Was Death Present in the Garden of Eden, before the fall?

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DPMartin said:
JM3

Please forgive me, sorry if I got heated there. I have no intention of insulting you.

That is not why we are here. It is to seek the Truth, and offer to others therein. And I know my statement about insistence to be right is of no value, is true. For I have been guilty of it many time, and the truth is ,even if your right, insistence to be right can be of no value.

Are we trying to win the day, or win the souls? Also one must be careful, there is a reason why the Scriptures are referred to as sacred.

There are those who don’t know, those who do know, and those who want to know. And the wise man knows that the Way of Life is always higher then himself. So therefore the wise man always wants to know.
The reason I have taken a hard core position on this one is I believe this topic is key to why the brake down in conversations and heated debates between the position of “there is a Living Knowable God” and “if there is a God we can’t find Him, we can’t know Him, and you can’t prove He is” position. There may be “ism” names for that, but I don’t know them. And the error is on our side of the conversation.

Take your statement about the water out of the rock which implies to me you might not understand some thing.

Consider, it is true that God Almighty is aware of every thing He has made, right? But does God have to be there in order to be aware of some thing or command something. Was God’s Presence with and in Moses or in the rock? The rock doesn’t have to be alive in order to respond to God’s command. The whole universe responds to God’s command. Heck, Lucifer has to respond to God’s command and we know God don’t hang out with Lucifer. We also know God made the darkness but we know God don’t hang out in darkness, but He is aware of both. Creation is made to accommodate Life, the Presence of Life therein, according to the source of Life, which He is.

As I understand it we and science can agree in the very first statement in the Bible.

Gen:1:1: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

According to science, all things are made of time energy space matter, and something that started it.

In the beginning - time

God - something that started it

created - energy

heaven - space

and matter - earth

God provided time for energy to execute and the result is space and matter. Which had no form order or light therein. Science learns the laws of order form and light in respect to creation but does not acknowledge that it is of God. For we know that God was before the beginning and always was. Therefore God does not need time to be. But creation needs God to give time in order to be.

Science and the supporting philosophies of the position mentioned, sees creation without the Living God in it. But yet they know there is law of light order and form that controls it. That such things as time energy space and matter cannot disobey. Hence they see no source of Life in creation and consider Life to be of creation.

God made the elements of creation moved on the face of the waters where there was no form order and light and spoke. This does not mean that the things of God were not before creation. But creation is commanded to accommodated the Presence of things of God, in God’s Presence therein.

So was there such a thing as death before man sinned? Anything that is not of the Word of God, in the Presence of God, is not Life.

Again, the Lord’s Peace unto you my friend in Christ.
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Curious, how you never mention the Catholic Church or its teachings. :hmmm:
JM3 said:
vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P2I.HTM

Death

1006 "It is in regard to death that man’s condition is most shrouded in doubt."565 In a sense bodily death is natural, but for faith it is in fact "the wages of sin."566 For those who die in Christ’s grace it is a participation in the death of the Lord, so that they can also share his Resurrection.567

1007 Death is the end of earthly life. Our lives are measured by time, in the course of which we change, grow old and, as with all living beings on earth, death seems like the normal end of life. That aspect of death lends urgency to our lives: remembering our mortality helps us realize that we have only a limited time in which to bring our lives to fulfillment:

Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, . . . before the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.568

1008 Death is a consequence of sin. the Church’s Magisterium, as authentic interpreter of the affirmations of Scripture and Tradition, **teaches that death entered the world on account of man’s sin.**569 Even though man’s nature is mortal God had destined him not to die. Death was therefore contrary to the plans of God the Creator and entered the world as a consequence of sin.570 “Bodily death, from which man would have been immune had he not sinned” is thus “the last enemy” of man left to be conquered.571
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JM3 said:
Curious, how you never mention the Catholic Church or its teachings. :hmmm:
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Well my friend what do you think Catholic teachings or doctrine would be based on? Could that be the Scriptures?

why not read the scriptures?
 
StAnastasia said:
DPMartin, death is part of the life process. Without death there could be no life, no way to recycle nutrients for the next generation of organisms. So death has been around on earth for 3.5 billion years.

StAnastasia
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StAnastasia

thanks for the reply

Yes, but where did the instructions come from, in order for the organisms to be, and pass that instruction to be on from one generation to the next?
 
Big_Dummy said:
The word “earth” in the Hebrew simply means dirt or land.

What exactly does the word world mean in hebrew?
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Big Dummy

Excellent point since God call the dry land Earth:

Gen:1:10: And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

The use of the word earth has changed since this was written, it would seem. But it seems that it is given to mankind to name things.

Though finding Hebrew reference for world might be found via internet. This is the first place in scripture I found the word world, which might help.

1Sam:2:8: He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill, to set them among princes, and to make them inherit the throne of glory: for the pillars of the earth are the LORD’s, and he hath set the world upon them.

Notice the distinction between what the earth is, and what the world is. According to the Lord.
 
DPMartin said:
StAnastasia thanks for the reply Yes, but where did the instructions come from, in order for the organisms to be, and pass that instruction to be on from one generation to the next?
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They were printed on the box.
 
DPMartin said:
Well my friend what do you think Catholic teachings or doctrine would be based on? Could that be the Scriptures?

why not read the scriptures?
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JM3 said:
vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P2I.HTM

1008 Death is a consequence of sin.** the Church’s Magisterium,* as authentic interpreter of the affirmations of Scripture and Tradition***, teaches that death entered the world on account of man’s sin.569 Even though man’s nature is mortal God had destined him not to die. Death was therefore contrary to the plans of God the Creator and entered the world as a consequence of sin.570 “Bodily death, from which man would have been immune had he not sinned” is thus “the last enemy” of man left to be conquered.571
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1008 Death is a consequence of sin. the Church’s Magisterium, as authentic interpreter of the affirmations of Scripture and Tradition, teaches that death entered the world on account of man’s sin.569 Even though man’s nature is mortal God had destined him not to die. Death was therefore contrary to the plans of God the Creator and entered the world as a consequence of sin.570 “Bodily death, from which man would have been immune had he not sinned” is thus “the last enemy” of man left to be conquered.571
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It may be that God reckoned the consequences of sin as a matter of reverse causality backwards from the time humans evolved moral consciousness. In any case, we know that death has been around since the beginning of life on earth, 3.5 billion years ago. The fossil record holds extensive evidence of predation and death. Whether dinosaurs suffered pain when being devoured depends on what kind of central nervous system they had.

Leaving for the remote backwoods – back on Sunday night.

StAnastasia
 
StAnastasia said:
It may be that God reckoned the consequences of sin as a matter of reverse causality backwards from the time humans evolved moral consciousness. In any case, we know that death has been around since the beginning of life on earth, 3.5 billion years ago. The fossil record holds extensive evidence of predation and death. Whether dinosaurs suffered pain when being devoured depends on what kind of central nervous system they had.

Leaving for the remote backwoods – back on Sunday night.

StAnastasia
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buen viaje
 
Those who speak like dogs, behave like dogs, could they be dogs?

Mt:7:6: Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.

I didn’t know that the Church’s Magisterium taught Catholics to be like dogs, I must have missed that teaching. 👍
 
“it is not God’s plan that the Bible be omnipotent. The sowing of the seed produces fruit in proportion to the receptivity of the soil. Revelation is subtle. It does not bludgeon unbelievers into acceptance, but charms the heart of those willing to be wooed.”

Sacred Reading by Michael Casey
 
comrade1789 said:
I ask this question, because hair is made up of dead cells, and Adam was naming animals, many of which I am sure had hair, as I am sure he had hair. So cells were dying, and multiplying,.
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The Church Fathers teach that man was born in incorruption, but fell into corruption through Adam’s sin. As St. Paul teaches, sin entered into the world through one man, and death through sin. This death is both physical and spiritual, and has cosmic dimensions. Animals, for example, were not created to be in enmity amongst one another and in conflict with man. Because of sin, the order of the universe has changed so that animal preys on animal, and beasts prey on man. This is not the harmony intended by God, where lion and lamb lie side by side.

Adam had hair and skin, but his hair and skin did not experience corruptibility. It only was after the fall, with the introduction of corruptibility to human nature, that man in both body and soul experienced death and the tendency towards non-existence.

Christ, through his death and resurrection, conquered death and enables us to return to incorruptibility. Christ’s appearance to his Apostles after the Resurrection, in which he defies the natural limitations of this world, is a mirror of the incorruptibility now given us and towards which we ought to strive.
 
SunshineZA said:
But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die Gen.2:17

The condition of death was present in the garden in Tree of the knowledge of good and evil.🙂
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According to St. Ephrem, God surrounded the tree of the knowledge of good and evil with darkness, and made it as least enticing to Adam and Eve as possible. God did everything He could to prevent the fall, and when Adam and Eve did sin, to allow repentance. The condition of death therefore was not so much present in the garden or in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which were established by God, but in man himself, who was created by God from non-existence, and was given free will.

Man was given free will to grow in perfection and imitate the life of God, uncreated and eternal. He derived non-sensual, noetic (heart-soul) pleasure from God. Instead of deriving pleasure from God alone, however, man tended toward sensible objects, and in so doing began to experience, contrary to his nature, pleasure from sensible objects rather than from God.
 
kwray said:
What about those creatures that live off the decayed material of plants and animals that have died? If there was no death period before the fall, how could those creatures have existed?
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Simply put, the fall was of cosmic dimension. Before the fall, man did not need to eat. He did not need to till the soil for food, hunt, etc. God provided man with everything he needed. Man’s real food was to cooperate with the will of God. Man did not hunger, thirst, grow tired, become sick, injured or die. The animals did not prey on one another for their sustenance, but instead served man, who served God, who provided everything for both.

These creatures existed because God created them. They did not need food because they did not experience hunger or necessity as they were part of the incorruptible order and did not yet suffer from mortality and want introduced by Adam into the world.
 
CMcLaurin said:
It’s perfectly reasonable to assume death existed before the fall – the Church teaches that evolution is compatible with Christian faith, and the universally received definition of biological evolution requires natural selection and the death of populations to work.

This is a good article on the subject.

What the Catechism and the Church teach is that spiritual death – estrangement from God and the privation of grace – did not exist before the fall. Physical death is theologically up for grabs, although I’d say the bulk of reasonable evidence suggests bodily death did occur prior to Adam.
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The difficulty with this approach is that it does not explain the origin of physical death. If physical death were not a result of Adam’s sin, from whence does it come? Evolution sees natural selection and the death of populations as laws of nature, but the Church always has seen this situation as not the natural order God intended. God did not create death, so how does one explain it? The Church Fathers I have read point to the cosmic dimensions of the fall. It not only was a spiritual death but a change of nature that affected creation as a whole.

The problem is multiplied when extended to Christ. If Adam through his sin only introduced spiritual death, then does Christ only bring spiritual life? This is the unsound teaching of some denominations who equate flesh with *body, *and so see only the soul as being saved. The Christian teaching of the resurrection of the body, and of Christ’s own resurrection, however, demonstrates that Christ’s work is to save the soul and the body, as it is these two together without dissolution or separation that make a human being. Their separation is not natural in God’s eyes.
 
larkin31 said:
buen viaje
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Gracias. It was magnificent – the snow, the poetry and music, planting trees and playing with the kids – a New Year’s refresher. Now back to the new semester, and lectures, and grading exams…
 
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