I have a simple question for the Chrsitians on this message board.
God originally created the world as being perfect. Pain and suffering did not exist. Then, the sin of Adam and Eve brought death and suffering into the world for all creation.
I don’t understand the next part.
Long before man even existed, animals, especially dinosaurs, existed and were killing each other. This would be animal suffering. This is before the fall of man. How could this take place? This is not a perfect and harmonious world.
How do Christians reconcile their doctrine of original sin with the suffering of animals that was occuring before the fall of man?
There is a school of thought among Christian scholars that Adam & Eve were attempt #2 at creation. They say that the first 2 verses of Genesis suggest that there was a first creation that got messed up, so God did it again.
The thinking is that when satan was cast out of heaven and down to the earth (earth became satan’s prison, if you will) he took the first creation and messed it up and made a bunch of weird stuff (dinosaurs, for one). So basically, the dinosaurs were killing each other in Earth part I, and their skeletons were already laying around when Earth part II started.
There is also another school of thought that says that the dinosaurs DID coexist with Adam and Eve but didn’t get dangerous till after the fall. It also could be that there were no dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden but they were all over the rest of the world doing dinosaur things. Many think that the Garden was in the modern day Mesopotamia/Iran/Iraq area, I wonder if any dinosaur bones have been discovered there.
I’m a creationist but I don’t have an opinion on this particular issue because I don’t know enough of the facts to form a solid one. I’m just telling you what other people think.
I once asked this question. Now keep in mind that I asked a Baptist…
I was told that dinosaurs never really lived. That nothing before ‘man’ really lived, and that ‘God’ created the Earth ‘aged.’ That is, he put fossils, bones, etc, in the ground to give us something to do. Just like he put all the other stars, planets, etc, in the universe so we would have something to look at and places to send space vehicles to.
I’m not joking. This is the explanation that a Pastor once gave me. I began to take a real dim view of religion after that.
The Fruit was of the Tree of Knowledge; it is not pain itself which is our lot, it is the awareness of suffering.
Regardless of whether beasts feel pain, they do not have the foresight to anticipate pain, nor the memory to recall painless times in their lives. Suffering is not the mere experiencing of pain, it is the knowledge that there no need for that pain.
Also, if you are a Biblical literalist, there were no animals living “long before man even existed.” Land-dwelling creatures were only introduced the day before Man, and water-dwelling creatures the day before that.
There’s yet another school of thought, which holds that Genesis is merely allegorical. This is the school of thought of quite a few Christians, and it is the official view of the Catholic Church, which has more than a billion adherents and has given the theory of evolution a thumbs up.
I went to a Christian school. Our “science” book had a drawing which I shall never forget. It showed a scene of humans farming in a field, with brontosauri peaceably munching on the trees in the background. It always made me snicker to imagine that the next scene would be a tyrannosaurus bursting from the treeline and gobbling up the people.
We were taught that dinosaurs co-existed with man, and the buried fossils are those animals which were killed in Noah’s Flood (The Flood also instantly carved out the Grand Cayon, by the way). The sediment hardened into rock immediately. We were taught that the Evil, Godless Evolutionists made up the elaborate lie about dating different layers of soil, and that carbon dating is worthless. Fossilization, they said, is not rare, nor does it take a long time. Sedimentary tone can be formed almost overnight.
Noah did take two of every dinosaur onto the Ark, they said, and our text-book even had a wonderful drawing of a stegosaurus in a stall next to a camel. I never got a straight answer about how Noah managed to house the big ten-ton beasts, though feeding, they told me was easy: God made all of the animals temporary vegetarians, and Noah had the foresight to bring a huge load of grain. Because “it was God’s will,” the dinosaurs went extinct shortly after the flood. (Maybe it was because the tyrannasauri kept eating the farmers.)
For “evidence” of co-exsistion, they cited the supposed footprints of man beside those of a dinosaur, something which has been long debunked) and descriptions of fantastic beasts found in the Scriptures.
God did “age” the earth in some respects: He created the trees fully grown, and mountain ranges formed. He set in motion erosion and continental drift, but all of the effects of them we see are accumulated only from the accepted six thousand year time of existance. (Any deep weathering was caused by the Flood.)However, he did not create the rocks to appear millions of years old. It’s all a lie made up by the Evil, Godless evolutionists.
As for animal suffering, apparently, God may see every sparrow fall from the tree, but doesn’t mind the bird’s sufferings when it is eaten by a predator. We were taught that animals suffered pain even before the Fall-- it was only Adam and Eve, God’s special creations, which were spared it. God then gave his special creations dominion over all of the other creatures, thus it is okay to do to them pretty much whatever we please. (Torturing them for fun, however, is not okay. Deliberate cruelty in any situation is wrong.) However, any pain the animal is caused to feel while we kill it for food, or use it in experiments is completely acceptable. They are only here for our use, after all.
Should the animal we like to hunt go extinct, it is not necessarily our doing. If God wanted the creatures to remain, he would have them reproduce faster than we could hunt them. If poachers kill the very last tiger, it’s because God wants them to go extinct.
*** I feel constrained to note that although this is what I was taught, I don’t believe a word of it. I report only what the Christians who ran my school believed.
This can’t be teached at a school, no?
I mean: a school, like “school” where children or a bit alder persons are getting education like an education you get in a school?
What type of “Christian” … “school” do you refer to here?
Well, there are in my lat father’s country no such madrassas. You are a bit far from home with your utterly generalizing = ignorance showing remark.
I have a question: Is it a habit of yours to answer questions addressed to an other member? Don’t you trust other members to be capable of formulating their own?
In my opinion you are just seeking a “confrontation”.
Well, you can try that as much as you want but you stand alone. It thus shall be a very one sided experience.
Have you something else to contribute to the discussion? Something that might be interesting for the other members, including myself?
The education I recieved was deplorable. Were I not a voracious reader, I’d be dumber than a sack of hair. I’d be extremely well educated in religion, but little else.
This school actually belonged to a nation-wide chain, which I’ll call “XYZ” which uses the same cirriculum in all of its schools. All that is needed to start one is a building, and a week-long training session which involves listening to an audio tape and then completing a simple test. Teachers do not need to have any other qualifications. (In fact, I myself have a certificate to teach in any “XYZ” school. I used to teach kindergarten when I was sixteen at my school.)
The chain claims to be non-denominational, but is strongly flavored with Southern Baptist.
There are actually a lot of “XYZ” schools. We had a basketball league which included the roughly forty schools in my state.
Actually Aldebaran, even if milroyj did answer a question addressed to another member there is nothing to prevent Lissa from posting her own answer if she should wander back here tonight or tomorrow.
I cannot speak for Lissa specifically, but such schools do exist in the US. I do not have any links which have a breakdown of their syllabus handy, but if you Google up “Berean Christian Academy” you will find may such schools.
We can’t really have an understanding of what the world was like before the fall of man. For all we know, Adam might have experienced injuries, but never the pain of those injuries, and the same with the animals. Others might say that they were all one big happy family that ate a bunch of plants and fruit and sang songs around the campfire at night.
I have to agree with Dr. Fidelius in that we are talking about awareness of injury or suffering as opposed to the infliction of the two.
“The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse. Yes, the right to kill a deer or a cow is the only thing all of mankind can agree upon, even during the bloodiest of wars.”