Did animals die before the Fall? If yes, can dinos be very, very old?
Animal Death could be Consequence of the Fall (Patristic support and scientific consideration)
Carnivores in Eden?
I am obviously speaking of the dogs and cats as belonging to the class carnivores, not as absolutely sure they were actually eating meat.
Church Fathers have differed on this one. St Augustine and Venerable Bede both held herbivores were actually getting fed to carnivores by sovereign decision of Adam.
As Benno Zuiddam very amicably pointed out to me, others before them disagreed. Defending either scenario - carnivores actually eating meat or not yet eating meat - is thus possible for a Christian.
Now, I will caution two things about this:
- if death occurred in beasts before Adam sinned, as per carnivores eating herbivores, it does not mean other beasts were dying as well or that there were any sick herbivores that needed mercy killing - and absolutely not that Darwinian evolution "guided by God" used deaths of less adapted forms to purify adapted ones, so that Adam would have come from less adapted hominids gradually evolving towards him by deaths of those less like him;
- if no death in beasts (at least what Hebrews would call nephesh creatures) occurred, this does not mean that the carnivores were automatically anatomically herbivores until drastic evolution changed them.
Let me elaborate on this point, and on another one also related to evolution as observed after the fall.
Hugh Ross is very right that God provides, and that this is stated in Psalm 103.
Therefore the direct driving force of selection is not chance death or struggle for survival, but the Providence of God.
The other point is this: an anatomical omnivore can be individually herbivore.
But a herbivore can loose its capacity to digest herbs. In a pure herbivore this leads to extinction, as celiacy would lead to starvation if man could digest nothing other than wheat. But in an omnivore this leads only to specialisation as a carnivore. And this would not be added information, it would merely be degenerative evolution.
Two nourishment related mechanisms may have been destroyed in man - perhaps at the fall or perhaps when God shortened human life span from 1000 to 120 years. We have an appendix, which may have been an appendix of a full caecum, as found in apes. But in us it is not. We have a sequence related to production of vitamin C within the body that is not functional - that lacks DNA "letters" to do that.
Now, dogs and cats could have lost caecum too, between fall and flood. Guineapigs have according to that appearance lost the vitamin C sequence functionality too (as have, I think apes).
One other point about evolution: for a mutation to spread, a small population is ideal, it does not have to get by many barriers before getting dominant or exclusive in them. After flood or even in breeds leading up to the arc this may explain quick evolution. In human varities enumerated by Linnaeus, europaeus, asiaticus, africanus, americanus, monstruosus, I only attribute monstruosus (extreme giants or dwarfs and possibly centaurs and fauns) to direct nephelim traits, while the four normal "races" would all have resulted in part by quick evolution in small groups. Actually it may be that American Natives are a mixture of West Europeans and Mongolian type Asiatics.
Whether it comes to skin colour in men or to exclusive carnivorousness in beasts, this is not at variance with Hugh Ross' mathematical model for evolution (which works well enough for bacteria, as he said) since the result to be explained is not advantageous mutations breaking through among ten thousand disadvantageous ones, but only the sometimes clearly degenerative mutations to actually break through - even by deteriorating a species.
Now, if Adam had not sinned, why would there have been carnivores around even though not eating meat in actual fact?
Well, as Christians know Satan hates us. He did creep into a snake to seduce, but he could theoretically have crept into something like a T Rex (unless these are genetically manipulated organisms, created by sinful tampering with genetics) or a bear and attacked Adam with direct physical violence. I think the snake was chosen because carnivores were part of a bodyguard for Adam. Let us say a big lizard, carnivorous like others, had attacked Adam under the influence of Satan. Let us say a Brontosaurus had killed it (thus expelling Satan from his tool as well) - there would have been a pile of unsavoury carcass around, and carnivores would already have been able to deal with it by scavenging on it. If a T Rex had killed a Brnto before getting killed there would be two carcasses. And even now, dog teeth are not just useful for chewing their meat food, but also for holding on to the limbs of malefactors, as guards know.
But without such an eventuality (and presumably there was none, since Satan chose the snaky approach, which he might not have done if there had been no carnivores around Adam), maybe they were symbiotic with ruminants. A sheep eats grass, it digests in one stomach, it pukes it up to chew again before digesting in the next stomach (which might be an argument why centaurs are less believable than fauns and dogheaded men even after Nephelim taint came into humanity) ... I am not sure lambs need feed on that, but if they do that would have been an occasion for a lion literally to lie down beside that lamb and get fed too, although an adult lion.
And after the fall, they still had the physical equipment to feed that way, if this theory goes anywhere, but after Adam's sin, peace was gone between lion and lamb, and the carnivorous capacity was used for simple feeding purposes - and the other feeding capacity may have been lost through degenerative evolution.
Bears are still able to eat berries and honey.
Hans-Georg Lundahl
BpI, Georges Pompidou
Vigil of St Bartholomew
23-VIII-2013
I wonder if the three sixes in the number of this post are a kind of warning? If so, I am forwarding the fact.
It might be because I used material about "homo americanus" from a video showing only stone age people in both Europe and America (but Ojibwa Indians have genetic markers in common with Western Europe, that was not mere speculation on part of those). Or it might be the prayers of some followers of Eugene Rose who in religion was Fr Seraphim Rose and who strongly disagreed with St Augustine and St Bede. Or again Orthodox opponents to him - I was neohimerite for some time. Or ...
Or I might have been culpable or badly influenced in not voicing my suspicion that T Rex might be a genetically modified ostrich rather than lizard. Some "dinosaurs" are of lizard type in hips and some are of bird type in hips. T Rex belongs to the bird type of hips dinosaurs.
Or culpable or badly influenced in not mentioning that Psalm 103 supports Geocentrism. Was probably so used in Galileo process.
