Over on the Cripplegate, I recently addressed several thorny theological questions. One was the question of what’s known as “the predator prey problem” in Creation Science. In a nutshell, the problem arises when one speculates how in the world animals that appear to be engineered for predation were not originally predators.
In other words, how were venomous snakes part of God’s “very good” creation when their fangs and venom glands appear specifically made for hunting other organisms. What purpose would venom have had before the fall? What purpose would fangs have had before the fall?
Due to the predator prey problem, some people have found an old earth/theistic evolution paradigm far easier to believe than a young earth/biblical creation paradigm.
Admittedly, it’s a difficult problem. It’s not difficult because there aren’t answers, but rather that the answers are inaccessible to everyone since the only way to answer the question would be to somehow see what creation was like before the fall. The Bible doesn’t give people a whole lot of information about the world before the fall, so the question is shrouded in a colossal amount of rather annoying mystery.
In the comment thread, I interacted with a good brother who was wondering why venomous snakes before the fall was a problem. I wrote a long enough answer that I wanted to save it for posterity…and also share it as a post unto itself. For those who think about such things, here’s what I said to him:
I’m not trying to be a pain, but there is a problem that emerges when a person says that before the fall, venom glands were designed AS venom glands that produced venom.
The insinuation is that God designed the world (at least in certain specific ways) for how it would function after the fall, rather than making it “very good” and it subsequently being corrupted.
The alternative is that something like a venom gland produced something other than venom (i.e. something necessary to the diet or life functions of the pre-fall animal) that then was corrupted via the fall into something horrible that it was never designed to be.
An example would be that I’ve listen to the late Paul Tomasek (Professor of Molecular Biology at CSUN) talk about how there’s a specific virus (I cannot remember the name) that has infected multiple organisms but its phylogenetic analysis (historic tree of progression and mutation: http://evolution.berkeley.edu/… ) ended up leading researchers to an original strain that lived in a certain type of tree.
In the tree, the original “viral strain” isn’t a virus at all, but rather part of the internal mechanisms of the tree. When a specific component of those internal mechanisms was removed from the tree and underwent a very small amount of genome resequencing, all of a sudden it was a horribly dangerous virus (to people and a few other types of mammals).
The same sort of historic changes could be hypothesized for something like a fanged & venomous snake. The snake may have originally eaten some sort of fruit that had a hard shell (like some sort of coconut). The snake may have bitten that hard shell and injected some sort of substance into the shell that softened it enough for the snake to break the shell apart in order to access the chocolaty center (while we’re using our imaginations, the fruit has chocolate in it). After the fall, that hard-shelled fruit might have died off and the softening agent may have undergone a very precise mutation in order to become venom.
The outcome of the scenario looks identical AFTER the fall, but before the fall we don’t have the difficulty of God designing venomous snakes as part of a “very good” creation that contains engineered predators, even though they’re (technically) non-predatory (yet).
The coconut example is admittedly a weak example, but hopefully it gets the idea across.
It’s not nearly a comprehensive answer, but it’s just some food for thought.
For further reading on this issue, I’d direct you to Answers in Genesis, Creation Ministries International or the Institute for Creation Research. They all have a large load of articles and technical explorations of this issue:
Answers in Genesis has articles like this and this and this and this and this.
Creation Ministries International has a whole section devoted to this issue.
The Institute for Creation Research has a specific article on the purpose of mosquitoes before the fall too. Just in case anyone has every wondered about mosquitoes.
Until Next Time,
Lyndon “VenomKnight” Unger