Hello!
I decided to join this forum hoping to find the asnwers nobody has given me yet.
I've been a Christian since 2017 (received water baptism that year, but became a believer earlier), and I was very zealous in my faith several years since then. Until I gradually strated thinking over certain questions and noticing things I had not been noticing before.
For example, the Bible says that the world was created in 6 days - I had no problem with this, until I started thinking about this deeper. In six days? With the creation of the stars on the third day? Even if the stars were created on the first day, the light from them would not have reached the earth up until today (except for the sun's light). I searched a lot of information and explanations about this, and what I found more or less plausible is the theory saying, while only six days passed on earth, millions of years passed in the space/cosmos, because the time flows with different speeds.
But, anyway, that's a whole another topic, I just mentioned it to show you what kind of stuff I pondered about, and today I would like to ask a different question.
I have been okay with the thought that there was no death before the fall at all - not even animal death. But then, when I thought about it deeper, I said, "hey, wait a minute. Do you really think that not any single organism died before the flood, even a germ? Even a mosquito at Adam's shoulder? When Adam and Eve walked around Eden, didn't they occasionally squezze some bugs in the grass to death?"
That made no sense to me. It's impossible that not a single organism could die. Were worms supposed to live forever?
But I found some explanations about this. Some creationist commentators say that there are some so called "non-nephesh animals", like insects. Here's an article I found -
God Created Insects - Today's Creation Moment
According to this view, insects did not have the blessing to live forever. Earlier I came across a creationist article which called instects "bio robots"
While I partly agree with this approach, this still creates a problem for me.
If animals (at least cerain categories) died before the Fall, death was in the original plan of God. If death was okay, that violence was okay too. What other purpose than killing and eating flesh was for a shark in God's original plan?
If death and violence was from the beginning, even before the Fall, than God was the author of death and suffering, and the whole creation story and the message of the Bible loses its sence. On the other hand, how was it possible that there would be no death at all for all living organisms, ever (if the Fall hadn't happened)?
That's a great dilemma for me.
The world we live in, with its animal life and how the life functions, just doesn't fit into ideal world God created as depeicted in Genesis 1, and it doesn't matter that the Fall happened. I mean, for the world to be ideal and excluding death altogether, that must have been some very different world with quite a different fauna and laws of life.
I just need to figure it out, and I hope you will help me.
