Animals ate plants before the Fall

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Contents

Claim

"The Bible teaches (in Genesis 1:29-30) that the original animals (and the first humans) were commanded to be vegetarian. There were no meat eaters in the original creation." (Italics in original.)

Source

Responses

  1. Many animals are obligate carnivores, meaning that they cannot get the nutrients they need from vegetables and so cannot live without meat (some can't even digest vegetables properly for what nutrients there are)
  2. Creationists maintain that created kinds are fixed and that there has been only one creative event. Yet some animal kinds (such as the commonly mentioned dog and cat kinds) clearly have meat-eating features (sharp teeth, powerful pursuit muscles, etc.) and/or features to avoid meat eaters (shells on turtles, quills on porcupines, etc.). A world created with animals with meat-eating/defense against meat-eating features where animals are not allowed to eat meat would either make God an incompetent designer or deny the existence of free will. Either is terminal to creationist philosophy.
  3. Similarly, curators of the Creationist Museum in Kentucky claim that the sharp teeth of carnivorous dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus Rex were originally intended as tools for the cracking of coconut shells rather than the digestion of meat. This claim is entirely ridiculous and easily disproved by every method possible, from evidence of the dinosaur's digestive system, relative dietary needs, fossil specimens found nearby to fossils of their mutilated prey, and placement of muscles; powerful legs and a large mass are generally not needed for simply shaking or picking fruit off a tree.
  4. If creationists claim that meat-eating/defense against meat-eating features evolved later, then macroevolution, by any definition, is clearly possible, running counter to most creationist claims.
  5. Ditto the above for information increasing.
  6. Claiming the meat-eating/defense against meat-eating features evolved later would require much faster rates of evolution than scientists allow for. It essentially makes creationists hyper-evolutionists! If this rate of change were possible, we would see much faster evolution today than is observed.
  7. The Bible does not record any subsequent creative events. A second creation to introduce new or modified animals would invalidate parts of Genesis and the world would not have been created in seven days.
  8. Typically the GI tract and associated digestive enzymes is different for meat eaters than plant eaters. So a lion must have had cow-like multiple stomachs and then lost these after the Fall, so substantial microevolution was recreated, and in very short order lest these critters starve immediately.
  9. add more responses

Fallacies contained in this claim

Just So Story (Made up as part of the No Death before fall fallacy)

Related claims

Acknowledgments

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