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2008
Feeding carnivores on the Ark, and refuting an accusation of ‘closet scientism’
15 November 2008
Composition of images by Amanda Greenslade (tiger). Bowl from StockXpert.
This week we feature an enquiry about feeding carnivores on the Ark, from LH of
Victoria, Australia, to which Andrew Lamb responds, and an accusation of ‘closet
scientism’ from a long-standing critic of CMI who apparently loves seeing his
name in print on our site, Richard Meiss of Indiana, USA, to which Jonathan Sarfati
responds.
Feeding carnivores on the Ark
How did Noah feed the carnivorous animals on the ark?
Thanks
L
Many carnivores, including lions and tigers, can readily manage on a vegetarian diet, and this may have happened
on the Ark. See Teeth and Tucker
for several modern cases of ‘herbivorous carnivores’.
Dogs are considered carnivores, but dogs in some countries actually survive on a primarily vegetarian diet. During many years of working in
Thailand, I observed that most pet dogs were fed on table scraps, which meant cooked rice was their
staple food, as this was the staple food of their owners. And in Indonesia many dogs are fed mainly on
vegetables—see note 5 here.
Consider another carnivore, the snake. There is a widespread misconception that snakes can only eat
live
food, but there are commercial breeders today whose snakes thrive on dry food pellets. So there is
no problem with Noah possibly doing
the same for carnivores on the Ark—a mixture of grains and legumes would provide all the
nutrition needed, including the building blocks
for animal protein.
Some ‘carnivores’ actually survive on a primarily vegetarian diet.
If it was unavoidably necessary for some of the Ark’s tenants to have meat in their diet, this could have
been readily accomplished using salted meat, reconstituted dried meat, or fresh meat from
fodder animals carried aboard for this purpose. Tortoises are a good example of
a fodder animal. Tortoises can survive up to a year and a half in captivity without
water or food. In olden days, the famous Galápagos tortoise nearly went extinct
due in part to its popularity as a fodder food. Thousands were taken aboard sailing ships to be
kept as a source of fresh
meat.
For a thorough study of this whole issue, see chapter 12, ‘Feeding challenges I:
Animals that eat fresh or live food’ of
Noah’s Ark: A Feasibility Study by John Woodmorappe. He deals exhaustively with the
issue of what was eaten during and immediately after the Flood by animals that are now carnivores.
A related issue to this is the question of when animal carnivory began. There are a number of clues
in the Bible hinting that carnivory may have been taking place before the Flood:
- In Genesis 6:12 the phrase ‘all
flesh’ is used. ‘And God looked upon the earth. And, behold, it was corrupted! For all
flesh had corrupted its way upon the earth.’ The Hebrew word translated as ‘all
flesh’ generally means both people and animals. If the animal kingdom had been corrupted,
carnivory might be an expected result. This phrase ‘all flesh’ occurs 10 times in the
account of Noah and the Flood (Genesis chapters 6 to 9). In many of these occurrences it is plain that
the phrase means animals and people inclusive.
- Genesis 6:13 says the world was full of
violence through them, where ‘them’ refers to ‘all flesh’ i.e. man and
animals. This verse seems to indicate that animals were being violent too.
- Another clue is in Genesis 6:7 where God expresses regret
not only for having made mankind but for having made the beasts too. Perhaps carnivory by animals
could have been a reason why God regretted having made them.
- Another hint of post-Fall, pre-Flood carnivory is in the Curse as recorded in Genesis 3:14–19. In verse 14 it says ‘you [the
serpent] are cursed more than all cattle, and more than every animal of the field.’ If the
cattle and animals of the field hadn’t been cursed, then it would be incorrect to say the serpent was
cursed more than them. The words ‘more than’ indicate that the animals were cursed too. If
the animals were cursed, then might not carnivory be one result?
The scientific evidence supports this view that carnivory began before the Flood. Many fossils give
indications of carnivory:
- Crushed bones have been found in a fossilized dinosaur coprolite (dropping)—see T. rex drops clue.
- Teeth marks have been found in dinosaur bones, in patterns suggestive of either carnivory or
scavenging.
- A fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex has even been found which has another T.
rex’s tooth imbedded in one of its ribs! See ‘Sue’ the T. rex: another
‘missionary lizard’.
Such physical evidences strongly suggest that by the time of the Flood many animals had descended
into carnivory.
We think it quite probable that not only some animals but some people too were eating meat before
the Flood. There is the case of Jabal, of the wicked line of Cain, keeping livestock. See the
discussion of his case under Did
domestication take place pre-Flood or post-Flood? Although God did not give permission to
eat meat until after the Flood (Genesis 9:3), the wickedness of man was
great (Genesis 6:5) and the world was full of
violence (Genesis 6:13); men were apparently
breaking the full gamut of God’s commands and prohibitions. There is no reason to think they
would have baulked at transgressing God’s stipulation that plants were to be man’s
food.
Returning again to the carnivores on the Ark, another point to consider is that it was probably far
easier in the pre-Flood world for animals to meet their nutritional requirements from plants alone.
Due to ongoing genetic deterioration, both the digestive efficiency of animals and the nutritional
value of plants are probably lower today than they were at the time of the Flood. So if carnivores
today can survive many months with no or little meat, how much more so their more robust
predecessors of Noah’s day.
Andrew Lamb
Refuting an accusation of ‘closet scientism’
Image wikipedia.org
CK-Chesterton
Dear CMI–
Your article about Chesterton prompts me to make
two comments. First of all, Chesterton’s arguments were made in the context
of our biological knowledge of eighty years ago. Much has changed then, even though
your article implies that there has been negligible scientific progress in the area.
The point was that Chesterton successfully took on the best arguments of his day.
After all, these were advanced just as dogmatically, and worse, many churchian leaders
urged Christians to accept evolution on the basis of such arguments. Yet even the
late Derek Ager, a staunch anti-creationist, admitted:
‘It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned
as a student, from Trueman’s Ostrea/Gryphaea to Carruthers’
Zaphrentis delanouei, have now been “debunked”. Similarly,
my own experience of more than twenty years looking for evolutionary lineages among
the Mesozoic Brachiopoda has proved them equally elusive.’1
Another point is that many of the fallacies that Chesterton refuted are still invoked
by evolutionists today, so clearly they haven’t learned from history.
Indeed, science has moved on greatly. At the time Chesterton wrote, cells were thought
to be blobs of protoplasm; there was no inkling of the hugely complex nano-motors
to produce ATP, wind DNA or the
scrunching and unscrunching machine necessary for transcription, or even
the notion of DNA as an encyclopædic information
storage/retrieval system.
Your criticism of ‘scientism’ is also interesting.
Do you understand what this means? It means the virtual worship of science as the final
and indeed only source of truth. As such, it is self-refuting, since the
proposition ‘science is the final arbiter of all truth claims’ itself
can’t be proved scientifically.
CMI, AiG, ICR, and your many fellow travelers, spend large amounts of time and money
trying to put a scientific ‘gloss’ on creationism—as witness the
RATE project, for example.
So do you have any specific objections to the data or interpretation thereof?
CMI is privileged that we
now have on staff one of the RATE scientists, Dr Russell
Humphreys, so we are well able to address questions.
This is obviously done to provide the public with a degree credibility for your
contentions that your religious approach cannot do.
Scientism is an example of the magisterial use of science, where it stands over
Scripture like a magistrate and judges it. … The ministerial use of science
occurs when science submits to Scripture.
How about, following the extremely fruitful approach of
the founders of modern science like Johannes Kepler
(1571–1630), famous for claiming that his discoveries were ‘thinking
God’s thoughts after him’.
This sounds like ‘closet scientism’ to me. It is at the very least a
tacit admission of the power of science and your willingness to borrow its luster.
All the above confuses the ministerial v magisterial approach
to science. Scientism is an example of the magisterial use of science,
where it stands over Scripture like a magistrate and judges it. Such ‘science’
is bound to be flawed, because science by its very nature is tentative,
and starts with axioms invented by fallible humans and not revealed by the infallible
God. Science should never be elevated to the same level as logic, because valid
logical deductions from true premises always lead to true conclusions, while scientific
theories come and go. This characteristic of science especially applies to
origin science (the study of one-off origins in the past), and some apply
this even to operational science (the science of repeatable observations in the
present2), although it’s
not our main point of debate.
The ministerial use of science occurs when science submits to Scripture.
This means that all things necessary for our faith and life are either expressly
set down in Scripture or may be deduced by good and necessary consequence from Scripture.
Many Scriptural passages show that Christians are not supposed to check in their
brains at the church door, but to use their God-given minds in subjection to God’s
Word.3
The following section from Refuting Compromise
should explain further why we like RATE, and why
it is diametrically opposed to scientism.
Ministerial and magisterial uses of science contrasted
The ministerial use elaborates on the clear teachings of the Bible, and
may help us decide on equally plausible alternatives consistent with the language.
Note that this approach to Scripture does not deny the authority of Scripture, but
recognizes that while Scripture is ‘true truth’ it is not exhaustive
truth. In contrast, the magisterial use overrules the clear teaching of
the Bible to come up with a meaning inconsistent with sound hermeneutics. Instead
of the Reformation principle of Sola Scriptura (Scripture alone), this
is Scriptura sub scientia (Scripture below science). The following examples
can aid our understanding of the differences between the magisterial and ministerial
use of science in the interpretation of the Bible:
- Scripture teaches that a year-long global flood (with
various stages) occurred about 1,600 years after creation. Creationist geologists,
such as CMI’s Dr Tas Walker, have worked on building a scientific model, based
on the types of rock formations predicted in every stage.4 A magisterial use of science is to claim that uniformitarian
science disproves a global Flood, so that Genesis must be reinterpreted to mean
a local Flood, or even dismissed as unhistorical.
- The whole tenor of Scripture is that the individual is a human being right from
the beginning of biological life; there is nothing to indicate that there is any
secondary event of ‘ensoulment’ after the beginning of biological life.
In particular, the Psalmist teaches that life begins at
conception (Psalm 51:5), i.e., he explicitly states that it was
‘me’ that existed from conception, not some blob of cells that later
became ‘me’. Science elaborates on this by showing that the union of
sperm and egg (fertilization or conception) is the scientifically irrefutable beginning
of the individual’s life, so can be equated with the Biblical term.
- The Bible teaches (ten times in Genesis 1) that living organisms reproduce after their kind,
and that man was created supernaturally from non-living
matter, not from a pre-existing living creature (Genesis 2:7). Since kinds are defined by reproduction,
creationists have used hybridization studies to elaborate on the boundaries of the
original created kind to elucidate the Biblical teaching. For example, the
wholphin, a hybrid of a killer whale and a dolphin, shows that they were descendants
of the same created kind, despite man’s classification of them into
different genera. In fact, since the wholphin is fertile, it means that its parents
were really members of the same ‘biological species’ by definition.
And since the Bible does not specify that the ‘kind’ must equal any
modern definition of ‘species’, science can help demonstrate that [Hugh]
Ross’s equation of these two terms is false.
A magisterial use of reason is that of theistic evolutionists who claim that all
living organisms, including man, have evolved from a simple cell. So if they regard
Genesis as remotely historical at all, it must be ‘reinterpreted’ to
be compatible with the idea that one kind has changed into another kind, quite contrary
to the plain language of the biblical text.
Jonathan Sarfati
Related articles
Further reading
Recommended Resources
References
- Ager, D.V., The nature of the fossil record, Proceedings
of the Geologists’ Association, 87(2):131–160,
1976. Return to text.
- Clark, G.H., The Philosophy of Science and Belief in God,
The Trinity Foundation, Jefferson, MD, USA, 2nd Ed, 1987. Return
to text.
- Sarfati, J.,
Loving God with all your mind: Logic and Creation, TJ (J. Creation)
12(2):142–151, 1998; <www.creation.com/logic>.
Return to text.
- Walker, T., Biblical Geological Model, <http://biblicalgeology.net>.
Return to text.
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