Death and Suffering Questions and Answers

How can an all-powerful, loving God allow suffering and death?

• Why would a loving God allow suffering?
• How did bad things come about? (From The Creation Answers Book)
• 9/11 and the real ‘enemy’
• Why is there death and suffering? (available in Italian)
• The problem of evil (response to critic explaining the logic involved)
• CMI answers philosophy/religion professor on biblical exegesis and the problem of evil
• When did evil begin?
• The Fall: a cosmic catastrophe: Hugh Ross’s blunders on plant death in the Bible (semi-technical)
• Cosmic and universal death from Adam–s fall: an exegesis of Romans 8:19–23a (technical)
• Romans 5:12–21: Paul’s view of literal Adam
• The carnivorous nature and suffering of animals (semi-technical, PDF)
• Answering angry anti-Christianity (response to critic)
• Crossing the thin red line: There are answers
• The Fall into Sin
• ‘Lost’ without Genesis: coping with the ‘death wave’
• The awesomeness of death
• Two histories of death
• Waves of sadness: Tsunami terror raises age-old questions (available in Spanish)
• The stingray of death: The tragic end of the life of ‘Crocodile Hunter’ Steve Irwin
• Why us?
• Creation and the Curse (Technical — ICR site)
• Did Eve lie before the Fall?
• Slipshod logic in Creation for Kids?
• New Zealand—part of a suffering world
• Pain in childbirth: result of the Fall or fear?
• Australia’s worst-ever bushfire disaster

How does biblical Christianity explain the origin of poisons and pathogenic bacteria and viruses?

• Did God make pathogenic viruses? (Technical — Journal of Creation article published on the True Origins website)
• Genome decay in the Mycoplasmas (Semi-technical — ICR Impact 340, Pathogenicity may be an indirect consequence of loss of genetic information, e.g. for amino acid synthesis)
• The terror of anthrax in a degrading creation (Semi-technical — ICR Impact 345, The deadly anthrax germ may have arisen after the Fall when a benign bacterium acquired a degraded plasmid)
• Understanding Poisons from a Creationist Perspective (Technical)
• Adam and the immune system
• Swine flu—Is it evidence of evolution?

If the original creation was ‘very good,’ why do many living things have features for attacking others?

• Helpful animals
• How did bad things come about? (From The Creation Answers Book)
• Skeptics challenge: a ‘God of love’ created a killer jellyfish?
• The carnivorous nature and suffering of animals

Is it possible for animals that are carnivorous in our world today to have survived in a pre-sin world without eating meat?

• The ‘bird of prey’ that’s not
• The Dracula connection to a young Earth
• Catching a kinkajou
• Echoes of Eden
• The lion that wouldn’t eat meat
• Lea, the spaghetti lioness
• Pollen-Eating Spiders
• Piranha
• Wouldn’t Adam have stepped on an ant before the Fall? (on ICR website)
• Vampire birds
• Bird-killing sheep
• Tigers and pigs … together?,
• Hen-hunting horse
• Wild and woolly
• Kea: clever, clownish and carnivorous
• Vampire finches of the Galápagos
• Vegan dog
• Match the bat’s teeth
• The cat who refuses to eat meat

How did the Curse affect the ground?

• Farming frustrations
• Why are there prickles, anyway?

Who was Satan or the Devil?

• Who was the serpent?
• What about the snake in the Garden of Eden?
• Snakes do east dust!
• Should Isaiah 14:12 be translated ‘Lucifer’?
• The Fall, Curse and Satan
• Cosmic and universal death from Adam’s fall: an exegesis of Romans 8:19–23a