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Would the pre-Fall world have been overrun by animals?
Published: 18 January 2020 (GMT+10)
A common complaint launched by skeptics against a historical Genesis and a lack of animal death before the Fall is that, if there was no animal death before the Fall, the world quickly would’ve become overrun by animals if Adam and Eve had never sinned. But is this true? Would the pre-Fall world have been an ecological disaster just waiting to happen? Or is there good reason to think God could have controlled this as needed? Daniel S. from Australia writes:
Hi,
I’m at Bible college, and I have a lecturer who believes that animals died before the fall. He says the lack of human death before the fall was due to them eating from the Tree of Life, and was not something that would automatically happen.
He pointed out a problem with the lack of animal death before the fall, which I had not considered, and which I haven’t found addressed on the site after a brief search:
Rabbits breed so fast that if they didn’t die, the volume of rabbits would increase exponentially, and they would overpopulate the planet so much that there would eventually be nothing else.My lecturer acknowledged that God can do anything and he could deal with it “somehow”. After all, humans would eventually face the same problem, even with animal death. In the case of humans he said that we could come up with technological means to make more room, but animals don’t have this ability.
How could God deal with the sheer volume of animals with something other than death?
CMI’s Shaun Doyle responds:
Dear Daniel,
Thank you for your email.
Notice God’s blessing on the creatures in Genesis 1:
And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” (v. 22)
Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth. (v. 28)
God blesses the living creatures with the purpose of them “filling” their respective domains. Thus, if Adam and Eve never sinned and the creatures filled their domains, clearly they would have had no need to further multiply, but it also means they would have fulfilled that purpose God gave them to fulfil. If they fulfil that purpose God gave them, why think God would let them multiply beyond the fulfilment of that purpose? The onus is not on us to stop ‘filling’; God would’ve stopped it if that aspect of His purpose for us had been fulfilled.
Just as we imagine how various aspects of the deathless world of The New Earth will work (see also Will the New Heavens and Earth be physical?), why think we can see problems from our post-Fall perspective in how God’s purposes would’ve been fulfilled in a pre-Fall world? The aspect that your lecturer is missing is that God’s providential care in the pre-Fall world was more abundant then than anything we experience now. And if God can maintain the clothes and sandals of the Israelites through the wilderness (Deuteronomy 29:5), surely ecological control in a pre-Fall world is not a problem for God, especially when doing so would match the purposes God gave to His creatures.
For more information, please see How did bad things come about? and Was there really no death before the Fall?, as well as Was the Garden of Eden a ‘sanctuary’ from a hostile outside world?, Bodily functions and blue eyes in the pre-Fall world? and Did Adam and Eve have to eat before the Fall?, which address some related issues.
Kind regards,
Shaun Doyle
Creation Ministries International
Readers’ comments
But could God's plan for creating such a vast universe, also filled with other stars and planets, possibly indicate that mankind and and maybe even animal and plant kind were destined to fill the universe as well? I know it's conjecture, but maybe there was a deeper reason to creating such vastness. And I don't necessarily mean we had to build spaceships either, the passage of angels from heaven to earth and back again may indicate passageways or portals already created by God.
I also don't think that animals would necessarily have had to breed in such numbers as today (like rabbits) in a perfect world because their offspring would not die out in large numbers. The same would go for humans. Richer societies (with age pensions etc and good healthcare) tend to have less children, compared to poorer countries where children are needed to look after the old. And there was no "sweat of your brow" agriculture needed.
Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil [tree of death] and they died. Everything reproduces after its own kind so they produced 'dead offspring'. A human comes into existence at conception. If Eve were pregnant before eating from the tree that offspring would not be a 'dead offspring' and thus would not be subject to death unless he/she also ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If such a person were alive even though not yet born then the earth could not be subject to a curse, so it is only logical to conclude she was not pregnant before the fall.
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2 down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.
this passage indicated more than one tree, its says on 'each side' of the river it also indicates water of life this could mean we drink this water. In the garden of Eden there was only one tree. This to me shows God provided only one tree in the garden as he knew we would sin and there wasn't going to me time enough for us to multiply in the garden of Eden. On writing this I have come to the conclusion that animals didn't die in the Garden of Eden as God new We would sin and therefore the garden would not become over populated.
Thank you Shaun Doyle.
Now think of it: All the previous generations of people have had children; the last generation, by God's will, according to your "eschatology", has been prohibited having a single birth, despite having the same organs of reproduction as all the earlier born others. Some how or other, this last infertile group, every single member, would have to have no inclination to have children, or become grandparents, etc etc. What was natural to the previous generations, would become unnatural to anyone else in that last generation.
I would say your response is one of special pleading to save your theory. It makes zero sense.
In fact, my previous response may have conceded too much to you. As several commenters have since pointed out, reproduction rates for many animals drop naturally as they approach ecological capacity. Of course, reproduction continues in a post-Fall world because everything dies. But what would happen in a world where animals didn’t die? Why not think that reproduction rates would drop to zero? Humans need be no different, since we too are biological creatures. I provided some suggestions as to how God might change physiology to achieve this. But ecology suggests that even this may not be necessary.
As to people being disappointed about not having children like previous generations—so what? People’s desires are highly changeable depending on circumstance. There’s no reason to think they would suffer some sort of mental breakdown or existential crisis because they can’t have children. If disappointment is the biggest problem with my scenario, it’s not a crippling logical or logistical problem for it.
If we are talking about carnivory, Genesis 1:30 has clear answers. Whenever I bring it up, old earth creationists either say nothing or decide that we need to revisit the meaning of YOM once again to show how it could mean anything we want it to mean! But Genesis 1:30 says nothing of watery creatures, such as sharks, blue whales (are krills plants?), octopuses, tuna, eels. Water is a very interesting biome that God created, and right now I'm on the side that God created the ferocity in violence of the shark as we observe it.
For some reason He also decreed no such thing on land. I don't know why, and it doesn't matter if I did, and I will not try to explain it.
Furthermore Genesis does not mention senescence, and I don't see how this could be a core issue. This could be a solution to overpopulation: an eventual death of land creatures once they have lived out their purpose. The other one is of course an end to sexual reproduction, which makes a lot of sense as well, although I'm sure a pre-fall human society would have been able to address overpopulation very efficiently in either case.
I think the problem with that argument is of it being an argument from ignorance. Yes. We aren't told, what kind of a food if any would've kept rabbits alive eternally. But really, why should we be told that. Bible says a precious little about the tree of life as a sustainer of human life on the context of the original creation, so on what grounds should we expect it to tell us how animals woul've been protected from death. It's not been written for animals!
How ever we ARE told, that death is the last enemy, we ARE told, that animals and people were originally vegetarian and we have there the all important phrase "nephesh chayyad" (or something like that). So why not start from what bible does say?
Thank you CMI for upholding the truth of the bible!
And then, just before eternity "begins", that last sexually active animal or human would produce a child which had all the organs etc in place but couldn't produce. That child on reaching adulthood would be sourly disappointed or not?
Moreover, some aspects of male reproductive anatomy have non-reproductive/non-sexual functions. Are we to expect those to be decoupled from the purely sexual/reproductive aspects? They are a highly integrated system. Indeed, the same could be said of the appendix with respect to the large intestine, which thus gives us precedent for thinking that some aspects of anatomy don't have to be discarded just because they've fulfilled their function..
Furthermore, women don't lose their reproductive organs just because they go through menopause. Why couldn't God produce some equivalent condition in the event of Genesis 1:22,28 being fulfilled?
And this all assumes that sex would've stopped in such a situation, which we don't have to grant. (Bear in mind that a world where we never sinned would be different from the eternal state we will experience where there will be no marriage (cf. Luke 20:35), since we don't know what God would've eventually done with marriage if we had never sinned.) Thus, the pleasure aspect of the sexual organs may still have been operative.
There are several different reasonable ways we can look at this question, all of which are consistent with Scripture. But in all this, where's the logistical problem for God? There is none. So, while the scenarios you mention certainly sound strange from our vantage point, I don't think they raise any real logical or logistical problems for the pre-Fall world continuing.
On the Tree of Life, please see Interpreting the early chapters of Genesis and Why did God prevent Adam from eating from the Tree of Life after he had sinned?
1) A command to fill the earth means that the earth was NOT full at the start. It would take time to reach the critter maximum. Even if they bred like rabbits. (Pun intended.)
2) The maximum populations are not even a factor if Adam and Eve sinned within a relatively short time period. So this is only a problem if you want to believe in a very old earth.
3) Based on scripture, we cannot reasonably assume that Adam and Eve lived in the garden of Eden for hundreds (birth age of first child; pain in childbirth as punishment after the Fall) or thousands (the Flood) of years.
3) Observable biology shows that creatures regulate their populations based on food availabiliity, space (not a problem at the beginning), epigenetics, etc. Once again, not a problem if the Fall occurs relatively quickly.
Sounds to me like your professor desperately wants to be an old-earther or a thevo. What a shame in a "Christian" course.
AG
Given that God had directed Adam and Eve to populate the world and no children had been born before the fall, I think that we can safely deduce that it was a relatively short period of time, probably less than a year.
Further history recorded in the Bible shows that it does not take we humans long to go astray in any circumstance. So, I think, the most obvious answer is that there was not enough time between creation and the fall for any creatures to over-populate their particular niches.
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