Scripture, Nature, and Time: Round 6

Closing Statement: What Would Cause Me to Revise My Position?

I want to begin by thanking Riley for this exchange. He has been clear, charitable, and substantive throughout. This has not been a social media argument dressed up as theology. It has been a real dialogue over Scripture, interpretation, nature, history, and theological coherence.

That is what I hoped this would be.

I also want to state where I think we agree.

We both affirm Scripture as true and authoritative.

We both affirm a real Adam and Eve.

We both affirm a real Fall.

We both affirm that Christ is the last Adam.

We both affirm that Genesis must be read according to genre, context, grammar, and authorial intent.

We both reject reckless concordism that tries to force modern scientific categories into every biblical text.

Those agreements matter.

The disagreement is not whether Scripture is true. The disagreement is how Scripture’s truth governs our interpretation of Genesis, natural history, death, and the created order.

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Answering Riley’s Main Question

Riley’s final question was direct: if God had created a world containing animal death, predation, disease, extinction, and natural disaster and called it very good, would He still be worthy of worship, or would He be evil?

My answer is direct.

If God had revealed that He created such a world and called it very good, He would still be worthy of all honor, glory, praise, and worship. God defines goodness. I do not stand over Him as judge.

But I do not believe Scripture reveals that He did so.

That is the issue.

The question is not whether I reserve the right to morally evaluate God. I do not. The question is whether Scripture presents the pre-Fall world as already governed by the same death-saturated order we now experience. I do not think it does.

Clarifying My Position

At this point in the exchange, I think it is useful to state my position more carefully.

I am defending what might be called functionally mature, open-age creationism.

By that I mean this: Scripture presents God creating the heavens, the earth, the sea, and all that is in them in six ordinary days. It presents the created order as functionally mature, ordered, and very good. It presents Adam and Eve as real historical persons, placed under real command, followed by a real Fall, real curse, real judgment, and real redemption.

At the same time, Scripture does not tell us precisely how much time passed between the completion of creation and Adam’s sin.

That interval may have been short. It may have been longer than many standard young-earth models assume. It may have allowed meaningful creaturely flourishing, adaptation, diversification, and speciation within created kinds.

But that openness has boundaries.

The creation-to-Fall interval cannot simply be filled with the full deep-time regime of natural history: violence, predation, disease, harmful parasitism, extinction, terror, and suffering as ordinary mechanisms of creaturely life before sin.

Deep time is not just time. It is a story of what filled the time.

That has been my concern throughout this dialogue.

Mortality and the Death-Regime

I also want to clarify the death-before-sin question.

I am not prepared to say that every non-human creature was necessarily biologically immortal before the Fall. Scripture does not explicitly say that. It is possible that Adam and Eve could have understood the warning “you shall surely die” through some awareness of creaturely mortality in the world around them.

But that is very different from saying the original creation was already governed by violence, predation, harmful parasitism, disease, extinction, terror, and suffering as ordinary mechanisms of life.

The theological problem is not merely “an animal eventually reaches the end of its creaturely span.”

The theological problem is a pre-Fall world in which creatures survive by tearing, poisoning, infecting, starving, and destroying one another for ages before human sin.

That is the distinction I want to preserve.

The biblical categories that matter most here are life, blood, violence, corruption, curse, suffering, death, redemption, resurrection, and new creation.

Scripture may leave some questions of creaturely mortality open. I do not think it presents the very good creation as a violence-driven order of predation, disease, parasitism, extinction, and suffering before the Fall.

Functional Maturity and Divine Action

Riley pressed the concern that functional maturity risks becoming an Omphalos-style theory of apparent age. That concern deserves a serious answer.

Functional maturity, as I am using the phrase, does not mean God fabricated false histories into creation. It means God created things capable of fulfilling their appointed purposes from the beginning.

Adam was created as a man.

Eve was created as a woman.

Plants were created yielding seed and fruit.

The heavenly lights were appointed to mark days, seasons, and years.

The world was created operational.

That is not deception. It is created readiness.

Nor is this pattern foreign to Scripture. At Cana, Jesus provided real wine without the ordinary history of vine growth, grape harvest, fermentation, and aging. In His healing miracles, He restored bodies without ordinary biological recovery. In the feeding of the multitudes, He provided edible bread and fish without the ordinary chain of agriculture, fishing, and preparation.

Those miracles do not create false things. They create or restore real things in complete functional form.

Creation is unique. It is the founding divine act by which ordinary processes become possible. But Scripture has no difficulty presenting God as producing functional completeness without ordinary developmental process.

That is the category I am defending.

The Central Difference

The central difference between Riley’s view and mine is not that he cares about genre and I do not.

I do care about genre.

It is not that he respects scholarship and I do not.

I value scholarship as a subordinate aid.

It is not that he believes nature matters and I do not.

Nature matters because God made it.

The central difference is that Riley sees Genesis 1–11 as historically grounded but not chronologically controlling for questions of natural history. I see Genesis 1–11 as both theological and historically bounded in a way that must discipline our reconstruction of origins.

I agree that Genesis is ancient, literary, theological, selective, and carefully structured.

I deny that those features make its chronology indefinitely elastic.

Selective does not mean unbounded.

Theological does not mean non-historical.

Literary does not mean non-chronological.

Ancient does not mean incapable of teaching real sequence.

Genesis gives us creation, Adam, command, Fall, curse, death, Flood, nations, Abraham, Israel, Christ, resurrection, and new creation as one coherent canonically governed story.

That sequence is the controlling reason I cannot accept deep-time natural history before Adam.

Science and Historical Reconstruction

I do not reject science.

I reject the assumption that present-process reconstruction has authority to govern revealed origins.

We normally experience the world through ordinary providence. We observe regular processes, and we naturally extrapolate regular processes backward. That is understandable.

But predicting the past is often as difficult as predicting the future. The farther one projects in either direction, the less certainty we have that all relevant variables, discontinuities, initial conditions, and boundary events have been accounted for. Deep-time reconstruction looks backward across immense distances of time. That does not make it worthless. It does mean it should be held with appropriate humility, especially when Scripture gives us reason to believe the past includes events outside ordinary present process.

Scripture gives us a past that includes more than ordinary process.

Special creation is a discontinuity.

The Fall is a discontinuity.

The Flood is a discontinuity.

Functional maturity is a discontinuity.

If those events are real, then the natural record cannot be reconstructed as though uninterrupted ordinary process were the only relevant explanatory category.

I am not claiming every scientific question is easy. I am not claiming every young-earth model succeeds. I am saying that deep time is not theologically or evidentially neutral. It is a historical reconstruction built on assumptions about continuity, process rates, initial conditions, and permissible causes.

Once Scripture’s own discontinuities are allowed into the reconstruction, I see no necessary reason the created order could not fit within a much shorter historical frame than the standard deep-time model requires.

What Would Cause Me to Revise My Position?

I would revise my position if Scripture itself required me to do so.

More specifically, I would revise if it could be shown from the text and canon that Genesis 1’s six days are not merely literary but intentionally non-chronological.

I would revise if Genesis 1–11 were shown to function as theological narrative without placing creation, Adam, Fall, Flood, nations, and Abraham into a bounded historical sequence.

I would revise if Romans 5, 1 Corinthians 15, Romans 8, and the doctrine of new creation were better explained by a model in which animal death, predation, disease, extinction, and suffering are normal features of the original created order.

I would revise if the biblical category of “very good” were shown to include the full death-regime of deep-time natural history before sin.

I would revise if Scripture clearly taught that the Fall affected only human spiritual status and not the humanly governed created order.

I would also revise specific scientific claims where they are weak. I have no need to defend every popular young-earth argument, every speculative Flood model, or every overconfident claim made in the name of creation science.

Truth matters more than team loyalty.

But I am not persuaded that Riley’s model has met that burden.

Final Word

I appreciate Riley’s care in arguing that Scripture should be read according to what it intends to teach. I agree with that principle.

I simply do not think his model has shown that Genesis 1–11 intends to give theological meaning without chronological force.

Nor do I think it has shown that the pre-Fall world can absorb ages of predation, disease, extinction, violence, and suffering while preserving the Bible’s creation-Fall-redemption-new creation sequence.

If the pre-Fall world is already “red in tooth and claw,” then what we now call “natural evil” is not an intrusion into God’s order but the very structure of that order. In that case, the cross does not answer a rupture in creation; it simply decorates a brutality that was there from the beginning.
That is why we instinctively feel that a “very good” world built on predation, disease, parasitism, and extinction presses not just on a detail of Genesis, but on the character of God Himself. If this is what God means by goodness, then our conscience, our reading of the life of Jesus, and our hope for new creation all need to be redefined downward to fit a universe where suffering is not an enemy but a design feature.

So I remain convinced that Scripture presents a better framework: six-day creation, functional maturity, a real historical Adam and Eve, an open but morally bounded creation-to-Fall interval, real rebellion, real curse, real judgment, real redemption, and real new creation in Christ.

Creation was good.

The Fall was real.

Death is an enemy.

Christ is victorious.

And the final hope is not escape from creation, but creation redeemed, reconciled, and made new under the risen King, the Prince of Peace, the Lord of Life.

Soli Deo Gloria.

-JD