I don’t see any direct evidence against the idea. You’ve brought up some interesting points in English translations but none of it precludes pre-Fall children and ultimately the text is silent on the matter so it simply isn’t important. Anyone is free to believe whatever they want about it with no penalty or harm.
Well there’s no textual evidence for any of that!Pre-flood, CO2 levels would have probably been substantially higher. This is because if all the pre-flood vegetation was buried (becoming coal etc), and the world needed to grow a whole new vegetation cover, all the carbon in that new vegetation had to come out of the atmosphere. This would deplete the atmosphere and result in a substantially depressed CO2 content - and as a result slower plant growth and conditions generally less favourable to life. Which means of course that the more coal we burn, the more we restore the original atmosphere, so if we want to restore the world to the lushness of Eden we need to burn as much coal as possible, but I digress...My point is that in a much better ecosystem everything can be expected to grow better, which helps to explain megafauna as well.
The whole of Creation was corrupted by death by Adam’s sin. Animals, many of which grow for as long as they live, also started dying. Reptiles particularly grow as long as they have food and space. Their shorter post-Fall lives simply don’t let them grow that big anymore.
I think we have much clearer textual evidence for shorter post-flood lives, if we look at human ages. I'm assuming you're not seriously suggesting animals lived for hundreds of thousands of years pre-fall and there were hundreds of thousands of years for them to live in, because that raises impossible demographic problems - the world would be absolutely flooded with immortal animals starving but unable to die. If your hypothesis that Adam and Eve were in the garden for hundreds of thousands of years is correct, animal death pre-fall is a practical necessity. So we have no evidence of a change in lifespan for animals at the time of the fall. And the change that occurred for humans can hardly be called a change of lifespan either - going from immortal to mortal is a qualitative change, not a quantitative one.
I LOVE it! Hopefully this doesn't derail the thread, but I had a coworker who was one of those environmentalist hybrid driving "save the planet" libtards. I told him that I had found a good way to save money by switching to coal (because in Texas, we can choose who provides our power), and I got a good eye roll from him.Pre-flood, CO2 levels would have probably been substantially higher. This is because if all the pre-flood vegetation was buried (becoming coal etc), and the world needed to grow a whole new vegetation cover, all the carbon in that new vegetation had to come out of the atmosphere. This would deplete the atmosphere and result in a substantially depressed CO2 content - and as a result slower plant growth and conditions generally less favourable to life. Which means of course that the more coal we burn, the more we restore the original atmosphere, so if we want to restore the world to the lushness of Eden we need to burn as much coal as possible, but I digress...
We have had this discussion before. I brought up Barry Setterfield and his C-Decay Theory, which you kind of poo-pooed. Eternity past is something the human mind can NEVER comprehend, regardless of how old the universe itself happens to be. No one could possibly imagine all the thing that God caused to pass, because that number is infinite, as it was an infinite amount of time before God started the process.
I don't think so this explanation for megafauna is good. 10X bigger in adult requires different body shape. Same for their younglings. This implies new species which imply mass extinction (how, from what).
Never said 10x bigger. I said live 10x longer. This gives time for a reptile growing at an expected growth rate to reach the size of a dinosaur. Obviously we don't have the same species now, they've died out. But it explains how those species, when they were present, had time to grow so large.
Humans are always top of the food chain. We're smarter than animals.
Concurrent. The trend in the world is for species to become extinct and diversity to reduce over time - we've seen plenty of examples of that during our own lifetimes. Go back in time and there was simply a greater diversity of species. The larger ones died out due to "climate change" (caused by the flood), or predation / extermination by humans. Extermination explains the loss of some of the more dangerous species, and also all the dragon legends in oral history - when there are dangerous animals around, humans naturally seek to exterminate them, and the people who kill the last ones are remembered as heroes.
Dinos don't need to much time. Current estimates are weight gain of one tonne per year for sauropods reaching adulthood in 2 decades.
Nope. We rely on technology we extend our reach. And we start with zero technology. So either garden if eden had "shield" keeping out bad boys out or they don't live together.
Fossil records also shows explosions of life which also requires explanation. And there was no hunting out large sea predators. Flood doesn't stop large fishes.
Ever see a cave painting of humans hunting mammoths?
Yes. Spear band is enough for herbivores. What about packs of predators?
Humans have always killed predators. A "spear band" as you put it is essentially what an old-fashioned whaling crew is, and they killed the largest predators in history - sperm whales. A pack of primitive hunters could take down a T-Rex, or anything you can think of. It just takes ingenuity.
@FollowingHim, you are disregarding most important fact.
These dramatizations assume that humans would have been their only source of food. After a while, a beast gets tired of killing prey and stomachs get full, cold blooded animals eat far less than warm blooded animals.
Then you assume incorrectly. No one said that there was no death for animals, I assume that carnivores were still carnivores for instance, only that death wasn’t a given. There was no natural end to their lifespans.
6The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.
