The flood, and meat eating.

So god is impersonal? He has no huamnly concivable emotions? Then how are we to realate to him? QM and Multi-verse theorize that ALL potential universes coexist. If you are going with the idea of multi-verse then you have to deal with the fact that there are dozens of non-fall universes. All possible universes coexist.Many-worlds interpretation - Wikipedia Continuing: There cannot be a set potential of choices, there are an infinte potential of choices. If god can affect them, he must be affected by them by deffinition. Obviously he is affected by our choices. How can he have a causal relationship to a universe that has no affect on him? This makes no sense. It is not fallacious, does he or dosn't he exist? If he does, then this means he is contingent on existance to exist. Nothing can exist if existance dosn't exist

Actually, the OP deals with a question about flesh-eating plants. The topic has drifted a bit. Of course not. Where did I ever say that?I'm asking you to provide evidence that there was ever a time in the history of the world in which no animals ate meat. But it was placed here. If you don't like the constraints of the science forums, then don't post here. You can't just change the rules because you think the topic is in the wrong forum. No. The first step, as always in science (see Percy's thread), is to look at the evidence. Where is it? Well, I don't see the scientists flocking to your side. My point is that your whole "time travel" scenario - or whatever you want to call it - is not a valid excuse for having no evidence.If you want to argue that God could move around through time and do things without "recalling" all the animals, then that is a different thread.In this thread, we are talking about whether or not animals have always been meat-eaters. The "nature of existence" is off topic.

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People who think they have all the answers usually don't understand the questions.

The evidence is what I am talking about, and what you are ignoring, and that is the nature of fundamental existence, which quantum physics is seeking to answer.Until you answer that question, and get a very good handle on it, you really are just basing everything on assumptions as far as data since the assumption is that the past is static.Can you prove that the past is static?Where is your evidence?You say you have evidence of such and such time in history, but that's all based on an interpretation of the data, not the data itself. The data says nothing about ancient history. It is interpreted to say things about ancient earth history based on uniformatarian assumptions, namely that of a static time-line, which itself is based on concepts of time increasingly more unscientific.Understanding the nature of physical existence and time, and how time is part of the universe, is fundamental to answering any questions in this arena with any sort of validity.It's true that science has only uncovered a little bit, and that more evidence is needed, but since all the evidence points to ideas of reality and time consistent with what I am saying, I'd say you have a great deal to make up if you are going to present conclusive evidence to support your concepts of physical reality and time, which are evident from your statements.Can you provide any evidence that the past is unchanging? Or is that a mere assumption on your part?

No one ever said that. Next. No, QM does not. Multi-verse theorists posit this. Please show some evidence to back up your claims that other QM theorists believe ALL potential universes coexist. So then my theory must be correct, right? Btw, you are wrong to equate multi-verse theory with all quantum physics interpretations, and had you read my posts, you would see that I was merely using the multi-verse to debunk your idea that such ideas are unscientific, and to show that QM observations do seem to indicate reality is more in line with my perspective than your's. I wish that were so. I wish I could just choose to make the world a perfect place, but I cannot. I can choose maybe to view it that way or some esoteric concept, but bottom line is our choices are indeed limited to a degree. By what definition? Please show what the heck you are talking about? I can create characters in a story and "affect" them in anyway I want, but they cannot affect me at all. That's a dumb argument. First off, God self-exists, and thus existence is dependant on God for the concept to have any meaning at all.God's self-existence is really a form of existence we can only imagine due to God allowing us to imagine. There is no reason to think God is dependant on the creation of the thing we call existence in order for Him to self-exist.In fact, only He really exists in the sense of self-existing. Everything else is dependant, but not God.God by definition has the attribute of self-existence.

No, no and no.The topic is "The flood, and meat eating". That is the only topic to which evidence is relevant here.Your evasion could be applied to any topic. How do we know anything actually happened?Ever hear of Last-Thurdayism? God could have created the world last Thursday and made it look like it's 4.55 billion years old. Similarly, one of your blips in the space-time continuum could have disrupted everything we think we know.The problem with your "theory" is that it's perfectly useless. If you can "poof" the evidence out of existence at your convenience, we can't ever know anything.Stop being evasive.The onus is not on me to prove that evidence can not vanish in a puff of time-travel. The onus is on you to provide evidence to back up your "theory".But that is not even the topic here. The topic is "The flood, and meat eating." Show us the evidence that there was no meat-eating before the Flood and/or The Fall.

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People who think they have all the answers usually don't understand the questions.

Hey Randman,If you are interested in discusing these QM/reality/God/Time Travel ideas, open up another thread. I will be happy to continue our discussion there.I think Ringo is right that we are essentially going off on a tangent with all this stuff.

"Light, for example, can exist as a wave or a particle"This is not quite true. Light does BEHAVE as both a wave and a particle, that is true. However, a particle implies matter and matter has mass. Light "particles" (photons) have no mass, as light is a form of energy. According to Einstein's equation, energy can be turned into matter just as matter can be turned into energy. Therefore it should be possible to transform light into matter - but then it would no longer be light. This is all of course quite off topic.Now , as to the original question about meat eating.....
How is it that you can just assume that the digestive system of man was changed to accomodate meat eating - POOF - just like that? When did this happen, and more importantly - WHY did it happen? The logic is not there, imo. The Fall of man is associated with the beginning of agriculture. Man went from gatherer/hunter to tiller/herder. The need to be able to eat meat is the same (actually less in more fertile areas with tillable land). Where does it say in the Bible that man did not eat meat before the Fall and where does it say he was changed - POOF - to be able to eat meat after the Fall? I find it really annoying that Biblical literalists want to "add stuff" to make the Biblical narrative fit their model when necessary. Thus we have the YEC's proclaiming that man did not eat meat before the Fall, that carnivores were herbivores on the Ark, that dinosaurs were taken on the Ark as juveniles (even though the Biblical narrative suggests nothing of the kind)- all "just so" stories to make the Biblical narrative fit into modern understanding of reality. Further, I find it interesting to see when Biblical literalists decide a miracle is needed - whenever there is a GAP with reality ..... hmmm, if it weren't for science and the explorers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Biblical literalists would still be insisting that the earth is flat and the sun moves over the earth. Think about it. END OF RANT.

Good point. Well, wave/particality duality seems a lot of like a magical POOF action, but we are digressing.The "why" is that man's consciousness fell. It was darkened while gaining more knowledge. It is possible that quantum physics interpretations which show consciousness somehow involved in the collapsing of the wave function, or whatever you want to call it, indicates that consciousness of man, the observer, somehow plays a role in the manifestation of reality in one form or another. That, to me, is evidence for how such a change could occur. You've got it totally backwards. No one is adding to the text to make it fit a "model." The Bible says death entered into the world via Adam's sin. Now, there are some ways people try to get around this. One is claiming that death entered into the world of man, or that death refers to spiritual death only, but that animals lived and died and ate one another, etc,....If one takes the Bible's claims of death beginning with Adam's sin as meaning what it appears to on the face of it, then you can either just reject the Bible, or you can accept my interpretation. There may be another alternative out there, and I am open to that, but imo, what I am saying is consistent with both scientific principles as we know them and with the text of the Bible.If you want definitive proof, that may not be possible. What may be possible is to determine that the scenario I put forward is scientifically possible, assuming God's existence, and harmonious with what we know about time and physical existence.Edit to add: What makes you think what I am proposing is YEC? Additionally, I think for any evolutionist to complain about "just-so" stories begs the question of who is the pot and who is the kettle.This message has been edited by randman, 07-27-2005 11:22 AM

False dichotomy. You are ignoring at least one alternative - and a more obvious one:The Bible's "claims of death beginning with Adam's sin" are symbolic.Adam is symbolic of all mankind. "For all have sinned...." We are responsible for our own sins. We can't blame Adam for them and we can't claim that the Bible blames Adam either.That is what the Bible appears to say "on the face of it", and there is no need for a vegetarian-to-carnivorous "poof".But that discussion belongs in Faith and Belief and the quantum mechanical discussions belong in a different forum too.Stop evading the issue. Either show us some evidence that there was a time before meat-eating, or admit that you have no evidence.This message has been edited by Ringo316, 2005-07-27 09:59 AM

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People who think they have all the answers usually don't understand the questions.

Genesis 2:16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:17 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.This is the text. Note that it says nothing about death being absent in the world - even for Adam himself, let alone the animals. It just says "if you eat from this tree you will die." If I say to you, "you will die if you eat castor beans" that doesn't mean you won't also die if you walk out in front of a bus. The "no death/carnivores" in the Garden of Eden is simply faulty logic. Furthermore, how does Adam even know what "death" is if it does not exist up to this point? There is no life without death. Do you think you would be alive today (or any human or other form of life) without death? Think about it.More evidence from the Genesis text.Genesis 2:20 And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found a help meet for him.OK - here a distinction is made between cattle and beasts of the field. What were those cattle all about? What is the purpose of having cattle? I don't know about you but where I come from and everywhere I have been in the world (ok, I haven't been to India), people EAT cattle. If you are going to be a literalist, than be a literalist. Don't add "stuff". You simply cannot get Adam as a vegetarian from the Bible. It says he was given plants to eat, yes -it does not say he didn't also eat animals. It also does not say there was no physical death before the Fall. That is a fundamentalist heresy, in my opinion.Edit: I didn't say you were a YEC. I said that YECs make claims
that have no basis in the Biblical text. Here is what I said,"Thus we have the YEC's proclaiming that man did not eat meat before the Fall, that carnivores were herbivores on the Ark, that dinosaurs were taken on the Ark as juveniles" - If the shoe fits.....Also, even if it were true that evolutionist scenarios are "just so" stories, which it isn't - that would not make the YEC "just so" stories any more valid. That is a logical fallacy in and of itself.This message has been edited by deerbreh, 07-27-2005 12:16 PM

How do you explain Paul's use of Genesis to mean that "death entered the world" via Adam?Paul was a highly educated Pharissee before becoming a Christian, and he says death entered the world via Adam's sin.I still see no credible explanation for that. I agree that cattle are for meat, but the explanations that somehow the phrase on death entering the world is merely symbolic as one post states above, does not work for me. Paul is talking about a literal resurrection in his treatise.The unbeleiving approach is to dismiss it all as myth, which just happens to be coincide with general principles such as the Big Bang, and "Let there be light", and man being a later creation to sea animals, and the fact there are prehistoric birds that were created from the sea, and a different set of birds from the ground, and stuff like that.The believing approach, imo, fits these things together and sees a pattern that the Bible speaks of, which agrees approximately with the current time-line history, due to the pattern, but in which changes are made.So we still have the Big Bang of "Let there be light," and we still see dark matter and energy separated from light as Genesis records. We still have man appear as a rather late creation in the world, but we have a different creation time-line to a degree, compared to the original creation which had no sin.

Also, cattle are also used to plow fields and for milk. Nonetheless, it does seem odd to speak of cattle for the garden.An explanation could well just be they were not at that time used for meat or to plow fields, but became that way later.

If you agree that cattle are for meat, how can you turn around and say that Paul's statement means there was no physical death before the Fall? Besides, you still haven't explained the logic of how life can exist without physical death? If there were no death, how long do you think it would have taken to fill up the world with say, fruit flies? Or mice? Rabbits? Or do you think the "no death" clause just applied to mammals with long gestation periods?

"Also, cattle are also used to plow fields and for milk. Nonetheless, it does seem odd to speak of cattle for the garden.
An explanation could well just be they were not at that time used for meat or to plow fields, but became that way later."Hmm, I always thought that tillage came as a consequence of the fall. "cursed be the ground....thorns and thistles....sweat of thy brow......" what was that all about?But now we are adding to the text again, aren't we? Don't you ever find it just a little tiring being a literalist?

As far as cattle, they existed at some point as wild animals, right?Or not?Either way, the fact they are for meat now does not preclude the idea they could have existed just as animals.On reproduction, there could well have been a far lower rate originally, which incidentally fits well with the original longer lifespans after the Fall.My point here is that the Bible suggests that the creation itself was changed, the entire creation, including forms of animals, when sin entered into the world. To posit, based on the current creation, how certain facts contradict the Bible's depiction of the original creation is a fallacious argument.If you want to say there is no evidence other than the Bible for this original sinless creation, fine.But you don't have any evidence against it either.There is evidence for how such changes in the time-line or alternative universes could appear, although science is too primitive at this stage to verify such theories.But once again, you cannot claim science is advanced enough to dismiss these ideas either.