Was there animal death before the fall? Does the wasp laying eggs in a caterpillar, thus leading to the caterpillar’s death, prove animal death before the fall?
Peter in his sermon gave us such encouraging words: “Repent therefore and return that your sins may be wiped away, in order that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord; and that He may send Jesus, the Christ appointed for you, whom heaven must receive until the period of restoration of all things about which God spoke by the mouth of His holy prophets from ancient time…” Acts 3: 19-21.
The Greek word restoration implies “a return … to a former, original, normal, or unimpaired condition, or the restitution of something taken away or lost” Thayer’s Greek Dictionary defines this Greek word this way: a return to the way things were before the fall of Adam and Eve.
What was the condition of things before the fall? Only the Bible is our true source of knowledge about how things were before the fall. What does the Bible say? We are told that when God finished creation, behold it was very good. We are told that Adam and Eve were without sin, for they were naked and not ashamed. There was no sin to make them ashamed. There was to be no death for man, for death was definitely the result of sin as we read in Genesis 2: in the day you eat thereof you will surely die, and Genesis 3: Because you have eaten , dust you are and to dust you shall return.
So without doubt there was no human death before the fall. But was there animal death? Some use Romans 5:12 to prove there was no animal death, but I agree with Terry Mortenson, on this, that Romans 5, though absolutely clear in teaching that human sin brought human death, does not explicitly say human sin brought animal death also. So does that mean that the Scriptures give no answer as to whether animals were eating each other in an evolutionary dog it dog survival of the fittest kind of world? Absolutely not. The Bible gives many clear answers. We will look at three of these.
The first is Acts 3: 21, in the words “the restoration of all things about which God spoke by the mouth of the holy prophets from ancient time.” What holy prophets did speak about this restoration?
In his commentary on Acts 2:21, Lenski, the German Lutheran commentator of 1864- 1936 points to two places from “the holy prophets” who speak of this restoration:
Isa 11: 6-9 And the wolf will dwell with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the kid, and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little boy will lead them. Also the cow and the bear will graze; their young will lie down together; and the lion will eat straw like the ox. And the nursing child will play by the hole of the cobra; and the weaned child will put his hand on the viper’s den. They will not hurt or destroy in all My holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.”
Isaiah 35: 1-10 … Then the eyes of the blind will be opened, and the ears of the deaf will be unstopped. Then the lame will leap like a deer, and the tongue of the dumb will shout for joy…. No lion will be there, nor will any vicious beast go up on it. These will not be found there. But the redeemed will walk there…
Both of these Isaiah passages speak of animals not eating each other in the future, so that means that when things are restored, the future will restore the way they were in the past. Some believe the wolves and lions in these verses are only used as symbols for tyrants and murderers. Surely that will be the case in the new world: they will cease to be. But understanding these verses to also be about animals would fit with the following:
A second passage about animal death is Genesis 1:30 where God says that the food of animals is the green plant, thus they are not given each other to eat.
“to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food, and it was so.”
A third passage which Terry Mortenson says is the most powerful answer is Romans 8: 20-23 “For the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God . For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers in the pain of childbirth together until now.” Corruption of course includes death. Why is this such a clear answer that there was no animal death before the fall?
The answer: because the corruption, that is the death, that is, the groaning and suffering in pain in verses 20-22 is not about man’s suffering and death, but animal suffering and death. Let me say that again, the suffering and pain in verses 20-22 is not about man’s suffering and death, but the animals suffering and death. We can say that absolutely, because of verse 23: And not only this, but also we ourselves… groan. So only starting in verse 23 is he speaking of the part of creation we call human. The three verses before verse 23 are speaking about the non human part of creation, from animals to all other parts. This being the case we can read verses 20-22 by using the words “animals, plants and earth” where the word “creation” is found.
According to the theistic evolutionist all this corruption and suffering and death occurred before sin as well as after sin. But v 20, says no, it came after the fall. “It was subjected to futility, not of its own will, but because of Him who subjected it.” And when did that subjection happen? In the garden after the fall when God cursed not only man but also man’s domain. And what is man’s domain: all that man was to have dominion over: the ground ( it was cursed with a flood), its plants, (it started to have thorns and thistles), and the animals .
In these three verses I think we have the strongest Biblical answer to why theistic evolution is totally contrary to Scripture.
If the theistic evolution picture is true, then the restoration Peter speaks about in Acts 3:21 will be horrible. And what is their picture: it’s dog eat dog, survival of the fittest, animals preying on each other, mass extinctions (some say 60%), floods and volcanoes, and mass destructions.
Theistic evolutionists claim they are being objective scientists looking at a clear fossil record. But the fossil record is not a record of “behold it is very good.” For this record shows animals eating each other, dinosaurs having cancer, some animals suffering diseases like arthritis. There are even huge fossil graveyards such as in Agate Springs where 9000 animals like rhinos, horses, camels are mixed in chaos.
Without floods and catastrophes we would have few if any fossils. For fossils are formed by sudden floods carrying sediment burying animals. Because the burial was so sudden, details like the soft parts of jelly fish are clear. No fossils are formed when animals die on the land or in the sea under normal conditions. That’s because animals lying on the land are eaten by other animals; fish dying in the sea are eaten by other fish. Thus the fossil record is one of horrible sudden death by floods or volcanoes.
Theistic evolutionists are thus forced to picture God as destructive, evil, vicious, irrational, and leaving chaos and misery in his path as he guides the evolutionary process.
Too often the question of animal death before the fall is discussed without reference to the catastrophic nature of the fossil record, this evidence of God’s cursing what he has made. Instead we abstract the question from this historical geological record by just referencing a wasp that lays its eggs in a caterpillar, which in turn kills the caterpillar, as though that proves there was animal death before the fall. But if we believe that God did not curse the domain of Adam before the fall, then we would have to assert that God gave the wasp a different way of producing young before the fall. Just as God changed the DNA of Adam and Eve so that there would be genetic entropy after the fall leading to death, so he could have changed the way of the wasp before and after.
Theistic evolutionists all to a man deny that Noah’s flood covered the whole earth, so they have to conclude that most of the millions of floods that killed animals occurred before sin. That’s a problem only for the theistic evolutionists who believe in a real historical fall. Sadly more and more of them today deny a real Adam and Eve and thus deny the fall, and thus believe God was cursing his creation from the beginning.
Theistic evolutionists have told me that if we don’t accept their science, the world will not want to believe in Christ, because their science is so sure. They say that Christians who teach a young earth will be viewed as opposers of truth, despisers of science, not interested in God’s second book, and thus no one will listen to their Gospel witness or want to hear about their God.
In fact the opposite is true. Listen to the testimony of a philosopher writing in the British journal, Nature, the leading science journal in Great Britain. This atheist philosopher is saying that if theistic evolution is true, he hates the character of such a God.
“The problem that biological evolution poses for natural theologians” (meaning theistic evolutionists) “is the sort of God that a Darwinian version of evolution implies. The evolutionary process is rife with happenstance, contingency, incredible waste, death, pain, and horror. Whatever the God implied by the evolutionary theory and the data of natural history may be like, he is not the Protestant God… He is also not a loving God who cares about his productions. He is not even the awful God portrayed in the book of Job. The God of the Galapagos” (the Galapagos Islands where Darwin birthed his theory) “is careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical. He is certainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray.”
This God of theistic evolution is not the God of the good news declared by Peter in his sermon in Acts 3:21. Peter’s understanding, and Isaiah’s understanding of this restoration, is just one more of dozens of reasons why I can’t understand how any Christian would want to compromise with evolution and call it theistic evolution. Why would a person baptize a world of chaos and death before the fall and call that good? It’s beyond me.
I certainly hope God isn’t going to restore such an ugly world when Christ returns.
Musings of Gary From the Heart