even authorizing Adam to examine and name them (Gen. 2:19–20). Furthermore, there was an abundance of food for all of them (Gen. 1:30), and definitely no “struggle for existence.” The 19th century depiction of “nature red in tooth and claw” (Tennyson) was diametrically opposite to the true picture of the primeval creation as revealed in God’s Word. At that time, all the animals were herbivorous and at peace with one another and with man.
That is not the way it is now, of course, for “sin entered into the world, and death by sin,” so that “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” (Rom. 5:12; 8:22). God had to tell Adam: “Cursed is the ground [same as ‘earth’] for thy sake” (Gen. 3:17), and Adam’s whole “dominion” (Gen. 1:28) came tragically down with him.
Evolutionists, however, have long regarded this groaning and struggling in nature as the basic means of evolutionary progress. The conclusion of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species even seems to glory in this state of suffering and death:
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life.20
Now, strange and sad to say, a number of leading evangelicals — those espousing either theistic evolution or progressive creation — in their wistful attempt to hang on to the vast geological “ages” of the evolutionists, seem to agree in general with “this view of life.” That is, they also explain suffering and death in the animal kingdom not as a result of God’s curse on the creation because of sin, but as a necessary component of the balance of nature. For example, physicist Don Stoner says:
There is scientific evidence that many creatures, from before the time of men, ate other animals. The evidence says there was animal death before Adam.21
Of the many modern progressive creationists who hold similar views, one of the most influential is Hugh Ross. In his recent book (which is mainly a polemic against “young earth creationists,” especially at the Institute for Creation Research), Dr. Ross says this:
An organism’s place in the food chain determines its capacity for efficient work. . . . Considering how creatures convert chemical energy into kinetic energy, we can say that carnivorous activity results from the laws of thermodynamics, not from sin . . . we cannot realistically compare the suffering and death of animals to the suffering and death of humans.22
Thus, progressive creationists see no theological or biblical problems with having animal death prior to human sin, nor in the idea of billions of animals suffering and dying long before God got around to placing them under man’s dominion (whatever that could mean, after the animals had already been around for a billion years).
Literal creationists do have problems with this idea, however. The concept of an omnipotent, omniscient, loving, caring God devising such a scheme seems completely incongruous!
Knowledgeable evolutionists have difficulty with it, too. For example, Stephen Jay Gould, probably this nation’s most influential evolutionist, emphasizes not only the cruelty of natural history, but also its randomness, with no indication of direction or purpose.
Moreover, natural selection, expressed in appropriate human terms, is a remarkably inefficient, even cruel process. Selection carves adaptation by eliminating masses of the less fit — imposing hecatombs of death as preconditions for limited increments of change. Natural selection is a theory of “trial and error externalism” — organisms propose via their storehouse of information, and environments dispose of nearly all — not an efficient and human “goal-directed internalism” (which would be fast and lovely, but nature does not know the way).23
Dr. Hugh Ross tries to mitigate the harshness of the process by saying that some kind of “mini-creation” process is activated every time a new species appears, maintaining that these millions of mini-creations that he postulates make him a creationist. It is obvious, however, that such a system is merely theistic evolution under another name. In any case, it does not do away with the utter cruelty and randomness of the whole monstrous system. How can we dare blame God for such a thing? Gould’s atheism is much more logical than so-called “progressive creationism”! As mentioned earlier, Dr. David Hull, professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, has said:
Whatever the God implied by evolutionary theory and the data of natural history may be like. . . . He is certainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray.24
Or, as Dr. Gould said, in an earlier article:
You can hardly blame the divine Paley for not even imagining such a devilish mechanism.25
The God of the Bible is neither capricious nor cruel, and it is a mistake to think that He would use the “devilish mechanism” of billions of years of trial-and-error variation, struggle, suffering, and death in the animal world as prologue to His great plan for creating and redeeming men and women.
His creative purpose, instead, was that “they shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain.” Anything other than that can only be rightly understood as a later intrusion into God’s “very good” creation.
The leaders of evolutionary thought are indeed intractable. They will never be persuaded by any amount of compromise. Compromise on this vital subject is, in the long run, futile — and perilous!
The Sad Results of Compromise
Indeed, it is dangerous for those that get involved in compromise of creation. One compromise leads to another. Once the safe haven of absolute biblical inerrant authority is left behind, there is no satisfactory or secure resting place. Following the shifting winds of secular intellectual opinion often leads to spiritual shipwreck.
The life and death of Charles Darwin himself is a case in point. Although he has received the adulation of the world for over a century, and was buried with high honors in Westminster Abbey, he never knew peace himself after once placing his faith in evolution. As one of his many biographers, Irving Stone, has noted:
Darwin returned to England at 27 in a robust state of mind and body. It was not until a year later, when he began to write in his evolutionary notebooks, that he first felt and commented on his illnesses, forcing himself into a lifetime of severe, repugnant, and sometimes ludicrous disability.26
Darwin complained all during his life of his constant illnesses, and entire books have been written just about this aspect of his life. Yet in the most exhaustive and modern volume on this subject, a book entitled To Be an Invalid, the author, Dr. Ralph Cox, concludes that there was nothing organically or physically wrong with Darwin at all. His granddaughter, Nora Barlow, who edited his autobiography, said he was a hypochondriac.
The biographer Irving Stone, who is an ardent evolutionary humanist and profound admirer of Charles Darwin, attributed all his troubles to the intense conflicts generated by his evolutionary theory, blaming the opposition of the Christians and creationists of Darwin’s day. Stone does acknowledge, however, that Darwin hated to “think about the demon of evolution he had released upon an unwilling and unprepared world.”27
