[... several paragraphs deleted]
> Yet, on this matter there is a surprising degree of misunderstanding.
> It is useless to complain that nature is made according to such and
> such a pattern unless we can suggest some better way which it might
> have been made. Suppose, then, that animals never ate one another but
> always died naturally. Would their suffering be less than it is? It
> certainly would not. The wounded and the infirm would linger on
> indefinitely in joyless existence, only to die of starvation when
> physically incapable of finding their food. But suppose animals were
> immortal -what then? The answer comes that over-multiplication would
> soon bring universal death from starvation. Alternatively, if the
> were immortal but had no progeny, accidents, frost or drought night
> cause the species to die out.
The problems I see with your argument are:
1) Genesis is very specific about the fact that man was not originally
designed by God for death. Therefore, if man was to have escaped death,
then certainly there was no reason the same miraculous existence could not
have existed for all the animal kingdom as well. All the
over-multiplication problems and such you discuss would also have applied
to an immortal humankind.
In other words, it is no more difficult to believe in an immortal animal
kingdom than it is to believe in an immortal humankind.
2) Revelations hints strongly of a new heaven and new earth where animal
death no longer occurs -- or at the very least predation no longer occurs.
Why believe in a vegetarion lion (with all those sharp teeth and claws)
existing in the future if it is so hard to believe as existing in the past?
The apparent reality of eons of death and violence remains difficult to
justify with the Genesis account IMHO.
---Michael McCullochmmccullo@usit.net