No Valerie. Organismal decay is a consequence of death. To defend your interpretation of scripture, you are ignoring the knowledge we have now of cell biology and biochemistry. There must have been cellular death in the garden. There is no escaping this.
Is that really the clearest passage? If I read the thread correctly what we were discussing was whether evolutionary theory is contradicted by Scripture, because evolutionary theory has millions of years of animal death and Scripture (supposedly) has no death before the Fall.
But Romans 5:12 says nothing about the death of animals. In fact itâs quite easy to reconcile it to a GAE style scenario with evolutionary history and biological humans outside the Garden. E.g. the human beings in the view of Scripture are Adam and Eve and their descendants, and indeed sin and death spread to all of us because of their sin just as the verse says. (Those outside the Garden, not descended from Adam, are simply not mentioned, because by the time the Apostle Paul wrote Romans, they didnât exist anymore.)
As for what Jon says about it in his book, Iâd have to go look it up. Or you could.
I donât know what you mean by that. Can you clarify?
Why does Genesis 1 and 2 being part of the same beginning invalidate an ancient earth or evolutionary theory? The whole history of the universe prior to the Garden could just be part of the beginning from the perspective of the story of Scripture without making a word of it false.
You didnât mention untruthfulness before. What makes you think itâs untruthful?
But you donât want to think about them, do you? Of course, youâre confused about the implications anyway.
Itâs REAL physical life too! Thatâs why we have the resurrection!
See what Michael wrote. Maybe heâs making more sense than me.
Youâre OK with lots of âpeopleâ existing alongside Adam and Eveâs descendants viewed as âanimalsâ?
If God made a promise, and took it back, then we should have clear evidence in scripture that He decided to exile them rather than them dying because of sin.
It perhaps doesnât. It invalidates GAE though.
The Bible, the science, the ridiculous debates. The fact this theory has been around and the science for it has gotten worse not better. If it had any merit, the church wouldâve already been fully on board.
What he said has nothing to do with what I said. He is arguing for spiritual death as a better interpretation instead of physical death.
Tumors and antibiotic resistant bacteria: you say what??
The resurrection shows us that physical death is not the end. It does not imply anything about the origin of physical death.
I agree with @Michael_Okoko that he is making a completely different argument.
You are arguing against something @structureoftruth never said.
Not at all, I canât tell why you would even think so.
Oh goodness, @thoughtful, letâs examine this argument in more detail.
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The Bible - there are millions of us Christ-followers that accept the Bible as the Word of God and accept the scientific evidence for evolution and believe that God created through the process. Are you ready to take the stance that anyone that believes differently from you is wrong by default? If so, I admire your confidence in your own understanding, but would encourage humility.
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The science - The science has only become more certain in the last 150 years that current life on the planet is a result of evolutionary processes.
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The ridiculous debates - There are ridiculous debates that 5G is causing the coronavirus pandemic. Does that somehow invalidate scientific evidence that 5G is irrelevant?
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If it had any merit, the church wouldâve already been on board - Well, if you are using the opinion of the church as a whole as the arbiter of truth, you should probably acknowledge that a majority of the church worldwide is already on board. Second, I am reasonably confident we can agree that church opinion is an inadequate tool for the measurement of scientific validity.
All of you here who are arguing in this fashion can only be wrong. How would we even know what death was except that they ate of the fruit. It would have been a totally foreign concept to Adam and Eve had they never rebelled. A foreign concept, that is, because it never existed until then.
The bible has nothing useful to say about evolution. The science does, and it supports current theories. Not sure what ridiculous debates youâre talking about or why you think the science has gotten worse. Nor do I understand why you think the church is decisively influenced by the scientific merit of a theory.
None of that seems like a reasonable response to my question.
You could have said âscience consensusâ and you would have been right. But we have all read, including you, that the advent of genetics is actually helping to unravel that evolutionary consensus.
You almost certainly would be found to be incorrect here if you were able to pull the numbers. Can you prove that the WW church is already onboard?
Unless we are right, of course! Iâm not sure why you are so confident in your own opinion.
How would a warning of death work if Adam and Eve had no concept of it? It seems to me that âyou will surely dieâ would only be an effective deterrent if they actually knew what death was.
You have no basis for claiming that, as you steadfastly avoid evidence in favor of hearsay.
The church? Really? Most Christian churches already are.
Precisely as Curtis noted:
Particularly for the second - if youâre suggesting there is a problem with the fact that God said âin the day you eat of the fruit you will surely dieâ followed by their exile from the Garden rather than immediate death, then it is a problem shared by YECs as well as OECs.
In regards to the first, I never said that the biological humans outside the Garden are viewed by Scripture as animals. I suggested they are not in view at all.
Another possibility is that they are implicitly in view: it is not a great strain on the text to read Genesis 1 and 2 sequentially, so that all biological humans (who are all made in the image of God) are in view in Genesis 1, and Adam and Eve specifically are in view in Genesis 2. Adam and Eve are created in a special relationship with God and intended to bring all those outside the Garden in: then there are very strong parallels between Adam and Israel and Christ (making sense of some other themes in Scripture, such as the parallels between the Garden of Eden and the Temple).
So thereâs multiple ways this could go without difficulty for the GAE view.
A post was merged into an existing topic: Can Pew data on Christian acceptance of evolution be trusted?
And how specifically was death modeled in front of Adam and Eve?
I suspect it was by watching living organisms die.
Your suspicions are not enough to rewrite the Genesis history to include evolution and death of Human Kind before the Fall. How again are you claiming that humans were already dying? Or were you claiming that at all?
This is a really great argument, thank you. God doesnât say unimportant or superfluous things and would not have addressed the penalty of sin with something they did not understand, so they must have known and death must have existed in some form. Makes perfect sense to me and to the Spirit of truth in me. Logical hermeneutics makes me happy.
Iâve explained previously why I think the standard Biblical passages that are often used to support the âno death before the Fallâ idea are wrong - in Genesis, Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15. The sin of Adam and Eve brought spiritual death, not physical death. I donât think any of it needs rewriting.
So God was saying âYou will surely die spirituallyâ. Is this your view? But you told me that physical death had already been modeled before them. Reconcile this for us.