Re: [asa] The Fall (humanity source of suffering)

I respond to one of Bethany's points, as follows:

>>> "Bethany Sollereder" <bsollereder@gmail.com> 6/18/2008 2:20 PM >>>

"I'd say that human beings clearly evolved, yet in some very deep sense,
are
also responsible for bringing the darkness into our world. "

How can they be responsible for something that happened long before they
existed? You can't say the process of evolution, which includes pain and
suffering for animals, was caused by humans. Nor can you say that because
an earthquake hit a human settlement and killed the inhabitants that they
were responsible for it. How and when were humans responsible? Or are
you
saying that these things (that have happened for billions of years) only
became 'dark' due to humans

***

Ted comments:

I've often talked about the historical importance of theodicy, in this
specific form--the question of animal death before the fall--in
conversations about origins and Genesis. One answer to Bethany's question
comes from Edward Hitchcock, a leading natural theologian and professional
geologist from the mid-19th century. He wrote about this repeatedly in his
"Elementary Geology," which was the first geology text by an American, and
the earlier editions are even more interesting than the one I will quote,
from 1863 (he died the following year). Hitchcock believed that the Bible
required a link between physical death and human sin, but he was equally
convinced that animal death preceded the fall by thousands or millions of
years. To resolve those two facts, as he saw them, he appealed within his
Calvinist theological tradition to what I think would be correctly called
the doctrine of supralapsarianism--that God foresaw the fall and already
planned for it, before the creation of humanity. Here is Hitchcock:

<Geology shows that the same mixed for system of suffering and enjoyment,
of liability to painful accident and inevitable death, has always prevailed
as they now do. The Bible, too, intimates that death and other evils
preceded man. Of what use was the threatening of death if no example of it
existed among animals? Again, plants were created with seeds in them, and
animals made male and female for the production of a succession of races,
and such a system implies a correspondent system of death. The human family
might have been specially preserved by the fruit of the tree of life,
perhaps, from the common lot, till they had sinned, when they too must die.
Again, the selection and fitting up of a spot eastward as the Garden of
Eden, as a place for man while holy, and his expulsion from it after he had
sinned, implies that the world generally was, as now, a world of evil and
suffering. It was made so from the beginning, because it would ultimately
become a world of sin, and sin and death are inseparable. If animal
existence is, on the whole, a blessing in such a world as the present, or if
animals may live hereafter, and receive some compensation for their
sufferings here, the time when they suffer, be it before or after man's
apostasy, makes no difference.>

Ted

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Received on Wed Jun 18 14:39:04 2008