Tool Alpha
Genesis, the Beginning
What the first eleven chapters say, what they do not say, and where the real arguments are.
Death before the fall
Did anything die before Genesis 3? The two poles of this tool answer the same way. The fight is with a third position.
Romans 5:12, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: if the world is old, animals died long before Adam. Does the Bible forbid that? Since the storm, the whole town has been without power. Does the whole town include the streetlights, the farms outside the limits, the hospital on its generator? A sentence about all can mean every person or every thing, and readers of Romans 5:12 split on how far it reaches.
For many readers this is the argument that decides whether an old earth is compatible with Scripture. It rests on what Romans 5:12 and Romans 8:20-21 claim about whose death came through sin.
Romans 5:12 says death spread to all people because all sinned. Genesis 1:29-30 gives plants as food. Romans 8:20-21 speaks of creation subjected to futility and bondage to decay.
Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:
Lennox notes what Paul says and what he does not: death spread to all human beings, not all living things. Humans are moral beings and their death is the wages of sin; nobody accuses a lion of sinning. Plant death is built into the God-given diet. Predators, venom, camouflage and the woodpecker's neck would otherwise have to be products of Adam's sin. He reads Romans 8 as speaking of decay and corruption, distinct from the death that is part of the cycle of nature, and leaves animal pain as an open question he points toward a dark power that corrupted part of creation.
Walton reaches the same place by a slightly different route. Romans 5:12 is about how death came to people. Day three describes plant life that involves death at every stage; a caterpillar eats a leaf, a bird eats the caterpillar; Adam had skin, and the outer layer of skin is dead cells. People were created mortal and kept alive by the tree of life. When access was cut off, they were left to their natural mortality, and so death came through sin.
The young-earth position holds that there was no death before the fall and that the original creation was "very good" in a sense that excludes it. Walton replies that "very good," tov meod, is also said of the Promised Land in Numbers 14:7, a land full of enemies and predators. C. S. Lewis, quoted by Lennox, suggested a fallen angelic power may have corrupted the animal creation before man.
Lennox and Walton both have to explain why a good creation contains predation and pain, and Lennox says plainly he has not solved animal suffering. The no-death position has to explain where predators came from and how Romans 5:12 grew to cover all life.
Not a denial that human death came through sin. Both poles affirm it. They limit the verse to what it names.
- Lennox, Seven Days that Divide the World (2021), ch. 4, with C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, ch. 9, as quoted there
- Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One (2009), proposition 10
- Walton, The Lost World of Adam and Eve (2015), propositions 5 and 8
