You are citing a headline written by a journalist, not the original paper (Yonggang Nie, Fuwen Wei, 2014). I went into the footnotes of the paper cited by @Timothy_Horton a couple of days ago (Nie and Wei, 2019) and found a citation to a paper from 2015 by the same authors. Here is a link to that paper on Oxford Academic. This is what Nie and Wei say:
modern giant pandas still retains the ability to feed on meat as observed often in captivity and very occasionally in the wild.
I think itās worth mentioningā¦
I agree with this insofar as āhistoricalā incorporates the cultural embeddings of the time and place of the original audience.
Why do you always cite words, usually from non experts, instead of the evidence, @PDPrice? How can you so strenuously avoid the evidence yourself while falsely claiming that you YECs are merely interpreting the same evidence differently?
Do you not see the obviousness of your avoidance of evidence?
My only point with mentioning pandas at all was to emphasize the fact that just because something has sharp, carnivore-looking teeth does not mean it has to eat meat. Fruit bats also have very sharp teeth.
In PDās defense, Science is usually a reliable source of science journalism. And the pandaās diet is well over 90% bamboo in the wild, so the Science article is not outrageously wrong.
Itās still wrong, and the truth is perfectly consistent with the predictions of evolutionary theory, and PD very predictably leapt to choose words over evidence.
I donāt see how someone can make claims about how groups of people interpret evidence while avoiding evidence in favor of hearsay himself.
Thereās a lot of room for subjectivity when you try to discern all of that data. Itās not in Scripture, which means you are putting outside information alongside Scripture. Yet Scripture teaches us that Scripture is the final authority. Iām not disagreeing that culture is relevant, because it clearly is, but I think many theological liberals go off the rails in overplaying the cultural aspect to the detriment of the plain meaning of the text.
Note that the pandaās teeth have actually accumulated adaptations over the past 8 million years to assist their mostly-bamboo diet. From the same paper in Oxford Academic:
So their teeth, while not like those of the horse or elephant, are not like the tigerās either.
You should read the paper, I think you would find it quite fascinating. It reviews several different mutations in the panda genome, including pseudogenes, that are reflected in its unique morpology and behavior.
Cats require taurine from their diet as their bodies manufacture it a too low a level to live. Taurine can only be obtained from eating animals. Cats were not eating plants before the Fall or we would not have cat ākindā today.
Well the problem is that a great deal of the animal kingdom, with representation from mammals, insects, birds, reptiles, and sea life, is clearly designed, bow to stern, to feed off other creatures. That goes against your systematic theology which is based on your understanding of the perspicuity of scripture. This is what happens when tidy doctrine meets uncooperative nature. You can hold fast, but the price is that as soon as you step out of the echo chamber of the like minded, the world stops making sense.
Do you have any links to any good YEC models for creation of meat eaters after the Fall? Like, is it a rapid evolutionary adaptation? Was it de novo creation of those species or a de novo creation of those physical characteristics? Since the consumption of meat is such a widespread phenomena (Iām thinking worms and bacteria as well as fish and mammals) it really would be a rather radical āinterventionā, right?
Itās either a supernatural intervention on a large scale at the time of the Fall, or else it was an in-built capacity (according to Godās foreknowledge) that was only ātriggeredā after the Fall as a result of the way Godās direct presence on earth was suddenly withdrawn at that point.
I canāt think of a particular reason why the first option would necessarily follow from the Fall. I donāt see a theological reason why animals would need to be included in the curse. Only the serpent and Adam & Eve were specifically cursed by God, why would all the animals (which were created de novo so they donāt share in Adamās lineage or sin) need to die?
The second option seems more compatible theologically/textually, but that also seems a bit weird if God created animals with the ability to kill and eat each other, but then plans on preventing that for all eternity. That sounds an awful lot like God was planning on the Fall. Would that consistent with your theology?
Everything God created on Earth was under the headship of Adam. Adam was placed in charge of the earth.
āThen God said, āLet us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.āā Gen 1:26*
So the curse applied to the whole creation because Adam was its head.
Only the serpent and Adam & Eve were specifically cursed by God
No, thatās not correct.
And to Adam he said, āBecause you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, āYou shall not eat of it,ā cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;*
That sounds an awful lot like God was planning on the Fall. Would that consistent with your theology?
Just because God plans on something because he has foreknowledge in his omniscience does not mean God desires that thing to occur. That is not a problem for my theology.
