out here with the objection that words like radah and kabash derived their primary scriptural usage from “the fallen world,” and thus should not be applied to the pre-Fall “very good” creation. In response, I offer two observations.
First, this argument is an assumption, and only an assumption. Nothing in the text supports it, and the contrast I’ve demonstrated from the text where the garden and the surrounding lands were concerned at the very least casts doubt on it. Second, if Moses was trying to convey a very different pre-Fall world, why did he use terms that conveyed post-Fall imagery? Why apply terms that reference forceful subjugation and rulership to describe relations that were supposedly quite different? For instance, Moses might have used the term ra’ah, most often translated in the Old Testament as to “feed” or “shepherd,” terms that still reference authority but invoke much gentler imagery in association with it.[14]
In his article “Did Death of Any Kind Exist Before the Fall?” Answers in Genesis-UK Executive Director Simon Turpin argues that the Hebrew word radah (translated as “rule” or “dominion”) “can reflect a benevolent, peaceful rule which fits with the context in Genesis 1.”[15] As proof of this, he cites Leviticus 25:43, 46, and 53. This passage deals with how Israelites were to treat any fellow Israelite who fell on such hard times that he sold himself into servitude: “You shall not rule over him with severity, but are to revere your God…in respect to your countrymen, the sons of Israel, you shall not rule over them with severity.”
The conclusion Simon Turpin attempts to draw from this passage does not conform to the usage and context of Genesis 1. Leviticus 25 refers to relations between human beings, specifically between Israelites, who were in a covenant relationship with one another under God. In Genesis 1, humans are not commanded to radah over one another at all, but rather, over the earth and its creatures. Moreover, radah is not used by itself in Genesis 1 but in conjunction with kabash, which, as I’ve demonstrated, consistently conveys forceful means. The fact that God found it necessary to clarify the sort of radah Israelites were to exercise over their brethren implies that the word held a forceful connotation he wanted to soften in that particular context. Again, consider the contrast between radah, “rule,” and ra’ah, “shepherd.”
To summarize this section, the text of Genesis presents a garden and larger pre-Fall world that differ from the utopian realms imagined by young-earth teachers in three important ways:
1) The garden was a special place of abundant blessing, but it still had to be cultivated, maintained, and protected. It was not supernaturally self-sustaining, but rather, was vulnerable to the forces of nature and the stewardship of its keepers.
2) Man was directed to forcefully subjugate the land beyond the confines of the garden, strongly implying that the world was not an idyllic, harmonious, non-threatening environment. This directive makes little sense otherwise.
3) Entropy—the principle of decay in nature—already seems to have been at work in creation by necessity. As a result, we would expect things to break down and living organisms to decline and ultimately die apart from divine intervention, which is nowhere mentioned or, I would argue, even implied in the text.
Moving on now, let’s examine the scriptural evidences young-earth teachers typically bring to bear on the question of animal death and predation prior to the Fall of Man.
Next in this series: Life and Death in the Pre-Fall Animal World, I.
[1] “Hugh Ross vs. Ken Ham – TBN Debate,” YouTube video, 59:24 – 1:00:23, posted by “Sentinel Apologetics.” October 6, 2018.
[2] Terry Mortenson, “Why Shouldn’t Christians Accept Millions of Years?” in The New Answers Book: Over 25 Questions on Creation/Evolution and the Bible, ed. Ken Ham (Glen Forest, AR: Master Books, Inc., 2006), p. 29.
[3] https://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?Strongs=H5647&t=KJV
[4] Strong’s # H8104.
[5] https://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?Strongs=H1588&t=KJV
[6] https://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?strongs=H1598&t=KJV
[7] II Kings 19:34, 20:6; Isaiah 31:5, 37:35, 38:6; Zechariah 9:15, 12:8.
[8] Dr. Michael Heiser has done excellent work on the nature of the serpent, demonstrating that it was not a natural creature at all but rather a supernatural being. I highly recommend that interested readers give him a hearing on the matter. A short presentation on the serpent can be found here: “Michael Heiser – What Happened in the Garden of Eden,” YouTube video posted by Sentinel Apologetics, September 28, 2018.
https://youtu.be/1RAMHF90tkw.
[9] Dr. Danny Faulkner, “The Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Curse,” Answers in Genesis, November 13, 2013, accessed November 29, 2019.
https://answersingenesis.org/physics/the-second-law-of-thermodynamics-and-the-curse/
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Strong’s # H7287.
[13] Strong’s # H3533.
[14] Strong’s # H7462.
[15]Simon Turpin, “Did Death of Any Kind Exist Before the Fall?” Answers in Genesis, April 3, 2013.
https://answersingenesis.org/death-before-sin/did-death-of-any-kind-exist-before-the-fall/
