You are confusing distinct items. The point was referring to the broad message of scripture.
And that involves interpretation of scripture. So you need to show the hermeneutics that connect the "broad message" to the actual fall.
Later animals appear wild and threatening to humans
Later? When were they not wild?
and by the flood we are lookig at what appears to have been a cosmic catastrophe
I disagree. The flood takes place on earth and nothing indicates that the destruction involved the cosmos as a whole.
after which lifespans plummeted.
This, of course, assumes that the ages recorded were literal years as we know them. And that takes us back to shernren's early questions. If the fall & flood so disrupted nature as to make uniformitarian assumptions invalid, why are you assuming the uniform length of year?
And how do we know the ages have not been mistranslated from a non-decimal to a decimal base? Ancient Mesopotamia used a base-60 not a base-10 number system.
You see, there are all sorts of interpretive matters that crop up when you start trying to tie texts together. The story of the fall, as given does not include any of the concepts you are adding to it.
You cannot argue for the interrelationship of all the laws of nature and ignore the ways in which human bodies are interwined with the natural world and victims or beneficiaries of its laws. Man was the key to creation and suddenly man was dying - therefore nature began to die also.
Well, in my frame of reference, humans were already subject to biological death anyway. I believe Adam and Eve were created mortal, as all biological beings are. If they had no access to the Tree of Life, they would die in Eden just as well as outside of Eden.
I have no problem with creation from the first, exhibiting the cycle of biological birth, death and decay. Eden would not have been habitable without that cycle in place. There could have been no ripening of fruits, no eating, no digestion, no growth, no maturing of seeds, no reproduction, none of the things we associate with life had the biological cycle not been established.
There is a new savagery to nature which suddenly appears red in tooth and claw whereas before we all got along.
Who says? This is Tennyson, not scripture.
If nature is not an accurate guide to the divine why is it an accurate guide to its own true nature.
Because nature was not created to teach us the character of God. It reveals, as Paul says, that there is a creator and speaks of his power, majesty and glory. But it does not speak of his holiness, righteousness, compassion, mercy, justice or love. OTOH, nature was created by God who, (we know from revelation) does not lie. So it was created to reveal the truth about itself.
Something has changed - something is deeply wrong.
Sure, but scripture never says that the truthfulness of God or God's natural handiwork is what has gone wrong. It is we humans who have gone wrong. Our sin does affect nature, but there are limits to how much we can affect nature. We cannot change its fundamental properties.
Human greed and mismanagement undoubtedly impact negatively on nature but clearly there is much more wrong with nature than this which has nothing to do with mankind from cosmic collisions and earthquakes to the savagery of wild beasts.
Who says these things are wrong? Shernren has earlier posted passages from Job where God glories in the savagery of carnivores. And I remember reading that the dynamic nature of earth's geology is one of the things that makes life on earth possible. Planets without earth-like tectonic activity are not habitable.
I do not assume that stars came before people.
Neither do scientists. We know from the evidence that stars must have existed, not only before people, but long before the whole solar system. This is not an assumption.
Nor do I think the universe can be intelligible to humans except as human beings.
Agreed.
The probabilities are based on calculations based on false assumptions
Specifically, what assumptions are false and how do you know they are false?
And such a moral situation has severe physical consequences in that we die and experience a broken world that is somehow absurd to our senses because we know deep down its not meant to be like this.
And I would note that most of what we know deep down is not meant to be is the brokenness of human relationships which permits the needless deaths of thousands of children daily from malnutrition and lack of access to simple medical care, the enslavement of children, the sexual trafficking of women (predicted to be more profitable than the drug trade within 15 years), the horrendous death toll in places like Darfur and the rape of nature and its resources by short-sighted corporate practices and policies.
What do we find in untampered nature that comes anywhere near being as woefully wrong as human activities? Even where things go wrong in nature, it is usually human activity that is at the root of the problem e.g. climate change.
I suppose I hold what you might call an extreme version of this so called anthropocentric principle and hold that mans fall caused a fundamental disruption in the nature of the universe. This because we echo the Creator and the brokenness of our relationship with him has had implications far beyond our own immediate experience and broken the creation we were meant to steward in accordance with Gods will.
Not really. What you are adopting is a denial of the anthropic principle altogether. You are assuming that there can be a fundamental cosmic disruption in how the universe works and still be a habitable universe. What physics tells us is that this is not possible.
I don't know much physics, but I think many who know even less than me are not aware of how fine a line there is between the existence and non-existence of a habitable universe is. Consider just this one item:
"Researchers have calculated that if the universe had expanded ever so slightly faster or slower than it did (even by as little as a trillionth of a percent), the matter in our cosmos would have either quickly collapsed into a black hole or spread out so rapidly that it would have evaporated. [Duane Elgin, "Promise Ahead: A Vision of Hope and Action for Humanitys Future" (New York, NY : William Morrow, 2000) 47]
bolding added
And that is only one of some twenty-odd parameters that in theory can have a wide range of values, but, if you want a habitable universe must be restricted to the tiniest range of values. The same sort of thing can be said about the mass of the electron (a bit heavier or a bit lighter and atoms are not possible), the strength of the electric charges on atom and proton, the strength of gravity vs that of the strong nuclear force, etc. etc. etc.
If any of those values are off by the tiniest amount, the universe does not exist. At least, not in any form in which stars, planets, life and people are possible.
So I ask: did stars, planets, life and people exist before the flood? before the fall?
Do stars, planets, life and peopel exist after the flood? after the fall?
If the answer to all these questions is "Yes" it follows that anything as fundamental as these properties are to the existence of atoms, stars, planets, life and people cannot have been affected by the fall or the flood.
By the way, Duane Elgin from whom the quote above comes is a theist. The next sentence in the paragraph is "Such amazing precision implies a living intelligence is at work."
That same precision also indicates that this living intelligence did not alter anything that would uncreate creation as a consequence of the fall.
