The idea of all animals living off the bounty of the earth, if it was the case, only applies to the earth before man caused our earth to be separated from God. You can be sure that when God walked in the Garden, it provided all that any animal needed.
After the separation, the earth was no longer plentiful, and man would have to work "to make a living." After after Sin and Death entered to world, through Adam, the entire Cosmos became an illustration for Hypocrisy. We ALL live in Sin. Those who accept forgiveness for our sins are obligated to not sin on purpose as much as we can. But we are not yet in Heaven so our environment usually wins out.
Yes, but don't forget that in the curse of Genesis 3 man was to sweat for his food because
the ground would bear him thorns and thistles. Not because chasing down wild boar and buffalo herds is tough.
And can you really imagine yourself or any other creationist standing before God and blaming ... the environment? "Yes, God, I
know You didn't create chickens and cows to be eaten. Animal death was never a part of Your good plan for creation. But why did You have to make them so
delicious?"
If you really are willing to acknowledge that to eat meat is (if you are consistent) to wallow in the consequences of sin, then I can only echo Jesus' words: "Go, and sin no more." If you are not, then you don't
really believe that there's anything so much better about animals not dying than about them dying.
The ICR apparently has an
article dedicated to this very thing. And it seems to place sponges and "lower animal life" outside of actual life.
I'll be honest, this wasn't something I remember ever encountering when I was a YEC, and it's not something I thought about until recently (even though I'm not a YEC any longer).
This seems....bizarre....to me.
-CryptoLutheran
And to me too! But you need to remember that within the creationist worldview almost any biology done in the past hundred years has got an evolutionist tinge to it, and that includes the indiscriminate labeling of animal and plant alike as "life". ("Yeah, sure, after all
you assume that they all descended from the same primitive gloopy soup!")
Biblically at least there was certainly a phenomenological distinction between animal and plant life. One can say with Ecclesiastes that the breath of an animal returns to the Earth when it dies; but without modern biology there is no similar line to be drawn between a live tree and a dead tree, or indeed a good and a bad one (you have to wait for it to fruit or not fruit - whence many of Jesus' parables and sayings about tree and fruit). There are clean and unclean animals, but not clean and unclean plants (though some certainly aren't fit for consumption).
And this accords with our qualitative experience as well. Sure, it's a cute little technicality to trip creationists up on, but do we actually live that way - as if plant life is qualitatively the same as animal life? We certainly feel very little for a plant when we pluck its fruit, seed or flowers. (Has anyone ever sparked moral outrage over us celebrating Valentine's Day with the dismembered gonads of angiosperms, or feasting everyday on the babies or limbs of a million green lives?) For that matter, when you swallow an oyster or eat a scallop, it's hard to feel that you've just swallowed whole something alive - unlike the moral outrage people feel when they see a suckling pig, say, or the Japanese specialty of sushi prepared using fish fresh enough to show muscular spasms. For that matter, people still debate whether or not even crustaceans like lobsters actually have a complex enough nervous system to even feel what we would call "pain".
So I would say that, new though the idea seems (you're right, I'd never encountered it before switching sides), it does make some sense from their point of view.
I could claim that all the evidence from science is completely wrong and follow everything in the Bible. Not only is it very unlikely that all the natural sciences are wrong, but makes me look ignorant.
