Prelapsarian predation, part 1: can animal death be “very good?”

The notion of animal death before the fall is anathema to most conservative Christians. This tends to have the effect of producing rather unusual—even fantastic—theories about the prelapsarian state.

I don’t have any special problem with unusual or even fantastical theories, because our own credulity is not a good measure of truth; but I am concerned with whether these views are actually read out of scripture, or whether they are read into it on behalf of other intuitions or beliefs. Constructing weird and wonderful theological models is only worth doing if they are actually true—and if they are false, that’s not only a problem in terms of our obligation to biblical fidelity, but also in terms of apologetics. There’s no sense at all in wasting energy defending nonsense; and there’s a lot of damage to be done by Christians who promote nonsense.

My cards on the table

For some years I was fairly convinced of the “standard” YEC narrative of a Peaceful Prelapsarian Paradise, which you will not be able to say five times fast. I am now very skeptical of that narrative, but not because I have become persuaded of evolution or an old earth. I remain a young earth creationist. My reasons for doubting the standard YEC narrative are due to what can be deduced from scripture, and the deliverances of reason—not due to any evolutionary concerns.

In this series, I am going to explain why I think the “3P” view of a Peaceful Pre­lapsarian Paradise is mistaken, and why we should believe there was animal death and predation before the fall.

Not “perfect”

I’m going to start assessing the evidence by considering what the phrase “very good” in Genesis implies. But before I can do this, I must head off a ubiquitous error: the immoderate exaggeration of what Genesis actually claims. I have often been told that death has no place in a “perfect creation,” or that God made the world “as good as it could be.”

This is a problem of eisegesis: of reading into the text what we assume must be there. If we instead exegete the text, we discover that God only says the creation is “good” and “very good” (Hb. tov and tov m’od; Gen 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31).

Had he intended to say “perfect,” he would have used the Hebrew word that means perfect (tamim). Yet he did not. Had he wanted to say it was, in the traditional parlance, “exceeding good,” he would have used the phrase the spies use of the promised land in Numbers 14:7, “very very good” (tov m’od m’od).

Yet he says only tov, “good,” with respect to individual creative acts, and tov m’od, “very good,” with respect to their culmination, the completed creation. Clearly God was pleased with the creation—yet he did not go so far as to say it was “very very good,” let alone “perfect.”

This might seem like a minor point, since 3P advocates can argue just as easily that animal death is not “very good,” but I am not inclined to agree. People who do not handle God’s words carefully, and are quick to go beyond them—without even noticing—are not reliable guides to what God’s words mean.

“Very good”

Still, the 3P appeal remains to be dealt with: surely it is not “very good” for God to create a world in which animals suffer and die.

Intuitively, this appeal has some force; but notice that it is intuitive. We must notice this, because our intuitive responses to God’s ways are very often wrong. As I said at the beginning, our own credulity is not a good measure of truth. Consider, for instance, the enormously common but utterly unbiblical intuition that predestination makes humans robots and God a monster. ❋ See for instance Dominic Bnonn Tennant, “Thorny problems with Molinism #2: the demonstrable falsehood of its governing intuition” (January 2015). https://www.bnonn.com/thorny-problems-with-molinism-2. Indeed, this is the same kind of intuition; we might lay them out in the same way:

1. It would not be good for God to make a world where he intended some people to perish.
2. It would not be good for God to make a world where he intended some animals to perish.

These are not formally equivalent, because one is looking at the world after the fall and one prior; one is concerned with God’s secret will and one with his revealed. But they are parallel. Both are based on the same kind of intuition—a “felt assumption” about what God would be morally wrong to do; or what God’s moral character is like. And since one of these intuitions is knowably false, we should be very cautious about asserting the other without biblical proof.

Obviously 3P advocates think they have this proof in scripture itself—God’s sixfold evaluation during creation that the things he makes are “good,” culminating in his sabbath judgment:

And God saw all that he had made, and lo—very good. Genesis 1:31

But they are making considerable assumptions about what “good” means here—assumptions not developed from careful examination of the text, but rather by intuitive association with his own contemporary feelings toward animals.

Hopefully it goes without saying that I, too, believe the world God made was “very good”—yet I believe he made that world such that lions were much as they are today, and sharks, and eagles, and all dem other bitey critters. I believe it is very good for lions and sharks and eagles to be predators, and for antelope and seals and mousies to be prey. I believe this because the evidence of both scripture and creation is that this is how God originally made them, over which he pronounced his positive evaluation.

Needless to say, what I mean by “very good” is not quite the same as what 3P advocates do. The question we must ask then is: what does God mean by “good” and “very good” in Genesis 1?

Good in what sense?

God’s declarations of goodness are evaluations of his creative activities. And the continual, inexorable emphasis of those activities is his ordering of the world into a habitat in which man can live and serve him.

The creation week is thus framed teleologically—that is, in terms of what God creates the world for.

This teleological frame is implicit each time God declares something good. What he is declaring is that it fits the purpose for which he created it: he is pleased that it serves its end well. This is obvious when you look at the first example in Genesis—the declaration about light:

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God separated between the light and between the darkness. Genesis 1:3-4

The light is not morally good; that makes no sense. While it certainly does represent something moral, and has moral implications as a physical expression of an eternal, spiritual pattern originating in Christ (Jn 1:4–5), it is not itself moral. What God is assessing is simply physical photonic energy.

We can corroborate this by going to the other end of God’s creation judgments, and investigating his first assessment of something not good:

And Yahweh God said, “Not good, the adam to be by himself; I shall make for him an aid as unto his opposite.” Genesis 2:18

When God says that it is “not good” for the man to be alone, he cannot mean it is morally wrong; that would imply both a moral defect in Adam that had to be corrected by Eve, and that all single men are in sin. Rather, he must mean something like, it is antithetical to man’s teleology.

We can verify this by examining the solution God provides to correct the “badness:” he purposes to create for Adam an “aid as unto his opposite.” Traditionally we say a “help” who is “meet to him,” which is fine, but it misses something important in representing the two Hebrew words, ezer and k’negdo:

On ezer (“aid”), the meaning involves supplying what another cannot. By contrast, the word “help” suggests mere assistance with a task one can do for oneself. In the psalms, ezer is almost exclusively used of God coming to the aid of his people as an ally without whom they would certainly fail. The same concept is in view with the creation of Eve, except cast in a teleological rather than salvific frame. (Cf. Peter Leithart’s whimsical but extravagant rendering, “battle-mate.”) It is “not good” that the man should be by himself, because alone he is unable to fulfill the purpose of dominion, the service, for which God made him. This is vividly demonstrated to him in the presentation and subsequent naming of the various animals:

And Yahweh God formed from the ground every living thing of the field, and every flyer of the heavens, and brought in unto the adam to see what he would call to it; and what ever the adam called to it, the living lifebreath, that was its name. And the adam called names to every beast, and to the flyer of the heavens, and to every living thing of the field—and to the adam was not found an aid as unto his opposite. Genesis 2:19–20

Oxen certainly help Adam shape the ground. Donkeys and horses increase his mobility. Dogs assist him in controlling other animals. But these are things he can in principle do simply with enough men. There is still something critical missing that mere manpower cannot supply, whether augmented by animals or not. Eve is an ezer because she is the one who does what Adam can’t. Note that this is almost the opposite of what “helper” suggests in English.

It is not that Adam lacks anything in his individual manner of serving and imaging God. Rather, how he does so is distinct to his sex, and incomplete with respect to the purpose of humanity taken as a whole. Throughout the creation week, God has modeled dominion by forming and then filling the world. How is Adam to do this in God’s stead?

Only with an ezer who gives aid by supplying what he lacks.

This is emphasized by the use of the prepositional construct k’negdo. I have rendered this “as unto his opposite;” slightly more dynamically, “as unto his counterpart.” The term is a vexed one for translating into English because it originates in nagad, “to be apparent;” used prepositionally it refers to something right in front of you. This can usually be translated “opposite,” and thus I do for the sake of consistency. From here it comes to connote a thing that answers to or goes along with another. It is vital to understand “opposite” here in these terms. Adam and Eve are two “opposites” not in that they disagree with each other, but rather in that they agree, like a key that matches a lock, or a jigsaw piece that corresponds to another. More than that, the picture is of two facing parts that are functional and complete in themselves, yet also fit together in such a way as to become a greater whole.

Teleological goodness

What follows from this excursion? How does it illuminate the meaning of “good” in the creation account? Simply by confirming the teleological frame around it. “Good” most fundamentally means good at doing what God made it to do—good at achieving the end that God had in mind when he made it. Returning to the original example of light:

This is not to reduce God’s evaluations to mere teleology. Aesthetics and ethics are always implied in value judgments. But it is to correct modern readings which take the goodness of the creation in fundamentally moral terms, and then tacitly import the problem of suffering as an unstated premise, to produce the unargued assertion that animal death cannot have been part of the initial creation.

To summarize, then, when Genesis says that God saw that creation was good, we should read that not as something like:

…but rather more like:

Obviously you cannot reject prelapsarian predation, or general pre-fall animal death, by asserting that it cannot do its job well. What would that even mean? There are some ends which predation achieves exceptionally well. Indeed, it is very plausible, given our knowledge of the intricate balance of both plant and animal death in ecological systems, that predation is the only viable way to create a self-sustaining natural world that even remotely resembles ours. Moreover, there are important spiritual reasons for this, because death is actually a pre-fall pattern, not a post-fall one. I will elaborate on both these points extensively in later installments.

For now, sufficient to note that the common 3P appeal to the phrase “very good” begs the question. The salient response is simple:

1. “Very good” in Genesis 1 is an assessment with respect to a teleological end, not than a moral ideal;
2. Predation is very good at achieving certain ends;
3. Therefore, to assert that predation is not “very good” requires arguing against those ends as God’s original plan, not asserting that it violates some moral intuition.

God’s ends in creation are therefore the chief issue we should ultimately be inquiring about.

To be continued in part 2, on the provision of plants for food…