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by Steve Risner

[This blog post is part of a series. The previous one is here and the next one is here.]

Bad things happen. That’s just the way it is. It wasn’t always like this, but man strayed from the plan. Now we have all sorts of terrible things going on. We’ve no one to blame but ourselves. In fact, if you are a believer and don’t think the world was perfect BEFORE the Fall, I am wondering how you explain a great deal of Scripture—namely those that speak of heaven and, more specifically, the new heaven and new earth. The Bible states fairly unambiguously that the Tree of Life will be in heaven and that God will “restore” all things. The word “restore” means to return someone or something to a former condition, place, or position. If creation will be restored to a former condition and that condition isn’t a perfect place where there was no death or sickness or sadness, I’d be curious to hear what heaven will be like for the theistic evolutionist.

If you’ve not been keeping up with my writings over the past couple months, I’ve been going through a blog post by Tyler Francke he calls, “10 theological questions no young-earth creationist can answer.” You may think that this means I’ve been answering those 10 questions. However, up to this point, all I’ve been doing is responding to his introduction. Within that introduction is a paragraph full of links. The link this blog post will be responding to is found within the word “awfully” and is called “Otters do terrible things to baby seals, and it’s not God’s fault.” This entire paragraph full of links is supposed to be filled with terrible issues with Biblical creationist theology (which in and of itself is strange since it’s been the theology of Christianity for 2000 years and Judaism for much longer). The trouble is that most of the “theology” is just Tyler ranting about some idea (generally a strawman argument) that he’s made up in order to make Bible believers look foolish. We’ve seen “theology” about impact craters, tree rings, music groups, and the like. He does touch on a couple things that could be construed as theology—is God a liar? What’s the Tree of Life? But most of his “theology” issues show us he really doesn’t know what theology is. The study of the nature of God has little to do with ice layering, genetics, and starlight. Anyway, let’s move on to this week’s blog post of discussion. I’ve been trying to avoid it… but there’s nothing left to say.

The blog post in question is about the molestation and rape of one animal group on another. The first thing I’ll just throw out there is that Tyler, once again, is obsessing about Ken Ham. This entire writing is designed to bash Ken Ham’s organization, Answers in Genesis. He can’t get enough of it, I guess. He then goes on to say, “Otters are a great topic for proponents of young-earth creationism, because — for the most part — it allows them to discuss real scientific facts (like animal behavior and physiology) without endangering their worldview.” We’ve discussed the completely erroneous idea that a Biblical worldview and science are at odds many, many times. In fact, I think even in this blog post series in response to Tyler’s blog post we’ve touched on it many times. If you are still confused about it or if you actually do believe that a Biblical worldview is at odds with science, please read this, this blog post by Logan Ames, and this, but you can comb through my blog posts as well as many of the other writers’ blog posts and find this issue touched on. The truth is there is no reason to suggest creationists are not scientific unless you have no real argument and just want to discredit your opponent. It’s actually hard to take someone seriously who suggests this sort of thing since all of modern science was built by creationists save the study of Darwinism which is nothing more than a religious notion. Even the father of modern biology, Carl Linnaeus, was a creationist.

Tyler then makes a very common statement by evolutionists that confuses what the role of natural selection actually is or does. He states, “They can look at the otter’s dense, waterproof fur, webbed feet and muscular tail and claim them as the handiwork of a creative God — not the results of natural selection.” How could natural selection result in the acquisition of these traits? Of course, it cannot. Natural selection deals with what is already there. It cannot under any circumstance create a new trait. This is basic biology here. The evolutionist is always making this bogus statement but insists the creationist doesn’t know what he’s talking about. What this means is that the otter (or its ancestor) had to have had ALL of these traits in the past. Evolution cannot account for their origin. Only creationists can do that.

Now we finally arrive at what Tyler’s blog post is about—rape in the animal kingdom. After all that, the theological issue for Bible believers is animals “rape” animals and this is a problem for the Bible. I’m curious why Tyler stops with “rape.” Animals “murder” lots of others, as well. They kill their young. They can be cannibals. They’re promiscuous. They can be short tempered. They bite. They poop on your bed. They drink from the toilet. They can try to have sex with inanimate objects or your leg. Why stop there?

In the process of mockingly phrasing his complaint, he misapplies Scripture as well, which is another issue for another time. He describes for us his problem: “The problem, for YECs, is that it puts God in a rather undesirable place. Because if God is directly responsible for the otter’s wonderfully adapted marine physiology, than he is also directly responsible for the animal’s tendency to rape baby seals until they die.” He then issues a false dichotomy, which isn’t worth getting in to since it’s false. But Tyler actually tells us why this is—the Fall has corrupted this world. I’m not sure if he feels that since he flippantly announced the Biblical response to this issue that he’s somehow dealt with it. It just doesn’t work that way.

You see, in my worldview, God created a perfect world. But man chose disobedience and, therefore, corruption. The corruption of the Fall reaches to every part of creation according to Scripture. All of creation was subjected to the curse. Tyler here is suggesting that the Biblical God is evil for creating this, when the Biblical position is that man is responsible for it. However, what Tyler will not say but seems to think is that his god, the god of evolution, IS responsible for this. How blind to not be able to see the irony in his position here.

He attempts to explain why the Fall can’t be the reason for such things. But he, again, explains how he doesn’t seem to know very much about the Bible or the Biblical position. God didn’t MAKE all bad things happen with the Fall. Corruption ensued. Decay is a process. Man sold ownership, so to speak, of creation to Satan when he fell. He handed over dominion to the Father of Lies. Hence, the Fall allows Satan to do his handiwork.

I’ll point out also that he miserably fails to understand Biblical creation. He claims Adam and Eve never knew the otter existed because they aren’t from the Middle East. It’s so tiring correcting people who want to tell me I’m wrong when they don’t know what I believe. But what is still shocking to me is that he claims to be a follower of Christ. His next thing here is to quote someone saying why his argument (that bad things happen, essentially) is why they don’t believe in the God of the Bible. You see that? He’s using non-Christian arguments (their arguments for not being a follower of Christ) to support his position. But I’m supposed to believe he is a lover of Christ? Only a theistic evolutionist would be able to think such things. He also says, “I find it far more satisfying to view God as the sustainer and overseer of a vast creative process, rather than a tinkerer who has ‘designedly’ weaved cruelty and brutality into the fabric of the animal kingdom.” Why does he think the truth cares what satisfies him? He’s not even talking about the Biblical concept of God here in his objection. But the funny thing is a Biblical creationist would claim to adhere to the former portion of his statement rather than the latter. However, inserting the word “Designer” into that first half would be much more complete—God is the Designer, Sustainer, and Overseer of a vast creation, and I would say creation rather than creative process.

And finally, he tells us why his entire argument is incorrect. He simply explains the issue, and I can’t argue with it until he says it’s “nothing more” than a product of nature. It’s a product of nature as a result of the corruption of creation. So what we see here as a “theological” problem for Bible believers is nothing of the sort. I’d say it’s a problem for the theistic evolutionist, however. Not only does he not understand the Biblical position on why this is the case, he also explains why the Biblical position is correct, almost anyway. He does come up a little short, but he’s close. Stick with us. We’ll get to those 10 impossible questions soon enough.

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