christ, death, and creation

I guess I've been being lazy lately and spending too much time blogging about personal stuff. That's easier because I can ramble on and type my own thoughts without doing any research or otherwise educating myself first. Not that I never think about theology and politics and such, it's just that it takes much more effort to blog about because there's prep work involved. But I guess I'd better focus a bit more on real ideas and not my own pet problems or everyone else's or whatever.

Anyway, the topic of the hour happens to be the doctrine of creation. I don't know a lot about any of the various biblical views, but I generally think of three major ones -- young earth, old earth, and formation theory (I think) -- that I've heard of and have at least a small level of familiarity with. I don't claim to subscribe wholeheartedly to any of them, mainly due to lack of knowledge on the subject. But I'd say I tend to be less on the young earth side, and if pressed I'd describe my beliefs as somewhere between old earth and formation theory. I seem to share more in common with what I know of those two and less in common with what I've seen of the usual suspects of young earth creationism.

Well, I've been going to a Thursday morning Bible study with co-workers for a few weeks now,* and we've been watching and discussing a DVD series about the scientific evidence behind creation and against other views. One of the co-leaders told me about it recently and invited me to start coming again since he and I are both interested in that whole debate and have discussed the issue before. (We've talked enough that I know he's a staunch young earth guy and he knows I tend to distance myself from that view. But unlike a lot of people, he's very smart and is well-versed enough to give solid arguments in support of his side.) The presenter in the videos, Mike Riddle, has recently joined Answers in Genesis and is basically an apologist for young-earth creationism. He has come out against ideas like evolution, old-earth creationism, and especially the "narrative view", which as far as I can tell is formation theory by another name. This of course makes the material all the more interesting to me.

In a recent presentation on creationism vs. evolution, he made a good point that I hadn't heard before. Consider how death entered the world. According to the Bible, it was through the Fall. Moses said so (Gen 3:19,22), as did Paul (Rom. 5:12, Rom. 6:23, 1 Cor. 15:21). The Bible does not speak of any death before this point, nor does it speak of any animosity of any beings (i.e., animals) toward one another. So, from this we conclude that death did not exist before the Fall.

But if death did not exist before the Fall, then how do we explain any death of creatures that occurred before Adam and Eve existed? Is that even possible? And if death was in the world before the Fall, then death was not simply the result of Adam's sin. In that case the whole "Christ paying the penalty for Adam's sin" argument falls apart, because death wasn't the result of Adam's action. This last bit is clearly heresy, but I'm just putting it in there to show where we must logically end up if we decide death existed before Adam.

So...ouch. That's a tough one to explain away. Any plausible old earth or formation theory explanation would hold that there was life and death before man came into being, and thus any such theory must fall apart in the face of this theological argument. Right?

Well, there is one big loophole that I can think of off the top of my head. If those verses refer to spiritual death instead of physical death (which I believe to be the case), then one could argue that spiritual death entered the world through Adam and was defeated by Christ. This would remove physical death from the argument. It also lends itself to a lot of other rabbit trails that would be fun to pursue but not with the limited amount of sleep and thinking ability I'm working with right now.

So that's that. An interesting point, though I'm not so sure it holds much water. I'm not at all doing it justice here, though, as I've talked about and learned more that I can't remember or can't think of how to include. Oh well, perhaps the discussion will continue on another day.

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* I had attended for a while maybe a year or so ago, then slowly faded off and stopped going altogether. Why? Because it meets at the ungodly hour of 6 am near where I work, forcing me to get up at the even more ungodly hour of 5 am to be able to stumble in. But the new topic piqued my interest enough for me to start getting up early enough to attend every week so far this year.