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

In the passage quoted, Hitchcock refers to humanity possibly being preserved
from natural death by eating the fruit of the tree of life (which appears
again in the center of the heavenly city in Revelation) -- a theme echoed
by some evangelicals today who accept the "conditional immortality" of Adam
(e.g., John Walton in his Genesis commentary). My reference to human
technological potential is connected to this idea. Perhaps the tree of life
represents, among other things, the co-creational potential of technology.

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 2:38 PM, Ted Davis <TDavis@messiah.edu> wrote:

> 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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-- 
David W. Opderbeck
Associate Professor of Law
Seton Hall University Law School
Gibbons Institute of Law, Science & Technology
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