Man and Sin Had to Come Before Death and Destruction
The idea of an earth that is millions/billions of years old came from the belief that the fossil record was built up over a long time. But this creates an insurmountable problem regarding the Bible’s gospel message. The fossil record consists of the death of billions of creatures. It is a record of death, disease, suffering, cruelty, and brutality—a very ugly record.
The Bible is adamant, though, that death, disease, and suffering came into the world as a result of the sin of Adam. God instituted death and bloodshed because of sin so mankind could be redeemed. As soon as Christians allow for death, suffering, and disease before sin, then the whole foundations of the message of the Cross and Christ’s Atonement have been destroyed. Original sin is wiped out.
If there were death, disease, and suffering before Adam rebelled, then what did sin do to the world? What does the apostle Paul mean in Romans 8 when he says the whole of creation groans in pain because of the Curse of Genesis 3? How can all things be restored in the future to no more death and suffering, unless the beginning was also free of death and suffering? The whole message of the gospel falls apart if one allows millions/billions of years for the creation of the world.
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The Earth is not billions of years old because that would mean your ancient holy book and everything you believe in would be wrong?
I'm sorry but this took SERIOUS cahones to write as a defense of your beliefs.
The ability for life forms to die and things to be destroyed is absolutely not dependant on the actions of a specific species of life form, but I believe you when you say that you believe that and must accept that regardless of how flimsy that shows your beliefs to truly be.
It is indeed spiritually immature to equate death and decay with evil. Without death, reproduction would not be necessary, and without reproduction, natural selection could not improve a species over time. And without decay, nutrients in once living things could not be returned to the soil to replenish it and enable plants to grow. That's why the depiction of life prior to the Fall of Man, with no animals dying and all of them being vegetarian, is ludicrous. Within a few years, the cycle of life would grind to a halt because the animals would have eaten all the plants and the world would have been in a static state forever. God told the animals and people, even before the Fall, to "be fruitful and multiply". That would quickly end once all the plants were eaten.
If the gospel message is dependent on the Genesis myths, we are better off without it. Fortunately, no one has to be that narrow minded or irrational. The problem of sin among human beings would remain even if Genesis had never been written.
BTW, the Jews, whose ancestors wrote the Bible, do not beleive in Original Sin. So why should we?
You don't understand !
There is no 'reason' anywhere in what you claim. There is no 'plan' or 'blueprint' or 'grand design'. There no 'cycle of life'. It is all one horrible conflict - animals eating each other. Nature, existence, it is the biggest most senseless trench warfare that has existed forever. If you have cows the ability to shoot laser beams from their eyes they'd kill every human and every predator, and they'd breed out of control and cover the globe until disease cut down their numbers. There is no architectural plan behind this. It is all one giant catastrophe that has lasted hundreds of millions of years.
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiX1B8Y93Gk&feature=related
- http://www.thoughtware.tv/videos/watch/4670-Zizek-we-Should-Become-More-Artificial -
The fact that it means something to you and me is largely because we have evolved a capacity to attribute abstractions of desirable or undesirable, largely out of tribal causes and presume things that just aren't there.
http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Pattern_recognition
http://atheism.about.com/od/logicalflawsinreasoning/a/subjective.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia
Don't displace one mythological explanation of reality with another.
If the existence of a fossil record contradicting parts of the Bible then that does not disprove (in and of itself) the fossil record. It would have to be challenged on it's own ground (such a an explanation of why the record dates are incorrect and a verifiable explanation for the fossil records existence).