Seven reasons why we should accept millions of years - Part 5 - no more death and dying

Doctor Mortenson takes us right back to the first objection: why is it such a big deal to insist on a new earth vs an old earth. It doesn’t detract from God’s glory one bit.

Indeed, I think that making him into a wand-waving magician detracts from all that he has ever been to those who have known him. It is completely out of character.

It also detracts from the journey to redemption, by reducing that to a sham that could have been avoided or circumvented by the same wand. It makes the cross pointless.

What Mortenson now argues is that belief in a world dating back millions of years, detracts from the biblical idea of death and God.

I am at a loss to get that, but Dr Mortenson is at pains to defend the point.

After the fall, man was cursed, as was the earth. Death became the new reality

However, arguing that death never existed before that is not confirmed by the bible. It says, or implies, that man would die spiritually by being separated from God through sin.

That played out as an expulsion from the garden. Something about the hothouse-biosphere of that garden did preserve life. The tree of knowledge did not deny that, expulsion did.

The tree of knowledge only instilled the knowledge that initiated self-awareness, the crux of all sin.

In expelling them, God cursed the soil so that it would be harder to work. Viruses and bacteria probably also mutated, so new ways to physically die went with the deal.

However, even that did not stop them living really long lives. So disease and weeds did not specifically cause death – go ask Methuselah.

Oxidation did that. They were exposed to a harsher biosphere that resulted in them ‘rusting’, decaying and corrupting.

Okay, that is the first observation. The next is as important.

No one in science ever argued for a large scale elimination of species through weeds or infection.

However, death was patently possible, even for Adam and Eve. The biosphere of the garden may have precluded decay and oxidation, but mechanical death was not excluded.

If Adam had felt sufficiently immune to death to leap off a cliff, I suspect he would have died, not because of a curse, but because the human body was not meant to fly.

Thus, the ice-age argument, of which at least 5 are claimed by science, would account for major decimations of earth species. That may have been essential to creation.

In the early stages only vegetation occurred, so no animal life was present. That would have brought rampant growth, because of substantial greenhouse conditions.

But God had to first grow the plant-life to provide living creatures with what they needed to survive – the critical elements of oxygen, proteins and starches, and water.

Only on day 3 was all the essence of life created, but even then the engine that drives photosynthesis, only happened on day 4.

There is no doubt that sunlight was already evident on day 3, else plant life was nonviable.

However, it was either just a murky, misty experience of day and night, or as  some have argued a frozen hydrogen layer in the atmosphere facilitated perpetual light.

Well, whatever, the appearance of animals only happened in days 4 and 5. By then the earth’s biosphere was stable enough to support life.

But what then? The environment was still harsh and hostile, but it probably also needed some heavy lifting, some serious landscaping.

I am speculating here, but large herbivores and the counter-balancing carnivorous lizards, might have been the only life-forms that could survive that era.

They may well have helped in the distribution of seeds and the tilling of the earth.

Any ice-age, a natural enough phenomenon in a formative biosphere, may have removed redundant species to allow more refined species to take over. 

A thin atmosphere (prior to proliferation of organic life) and an undeveloped magnetosphere, are just two factors that could have triggered extinction events. 

However, as was always God's way, setbacks are normally progressive, so extinctions would have culminated in more familiar land, sea and flying creatures. 

However, even man may have been "formed" as Genesis 2:7 says, through a longer process, involving the elimination of prototypes who left their marks in primordial caves. 

That is controversial and detracts from the main argument, so I won’t go there.

Suffice to say, that the argument that death started with the fall, is not supported by scripture, per se. It is a spurious argument that does not support its intended thesis.

The fact is that death and decay was always around, had to be. Plants don’t die and revive each year because of sin, but to provide the earth with nitrogen rich humus.

I do accept that the garden itself was so flourishing that if allowed to stay there, life would have multiplied exponentially. How that would have played out I don’t know.

I also accept, according to Genesis 1:29-30, that all life at that stage was vegetarian, so in that sense the blessing of life held until the fall.

Animals were not threatening to men and men did not eat animals, but probably because they didn’t have to compete for food. Thus they may have had different impulses and instincts.

Again, I can only infer from scripture, notwithstanding evidence in science that carnivores did exist.

Well-fed animals are still relatively mild-mannered, so that is at least possible.

However, the argument that death never happened or that death detracts from an old earth, is very speculative and not supported by the bible.

(c) Peter Missing @ Bethelstone.com