Just to add (belatedly - apologies, for I only just noticed the textual resonance) that such a statement is not simply hot air, for in ch4 Cain receives a judgement that is almost identical to Adam’s, only worse - “the ground will no longer yield its crops for you.” Here, however, it is Cain who is said to be cursed, suggesting that the same is true for Adam in Gen 3.
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Even apart from evolution, the Fathers understood the essential predator/prey interdependence of nature. However, they were less inclined to put a gloomy spin on it than we are.
As I reason in my God’s Good Earth: the “red in tooth and claw” idea shared by Tennyson and Darwin, not coincidentally, almost certainly arose from the same, relatively recent, roots as the “traditional view” of the fall of nature.
Augustine, for example, viewed predation as the transformation of a lower nature to a higher. More in line with modern (post-Darwinian) science, though, the concept of mutuality of natures is a good one. It is by no means limited to predation: the bacteria in turn break down dead predators for the benefit of the plants. And in fact evolution/nature is rife with examples of cooperation rather than cut-throat competition. Conor Cunningham suggests that evolution is better characterised by cooperation and mutual exchange than by conflict, and I’m inclined to agree.
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While I was writing out my response the outlet that my computer and internet were plugged into failed and I lost about half of what I had written in another program, using diagrams to try to make things clear. I’ll just post that which was saved and maybe come back to the rest later.
Usually I would read over what I wrote to see check for typos and, perhaps, edit content, but I’m not going to do that either at the moment.
The distinction you’re trying to draw between God “changing” nature and God providentially governing nature isn’t clear. How do you classify God’s changing Saul’s heart (1 Sam. 10:9)?
On one understanding of the terms, changing nature would be one type of providential governance. In other words, God changing nature and God providentially governing creation are not mutually exclusive. God’s providential administration includes upholding ontological status (Job 34:14-15).
Or perhaps you have another understanding in mind. Let’s assume that by change you mean something like “bring about an ontological or qualitative change.” And to providentially govern simply means “to direct a thing within the bounds of a prior established ontology.”
One difficulty here is that knowing exactly where to draw the lines between an act of change and an act of providential governance won’t always be clear. For instance, on February 5th RTB podcast had a segment with Fazale Rana on whether it’s possible that humans lived for ~900 years. He claimed that some research findings suggest it may be possible to extend life spans by 20-40%. His suggestion was then that we may discover that it’s possible to make simple biological changes that can extend human spans to similar lengths in the early chapters of Genesis.
Would this count as a “change” or providential governance? Prior to any indication of how such a feat is possible we may have been inclined to think this requires change. But scientific discovery may reveal it to be an instance of providential governance.
But the bigger difficulty with the claim would be the lack of support for the idea that God doesn’t do change, only providential governance. You cite 1 Timothy 4:4 as support. So let’s look at that. Here’s how I think we would diagram the passage (and using this program and it’s lack of auto-save is what led to me losing half my work!):
Now, I think you want to abstract the argument a little and understand it like this:
But notice that if we don’t put any qualifications on this we end up with some odd counter-examples:
There are several ways we could understand Paul’s argument that wouldn’t lead to wrong conclusions.
- Narrow Contextual Boundary: Terms. The extent of Paul’s premise that everything God created is good is limited by the context of verse 3: foods and marriage. Paul would be saying “Everything God created with respect to food and marriage is good.” This would mean that we can’t abstract from 1 Timothy 4:4 a rule for how God governs rather than changes.
[It’s at this point that the rest of my work is missing… I’ll quickly add a truncated overview of the other two options I had spelled out, just so that this doesn’t cut off at an odd point:]
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Privation boundary. We might adopt a privation view of sin and evil and how that fleshes out. Under this option, Satan having some ontological goodness wouldn’t rule out Satan being appropriately described as “evil” (or even cursed).
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Brouad Contextual Boundary: Ceteris Paribus This one I had spelled out in a lot more detail, but the basic gist of the point I had in mind: had one presented C1 and C2 to Paul after he wrote 1 Tim. 4:4, I can imagine him viewing it as pedantic. He might say “Of course what I meant was all things being equal…” After all, 4:4 doesn’t have any chronological limit. So we could also have C3:
- Everything created by God is good.
- God created pork.
- Eating pork should not be forbidden in the Mosaic covenant.
Paul would likely say that he was taking it for granted that we would have an “all things being equal” condition to his claim that doesn’t lead to such absurdities.
Okay, maybe I’ll come back to this later.
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The admirable depth of your argument rather tends to hide the fact that I was not making an absolute that God’s rule by providence is opposed to God’s changing things. Rather, the whole question revolves around one very major, and specific, set of changes that God is claimed to have made after the Fall.
That is, of course, that a good creation that, supposedly, was orientated around deathlessness (or, I suppose, around deathlessness in the animal kingdom, plants being food) became suddenly and dramatically orientated around death, predation, parasitism, infectious disease, natural disasters and so on after Adam sinned.
This in itself somewhat clashes with the explanation of the “traditional view” sometimes put forward, that the corruption of nature was not God’s doing, but Satan’s - or perhaps even an inevitable (ie “natural”) consequence of Adam’s disobedience.
Either way, the crux is whether there is actually good evidence either in Scripture of in the physical world that such changes ever occurred, especially within the short time frame of a young earth.
We have to appreciate that what it entails is not only a complete re-ordering of the animal kingdom (though the curse on the ground only affects the vegetable kingdom, in fact), but a complete re-ordering of the cosmic order (maximal definition) so that asteroids and volcanoes become lethal, and so on.
In other words, it is nothing short of a second act of creation under a completely different natural economy.
On the other hand, if the basic nature of creation was unchanged, as I submit, then God’s providential government of its affairs through astronomical events, weather, redistribution of species and so on, as described in the Pentateuchal blessings and curses, was unchanged except in respect of its application to mankind.
Unless one keeps the original contention in mind, the discussion lapses into generalities.
On 1 Tim 4, Paul speaks at least in the prior context of the abrogation for Gentiles of the food laws, though someone might say that some other, Gentile, food fad was occurring.
I would argue that the the whole discussion initiated by Peter’s vision has to do with the sanctification of conscience, not of foods rendered somehow evil by the fall. The food laws were distinctives imposed on Israel, but not on gentiles, primarily to emphasise their distinctiveness. Granted it’s possible that the concept of ritual uncleanness might hark back to Genesis ideas of tohu wabohu, creatrures crossing boundaries, but pork was not unclean because pigs are predators.
The whole argument on the “unclean food” controversy was that, since the Mosaic covenant had now become obsolete, the rule was that God’s whole natural creation was clean, as it came from its maker’s hands.
And so the phrase “received with thanksgiving, because it is sanctified by the word of God and by prayer” doesn’t refer to sin-corrupted things being rendered harmless, but to the removal of human scruples by the recognition that they are not corrupt, but good gifts of creation.
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