Death Before the Fall

Dicet aliquis:  Cur ergo invicem bestiae nocent, quibus nec peccata ulla sunt, ut vindicta ista dicatur, nec ullam recipiunt tali exercitatione virtutem?  Ideo nimirum, quia scilicet aliae cibi sunt aliarum.  (Someone will say:  why then do beasts harm one another, since they have no sins for this to be called a punishment, nor do they gain any virtue by such exercise?  Plainly because some are the food of others.)¹

Only a strictly literal reading of Genesis that attributes all mortality and all predation in nature to Adam's fall can explain the origins of animal suffering in a way that maintains God's justice, God's omnipotence and God's love by refusing to allow that the Creator is the author of the evils of pain and death.²

Summary

1. The argument is the young-earth movement's strongest theological argument, and the movement states it without hedging. Creation Ministries International's list of arguments not to use still affirms that "Death and suffering of nephesh animals before sin are contrary to the Biblical framework."³ Answers in Genesis writes that "death, and this would include animal death, is the consequence and by-product of sin and was not part of the original creation."⁴ The Institute for Creation Research's statement, from John D. Morris in an article still on its site, is that "Before Adam and Eve rebelled, animals ate only plants (Genesis 1:30)" and that "the first death in all of creation occurred when God provided Adam and Eve animal skins for clothing."⁵ If those sentences are true, the earth is young, because the fossil record is a record of animals dying.
2. No verse states that animals did not die before the Fall. Genesis 1:29-30 assigns plants as food to man and beast. It does not mention death, and it does not forbid meat. Gordon Wenham, whose Word commentary is the standard evangelical treatment, writes that "Gen 1, however, does not forbid the consumption of meat, and it may be that meat eating is envisaged from the time of the fall."⁶ Claus Westermann, the standard critical treatment, writes that the verse "does not imply any prohibition; it is an action of the creator who is making provision for his creatures."⁷ Umberto Cassuto reads a prohibition into it and says so: "It is true that the eating of flesh is not specifically forbidden here, but the prohibition is clearly to be inferred."⁸ Every reading of the verse is an inference.
3. Romans 5:12 and 1 Corinthians 15:21 are about human death, and the young-earth side concedes it. Paul writes that death spread "to all people" (eis pantas anthrōpous, εἰς πάντας ἀνθρώπους), and 1 Corinthians 15:21-22 sets "in Adam all die" against "in Christ all will be made alive," which no one applies to animals.⁹ C. E. B. Cranfield's verdict on 5:12 is "According to this verse, human death is the consequence of human sin."¹⁰ Jonathan Sarfati's own summary of his chapter on death grants that "Some of the passages explicitly refer only to human death."¹¹ The animal-death argument has to be built from other texts.
4. Those other texts are Genesis 1:29-30 with 9:3, Isaiah 11 and 65, and Romans 8:20-22. They point the same way, and none of them states the conclusion. Genesis 9:3 first permits meat to Noah "As I gave you the green plants," which reads most naturally as a change. Isaiah 11:6-9 and 65:25 picture wolves with lambs and lions eating straw, and both close with "They will no longer injure or destroy." Romans 8:20-22 puts "the sum-total of sub-human nature" under bondage from the judgment of Genesis 3, on Cranfield's reading, which the parent article Adam, the Fall, and Death sets out. Against them stand Psalm 104:21 and Job 38:39-41, where God feeds the lion and the raven's young with prey and calls it his work, and Isaiah 65:20, where people still die in the same passage that has the lion eating straw.
5. The Bible's own category for the creatures whose death matters is nephesh chayyah, and it covers fish but not insects or plants. A count over the Westminster Leningrad Codex finds the phrase nephesh chayyah (נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה, "living creature") 13 times in the sense of a creature: 10 in Genesis, 2 in Leviticus, 1 in Ezekiel. Genesis 1:20-21 applies it to what swarms in the water; Leviticus 11:10 and 11:46 apply it to water creatures; Genesis 2:7 applies it to Adam.¹² It is never applied to plants or invertebrates, which is why the movement itself allows that insects, plants, and cells died before the Fall.¹¹⁴ The category is real and it is narrower than "death."
6. The reading commits a young earth to placing every fossil predator, every fossil tumour, every venom, and every infection after Adam, and most of them in the Flood year. The bottom of the fossil record already has predation: 2.7% of more than 500 Cloudina tubes from the terminal Precambrian carry drill holes 40 to 400 micrometres across, sized to the prey.¹³ The top has a Tyrannosaurus tooth crown embedded in a hadrosaur tail vertebra with healed bone grown around it, and a coprolite that is 30 to 50% bone fragments.¹⁴¹⁵ Between them are a Permian therapsid with a venom-gland fossa and ridged teeth, a 240-million-year-old stem-turtle femur with osteosarcoma, tumours in Cretaceous hadrosaurs found by fluoroscoping more than 10,000 vertebrae, and sauropods that died with active bone infections.^16171819 The Paleobiology Database holds 24,745 fossil occurrences of theropod dinosaurs and 13,097 of Carnivora, retrieved on 5 September 2026.²⁰ On the young-earth reading all of it is post-Fall. That is the same commitment the parent article records for fossil thorns, at a much larger scale.
7. The movement knows this and says so. Todd Wood, a young-earth biologist, answered the question "Did animals eat meat before the Flood?" in 2011 with "Of course they did," and added that he had "long thought we needed a good review of the evidence that animals ate meat before the Flood."²¹ The movement's models for how carnivory arose are three: structures with latent or dual functions (Stambaugh's pandas and fruit bats; Sarfati's spiders trapping pollen), rapid post-Fall change, and direct divine action at the curse.²²¹¹ Ronald Osborn's objection is that none of them explains why "placid, plant-eating sea creatures" had to be "rapidly transformed into great white sharks and killer whales" to punish a man.²
8. Church history is a divided witness, and two of its greatest names are on the other side. Augustine asked in De Genesi ad litteram 3.16 why beasts harm one another when they have no sins, and answered "because some are the food of others."¹ He read the thorns of Genesis 3:18 as plants that "previously grew only as pasture for other animals."¹ Aquinas held that "the nature of animals was not changed by man's sin, as if those whose nature now it is to devour the flesh of others, would then have lived on herbs, as the lion and falcon."²³ On the other side Theophilus of Antioch (about 180) wrote that the animals "were not made evil or venomous from the first" but "when man transgressed, they also transgressed with him"; Irenaeus expected the animals to "revert to the food originally given by God"; Luther wrote that "if Adam had not fallen by sin, there would not have been that ferocity in wolves, lions and bears"; Wesley preached that in paradise the animals had "pleasure unmixed with pain; for pain was not yet."^24252627 Calvin, asked whether meat was eaten before the Flood, said "I affirm nothing on the subject."²⁸ Basil's Hexaemeron 9.5 describes the lion's short neck as made for a carnivore, and the "vultures were not yet looking over the earth" passage attributed to him could not be verified in a primary text and is quarantined.²⁹
9. The old-earth replies pay their own price, and the best of them say so. Hugh Ross reads Romans 5:12 as "spiritual death" only and admits the difficulty: "Are birds and mammals condemned to 'death through sin'?"³⁰ John Munday, in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, concludes that "Scripture does not demand the absence of animal death before the fall" and adds, in his last sentence, that "The consequence of concluding otherwise leads to flood geology."³¹ Michael Murray, an old-earth philosopher, grants that young-universe creationists "are in a different position" because for them pre-human animal pain "is not a problem," and then asks the question that cuts the other way: "Wouldn't God secure all the relevant goods and avoid a massive array of evil simply by creating the universe in much the way the young-universe creationist believes it was created?"³²³² Christopher Southgate's answer is that a world of "death, pain, predation, and self-assertion" is "the only sort of universe that could give rise to" the creatures we have, and he calls that "the (unprovable) assumption" of his book.³³³³

Verdict:  The texts most naturally tie animal death to the Fall and do not state it.  Romans 5 is about people.  Genesis 1:29-30, 9:3, Isaiah 11 and 65, and Romans 8 together make the young-earth reading the more natural one, but each of them can be read the other way without violence, and Augustine and Aquinas read them the other way.  The cost of the reading is that the entire fossil record of predation, disease, and venom is post-Fall and mostly Flood-year, which commits the young-earth model to the Flood geology tested in Fossil Order and the Flood.  The cost of the old-earth reading is a God who called a world of predation "very good," which its own defenders call an unprovable assumption.  Neither side should claim the text settles it.

The argument, in the movement's own words

The claim is best stated by the people who make it.  Creation Ministries International, in the list of arguments it tells its own supporters not to use, keeps this one and states it as its framework:  "Death and suffering of nephesh animals before sin are contrary to the Biblical framework above, as are suffering (or 'groaning in travail' (Rom. 8:20-22))."³  Answers in Genesis:  "If we take God at his Word, it is abundantly clear that death, and this would include animal death, is the consequence and by-product of sin and was not part of the original creation."⁴  The Institute for Creation Research, in a 1995 article by John D. Morris, then its professor of geology and afterwards its president:  "Before Adam and Eve rebelled, animals ate only plants (Genesis 1:30).  Death came as a result of sin and the curse ... The first death in all of creation occurred when God provided Adam and Eve animal skins for clothing."⁵  Sarfati's summary of the chapter on death in Refuting Compromise:  "the death of vertebrate animals, classified as nephesh chayyah along with humans, also dates from the Fall.  This is shown by the original vegetarian diet and the fact that this will be restored.  The biblical teaching of sin-death causality is, with pun intended, the death knell for any long-age compromise."¹¹

The logic is simple, which is its strength.  If no animal died before Adam sinned, then no fossil is older than Adam, and the fossil record, which is a record of animals dying, was laid down in the few thousand years since.  Every long-age reading of Genesis has to deny the first premise.  That is why Sarfati calls it the death knell, and why Ross gives it a chapter, and why Osborn, who rejects it, calls it "one (and to my mind only one) theologically serious reason why one might hold fast to a strictly literalistic or 'scientific' reading of Genesis."²

The argument has one premise that is textual, that the Bible says no animal died before the Fall, and one that is physical, that fossils are post-Fall.  This article is about the first.  The physical question is handled in Fossil Order and the Flood, and this article's job is to say exactly what that article is being asked to carry.

The texts, one at a time

The young-earth case is built from about ten passages.  Each is examined here on its own, with the strongest reading on each side.  The translation is the NET Bible unless marked.³⁴

Genesis 1:29-30 assigns food. It does not mention death

The verse reads:  "Then God said, 'I now give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the entire earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it.  They will be yours for food.  And to all the animals of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to all the creatures that move on the ground -- everything that has living breath in it -- I give every green plant for food.'  It was so."³⁴

Three things are in the text.  Plants are given to man.  Green plants are given to land animals and birds.  The next verse calls the whole "very good."  Three things are not in the text.  The word "death" does not occur.  No prohibition of meat is stated.  Sea creatures are not addressed at all, which John Munday, an old-earth evangelical, noticed:  "The exclusion of sea life from both curses at least permits the possibility of marine animal death as part of the original created order."³¹

The commentators divide on how much to infer.  Gordon Wenham, whose Word Biblical Commentary is the standard evangelical treatment, gives both halves.  First:  "V 29 permits man to eat plants and fruit, but the animals may only eat plants (30)."  Then:  "Gen 1, however, does not forbid the consumption of meat, and it may be that meat eating is envisaged from the time of the fall.  Man is expected to rule over the animals.  The LORD provided Adam with garments of skin (3:21).  Abel kept and sacrificed sheep (4:24), and Noah distinguished clean and unclean animals (7:2).  Gispen may therefore be correct in suggesting that 9:3 is ratifying the post-fall practice of meat-eating rather than inaugurating it."⁶⁶

Claus Westermann, whose three-volume commentary is the standard critical treatment, denies that the verse is a command at all.  He rejects Karl Barth's view that "a prohibition is implicitly pronounced" and writes:  "An assignment or conveyance does not imply any prohibition; it is an action of the creator who is making provision for his creatures."⁷  He then makes the point that matters most for this article.  The priestly writer, "with his precise knowledge of nature which is everywhere in evidence, certainly knew that it was not possible to conceive of all animals as vegetarian.  But P is speaking of primeval time which is not subject to the conditions of present experience."  And:  "We can never demonstrate that there was a period when neither humans nor animals ate meat."⁷

Umberto Cassuto, the Jewish commentator whose reading of Genesis 1 the young-earth side most often cites, takes the other side and is candid about it:  "It is true that the eating of flesh is not specifically forbidden here, but the prohibition is clearly to be inferred."  He reads the verse as "a kind of idealized picture of the primeval world situation," in which "Not only man but even the animals were expected to show reverence for the principle of life."⁸⁸  The rabbinic tradition he stands in is older than any of the fathers.  Rashi's comment on 1:29 is that God "did not permit Adam to kill any creature and eat its flesh, but all alike were to eat herbs," citing Sanhedrin 59b, where Rav is reported as saying "Meat was not permitted to Adam, the first man, for consumption."³⁵³⁶  Note what both say and do not say.  They forbid Adam to eat meat.  They do not say that lions did not.

J. Barton Payne, a conservative who allowed long ages, denied the animal half flatly:  "Genesis 1:30, for example, does not restrict animals to a vegetarian diet, though this is often claimed."³⁷  Hugh Ross records the young-earth reading accurately, "Creation science teaches that all animals ate only plants until Adam and Eve rebelled against God's authority," and rejects it.³⁸

The honest summary is that the verse assigns a diet and the reader supplies the rest.  A young-earth reader supplies "and nothing else."  An old-earth reader supplies "as a general provision."  Cassuto, who is not a creationist, thinks the first is what the author meant.  Westermann, who is not a creationist either, thinks the author was describing a primeval time and not making a claim that could be checked.  Both are inferences.

Genesis 2:17 and 3:19 are about the man

"For when you eat from it you will surely die" (2:17) is addressed to the man.  "For you are dust, and to dust you will return" (3:19) is addressed to the man.³⁴  Neither verse mentions animals.  Cranfield's comment on Romans 5:12 is precise about what the Genesis text supplies:  its first two clauses "do not go beyond what is explicit in Gen 2.17b and 3.3, 19."  That is, sin entered and death entered through Adam.  What is not explicit anywhere in the Old Testament, he says, is that death "reached all men" through him, and he notes that "Ecclus 25.24 is the earliest passage to assert that physical death is due to the Fall."¹⁰  If the Old Testament does not state that human death is due to the Fall until Ben Sira in the second century BC, it certainly does not state it of animals.

Ronald Osborn, a Seventh-day Adventist critic of literalism, presses one more point from the same chapter:  "According to Genesis, Adam and Eve were not created deathless or immortal in their physical persons ... the only basis for humans avoiding death was their ongoing access to the fruit of the tree of life in the Garden of Eden, from which they were barred by the cherubim."²  Munday makes the same observation and adds that the tree of life "was never offered to animals."³¹  A young-earth reader can grant the point.  The reading does not require that animals were immortal by nature;  it requires that none of them died.  Those are different claims, and the second is the one the fossils test.

Genesis 3:21 and 4:4 record the first animal deaths in the story

After the Fall, "The LORD God made garments from skin for Adam and his wife, and clothed them" (3:21), and Abel "brought some of the firstborn of his flock" as an offering (4:4).³⁴  The young-earth side reads 3:21 as the first death in creation, and says so:  "The first death in all of creation occurred when God provided Adam and Eve animal skins for clothing."⁵  The text does not say that.  It says God made garments from skin.  That the skins came from animals killed for the purpose, and that no animal had died before, are inferences, and the second one is the whole question.

What the two verses do establish is narrower and worth stating.  Within the narrative, the first animal deaths that the reader is shown come after the Fall, and both are at God's hand or with God's approval.  That is consistent with the young-earth reading.  It is not evidence for it, because a story that begins with two people in a garden has no occasion to mention a lion killing a deer.

Romans 5:12 and 1 Corinthians 15:21 speak of human death

This is the text the young-earth argument most often opens with, and it is the one that does not carry the weight.  The Greek of Romans 5:12 is:  "Διὰ τοῦτο ὥσπερ δι' ἑνὸς ἀνθρώπου ἡ ἁμαρτία εἰς τὸν κόσμον εἰσῆλθεν καὶ διὰ τῆς ἁμαρτίας ὁ θάνατος, καὶ οὕτως εἰς πάντας ἀνθρώπους ὁ θάνατος διῆλθεν ἐφ' ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον."⁹  Death "spread to all people," eis pantas anthrōpous.  The next verses continue with people:  "death reigned from Adam until Moses even over those who did not sin in the same way that Adam ... transgressed" (5:14).  First Corinthians 15:21-22 is tighter still:  "For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead also came through a man.  For just as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive."³⁴  The "all" who die in Adam are the "all" who will be made alive in Christ.  No one applies the second to animals.

Cranfield, whose International Critical Commentary is the most careful modern treatment of the Greek, is unambiguous:  "According to this verse, human death is the consequence of human sin."¹⁰  Munday's verdict in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society:  "This appeal is overextended, however, because Paul says that 'death came to all men,' not to all creation nor to all animals."³¹  Ross:  "Note that the death Adam experienced is carefully qualified in the text as being visited on 'all men' -- not on plants and animals, just on human beings (Romans 5:12,18-19)."³⁰

The young-earth side, at its best, concedes this.  Sarfati's own chapter summary in Refuting Compromise says:  "Some of the passages explicitly refer only to human death, but even this is a problem because evolutionists date fossils of modern humans as earlier than Ross's dates for Adam.  But the death of vertebrate animals, classified as nephesh chayyah along with humans, also dates from the Fall.  This is shown by the original vegetarian diet and the fact that this will be restored."¹¹  That is the correct shape of the argument.  Romans 5 gives human death.  Animal death has to come from Genesis 1:29-30 and Isaiah 11, and it stands or falls with them.

Two things should be said for the young-earth side here.  First, Romans 5:12 does establish that human physical death is a consequence of sin, and Ross's alternative, that Paul means "spiritual death" only, is weak.  Cranfield's whole discussion assumes physical death;  Genesis 3:19 is about dust.  Ross himself has to grant that "Apparently Adam and Eve had the potential for eternal physical life before and after sinning against God."³⁰  Second, if human death is a consequence of sin, then no human fossil is pre-Fall, and Sarfati's point about the dating of modern human fossils is a real problem for Ross's own chronology.  That problem is not this article's;  it belongs to Pre-Human Hominins and Dating the Earth.

Romans 8:20-22 is the strongest text, and the parent article owns it

"For the creation was subjected to futility -- not willingly but because of God who subjected it -- in hope that the creation itself will also be set free from the bondage of decay ... For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers together until now."³⁴  The parent article sets out the exegesis:  Cranfield rules out every reading of ktisis except "the sum-total of sub-human nature both animate and inanimate," and takes the aorist "was subjected" as "the judgment related in Gen 3.17-19";  Dunn agrees that "the primary allusion is to the Adam narratives";  Ross reads the subjection as the creation itself.³⁹  This article adds only the Reformers' reading, because it bears on the animals.

Calvin on 8:20-21, in the 1849 Calvin Translation Society edition:  "For in the sad disorder which followed the fall of Adam, the whole machinery of the world would have instantly become deranged, and all its parts would have failed had not some hidden strength supported them."  And:  "all created things in themselves blameless, both on earth and in the visible heaven, undergo punishment for our sins; for it has not happened through their own fault, that they are liable to corruption.  Thus the condemnation of mankind is imprinted on the heavens, and on the earth, and on all creatures."⁴⁰⁴⁰  Wesley built a whole sermon on the passage, "The General Deliverance" (1781), and applied Romans 5:12 to the animals in so many words:  "Thus, 'as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; even so death passed upon all men;' and not on man only, but on those creatures also that 'did not sin after the similitude of Adam's transgression.'"²⁷

That is the strongest form of the young-earth reading, and it is a reading of Romans 8 through Romans 5, not a statement in either.  Michael Murray, an old-earth philosopher, states the traditional position fairly:  "the texts were not traditionally interpreted in such a way that human- and nonhuman-animal death were regarded differently, and for obvious reasons.  Death seems intrinsically evil, since it is contrary to the natural good of the creature which undergoes it."³²  The reader should notice that this is a theological premise, not a verse.

Isaiah 11 and 65 describe a future, and Isaiah 65:20 has death in it

"A wolf will reside with a lamb, and a leopard will lie down with a young goat; an ox and a young lion will graze together, as a small child leads them along ... A lion, like an ox, will eat straw ... They will no longer injure or destroy on my entire royal mountain" (Isa 11:6-9).  "A wolf and a lamb will graze together; a lion, like an ox, will eat straw, and a snake's food will be dirt.  They will no longer injure or destroy on my entire royal mountain, says the LORD" (Isa 65:25).³⁴

The young-earth argument from these verses is that a restoration implies an original.  Sarfati:  "Significantly, both passages close with indications that this reflects a more ideal world and the current world does not: 'They shall not hurt or destroy ...'  These indicate that hurting, harming, and destroying animal life would not have been part of a 'very good' creation."¹¹  Irenaeus made the same argument in the second century, and expected the animals to "revert to the food originally given by God (for they had been originally subjected in obedience to Adam), that is, the productions of the earth."²⁵  Wenham notes that the prophets' expectation "is often thought to reflect this idea; the new age will be a return to paradise."⁶

Three things weaken the argument.  First, the passages are pictures of a future, and a future can be better than the original without the original having been the same.  Sarfati himself affirms that "the new creation will be even grander than the original paradise."¹¹  Second, five verses before the lion eats straw, Isaiah 65:20 says:  "Never again will one of her infants live just a few days or an old man die before his time.  Indeed, no one will die before the age of one hundred; anyone who fails to reach the age of one hundred will be considered cursed."³⁴  People die in the same picture.  If the passage is a return to Eden, it is a return to an Eden with human death in it, which no one holds.  Munday's conclusion is that the lion-lamb peace "is not strictly 'postdictive' of Eden nor predictive of a future absence of creature death."³¹  Third, the snake eating dirt in 65:25 echoes the curse of Genesis 3:14, so the picture keeps one element of the curse while removing others.  The passages are not a photograph of the world before the Fall.  They are the best textual evidence that the prophets thought predation was not the ideal, which is a weaker and truer claim.

Psalm 104 and Job 38-41 describe the present world, and God owns it

"The lions roar for prey, seeking their food from God" (Ps 104:21).  "Do you hunt prey for the lioness and satisfy the appetite of the lions when they crouch in their dens, when they wait in ambush in the thicket?  Who prepares prey for the raven, when its young cry out to God and wander about for lack of food?" (Job 38:39-41).  Of the eagle:  "its young ones devour the blood, and where the dead carcasses are, there it is" (Job 39:30).³⁴³⁴

Osborn calls the Job speeches "Jewish Scripture's clearest answer to the problem not only of human but also of animal suffering," and concludes that "the Creator takes full responsibility for animal predation, and there is no hint that it is anything other than very good."²  That last clause overreaches:  Job 38-41 does not call predation "very good";  it calls it God's.  But the overreach is small.  Nothing in either passage suggests that the lion's hunt is a corruption.

The young-earth reply is that both passages describe the present world.  Sarfati:  "this psalm is a poetic version of Genesis.  It is in part a hymn to God's acts in the past -- note the past tense of the verbs from verses 3-9.  But it is also a hymn of praise for God's provisions in the present ... So Psalm 104:21 deals with the present day, not the original creation."¹¹  The reply is correct as far as it goes.  Psalm 104:35 asks that sinners "disappear from the earth," so the psalmist knows he is describing a fallen world.  What the reply cannot remove is the tone.  The psalmist and the author of Job describe predation as God feeding his creatures, and they do so without a hint of apology.  A reader who believes predation is a curse has to hold that two of the Bible's longest celebrations of creation praise God for the effects of the curse without saying so.

Genesis 9:3 is the first permission, not necessarily the first meat

"You may eat any moving thing that lives.  As I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything" (Gen 9:3).³⁴  The verse repeats the formula of 1:29 and extends it.  Wenham, quoted above, allows two readings:  that 9:3 inaugurates meat-eating, or that it "is ratifying the post-fall practice of meat-eating rather than inaugurating it."⁶  Calvin took the second.  On 9:3 he wrote that "nearly all commentators infer, that it was not lawful for man to eat flesh before the deluge ... But the argument is not sufficiently firm," because "they had before offered sacrifices to God, and were also permitted to kill wild beasts, from the hides and skins of which, they might make for themselves garments and tents."  Then:  "But since it is of little consequence what opinion is held, I affirm nothing on the subject."²⁸

Two things should be noticed.  Genesis 9:3 is about what people may eat, not about what lions did.  And even on the strictest reading, the change it records is at the Flood, not at the Fall, which is why the young-earth side has to argue that animal carnivory began at the Fall while human meat-eating was first permitted 1,656 years later.  That is possible.  It is not what the text says.

The scorecard

Read down the last column.  There is no row where the text states the young-earth conclusion, and no row where the text contradicts it.  That is why the verdict of this article is that the texts most naturally tie animal death to the Fall and do not state it.

Which creatures the Bible counts as living

The young-earth argument is not that nothing died before the Fall.  Plants were eaten (Gen 1:29-30).  The argument is about a category the Hebrew text supplies:  nephesh chayyah (נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה), usually "living creature" of animals and "living being" of Adam in 2:7.  Sarfati:  "the creatures affected were those the Bible calls nephesh chayyah.  When it refers to man, it is often translated 'living soul,' but, of other creatures, including fish, it is often translated 'living creature.'  However, it is never applied to plants or invertebrates.  Therefore, there is a qualitative difference between the deaths of the (vertebrate) animals called nephesh chayyah and plant death."¹¹  The CMI list quoted in the summary uses the same word.³

The claim can be counted, so it was.  A Deno script in this article's research/ folder reads the Westminster Leningrad Codex with the Open Scriptures morphology and finds every place the noun nephesh is immediately followed by chay.¹²  There are 20.  Seven are the noun nephesh followed by chay as a noun meaning "life" -- four times the plural chayyim, as in "my soul is weary of my life" (Job 10:1), and three times the feminine singular chayyah with a suffix, "his life" or "their life" (Ps 78:50;  Job 33:22, 36:14).  Neither is the expression in question.  The other 13 are the adjective phrase, and they are:

Four results follow.  First, Sarfati is right that the phrase is never used of plants.  Second, he is right that it is used of fish, so a reading that puts animal death at the Fall has to put all fish death at the Fall too, and the sea creatures that Genesis 1:30 does not address are pulled back in by 1:20-21.  Third, the phrase is never used of insects or any invertebrate by name, but Genesis 1:20 and Leviticus 11:10 apply it to what "swarms" in the water, and Leviticus 11:10 is about "all the swarming things of the water and ... all the living creatures that are in the water," which includes shellfish.  Whether the phrase excludes invertebrates or merely never happens to name them is not something the 13 verses settle.  Fourth, the phrase is used of Adam, so it is not a term for animals as against people;  it is a term for breathing life.

The young-earth side has drawn its line accordingly, and the line is worth stating in the movement's own words because critics often attack a position it does not hold.  Sarfati:  "We have never taught that plants didn't die before the Fall, but only nephesh chayyah."¹¹  On insects:  "The Bible appears not to regard insects and other invertebrates as 'living,' in the same sense as humans and vertebrate animals -- the Hebrew never refers to them as nephesh chayyah ... Also, insects don't have the same sort of 'blood' that vertebrates do, yet 'the life of the flesh is in the blood' (Lev. 17:11).  Therefore, the pre-Fall diet of animals did not necessarily exclude invertebrates."¹¹  On cells:  "cells are hardly nephesh chayyah."¹¹  Answers in Genesis, answering the question whether Adam could have stepped on an ant, allows in a footnote that "it is possible that nephesh life must have blood ... It might be implied from this that insects may have died before the fall," and then argues the other way from the diet of 1:30.⁴

Ross ridicules the distinction:  "But even plants suffer when they are eaten.  They experience bleeding, bruising, scarring, and death.  Why is the suffering of plants acceptable and not that of animals?"³⁰  That is not a serious objection;  plants have no nervous system.  The serious objection is the one the 13 verses raise.  If the category is "creatures with the breath of life," it includes the fish, and the fossil record of fish predation goes to the bottom of the vertebrate record.  If the category is drawn by blood (Lev 17:11), then the trilobites and Cloudina of the next section are outside it, and the young-earth reading is not committed to their deaths being post-Fall.  Either way, the young-earth reading has to put every fossil vertebrate that was eaten, diseased, or envenomed after Adam.  The next section is about how much that is.

What the reading commits a young earth to

If no nephesh chayyah died before Adam sinned, then every fossil of one that died by predation, disease, or venom was buried after the Fall.  On the young-earth chronology the Fall is within the first years of Adam's 930, and the Flood is 1,656 years later (Gen 5, Masoretic text).  The young-earth Flood models place the bulk of the fossil-bearing column in the Flood year, so most of those fossils are also Flood-year;  see Fossil Order and the Flood for where the models draw the boundaries.  This section lists what has to be absorbed.  The dates are the conventional ones and are given so the reader can see where in the column each item sits;  the young-earth side rejects the dates, not the fossils.

Predation is present at the bottom of the animal fossil record

Cloudina is a tube-forming animal from the terminal Precambrian, the earliest known animal with a mineralised skeleton.  Stefan Bengtson and Zhao Yue reported in Science in 1992 that "Of more than 500 tubes from Shaanxi Province, China, 2.7% have rounded holes 40 to 400 micrometers in diameter.  The relation between the size of the holes and the width of the bored tubes suggests that the attacking organism was a predator, selecting its prey for size."¹³  A 2018 review in Biological Reviews by Russell Bicknell and John Paterson, covering the whole early record of shell-crushing and drilling, finds that "The oldest known example of durophagy is shell damage on the problematic taxon Mobergella holsti from the early Cambrian (possibly Terreneuvian) of Sweden," and that "specimens of the ubiquitous Ediacaran shelly fossil Cloudina also show putative drilling traces."⁴¹

Whether these count against the young-earth reading depends on the line drawn in the previous section.  Cloudina and Mobergella are invertebrates with no blood.  On Sarfati's reading they are not nephesh chayyah and their deaths prove nothing about the Fall.  What they do show is that the fossil record is a record of predation from its first mineralised animals onward, so the reading cannot be that predation is a late arrival in the column.

Predation is present at the top, with healed wounds

Robert DePalma and colleagues reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2013 "definitive evidence of predation by T. rex: a tooth crown embedded in a hadrosaurid caudal centrum, surrounded by healed bone growth.  This indicates that the prey escaped and lived for some time after the injury, providing direct evidence of predatory behavior by T. rex."  The specimen came from the Hell Creek Formation of South Dakota.¹⁴  Healed bone is the point.  A bite mark on a bone could be scavenging;  a bone that grew around the tooth was bitten while the animal was alive.

Karen Chin and colleagues described in Nature in 1998 a Cretaceous coprolite "more than twice as large as any previously reported carnivore coprolite," attributed to a tyrannosaur, which "contains a high proportion (30-50%) of bone fragments."¹⁵  That is a meal, not a bite.

The young-earth side accepts this.  Todd Wood, a young-earth biologist who has written more candidly than anyone else in the movement about its evidential problems, titled a 2011 post "Did animals eat meat before the Flood?" and opened:  "Of course they did.  That seems like an obvious answer.  After all, I don't imagine T. rex sitting down to a salad every day."  He listed the evidence a reviewer should collect:  "bones with tooth marks on them ... bones with tooth damage that has healed, indicating that there was some kind of attack while the animal was still alive.  You could also look at stomach contents or even coprolite (fossil feces) contents."²¹  Note what this concedes and what it does not.  It concedes carnivory before the Flood.  It places it after the Fall, because on the young-earth chronology everything in the Phanerozoic column is after the Fall.  There is no fossil that could distinguish the two, because on that chronology no fossil is pre-Fall.

Venom is present in the Permian

Euchambersia mirabilis is a therapsid, a mammal-line reptile, from the Permian of South Africa.  Julien Benoit and colleagues re-examined it by micro-CT in 2017 and concluded that it "manifests evidence of all characteristics of venomous animals: a venom gland (in the maxillary fossa), a mechanism to deliver the venom (the maxillary canal and/or the sulcus located ventrally to the fossa); and an apparatus with which to inflict a wound for venom delivery (the ridged dentition)."¹⁶  The authors are careful:  they consider and do not exclude the alternative that the fossa held a nerve ganglion.  The point for this article is not that the case is closed.  It is that a venom apparatus in a Permian vertebrate, on the young-earth reading, is a post-Fall structure in a Flood-year fossil.

Jerry Bergman's treatment of poisons for the Journal of Creation shows the shape of the young-earth answer.  He argues that "a false dichotomy exists between poisonous and non-poisonous chemicals," that "Nothing is toxic in small amounts, and all chemicals are toxic at high levels," and that "A major reason for toxins in this post-Fall world is to maintain the ecological balance so necessary for life to exist on the Earth."⁴²  That answers the chemistry.  It does not answer a gland connected by a groove to a ridged tooth.

Disease and cancer are present throughout

Bruce Rothschild and colleagues fluoroscoped dinosaur vertebrae from museum collections and reported in Naturwissenschaften in 2003:  "Among more than 10,000 specimens x-rayed, tumors were only found in Cretaceous hadrosaurs (duck-billed dinosaurs).  These included hemangiomas and metastatic cancer (previously identified in dinosaurs), desmoplastic fibroma, and osteoblastoma."¹⁸  Yara Haridy and colleagues, with Rothschild, reported in JAMA Oncology in 2019 "bone cancer in a 240-million-year-old reptilian amniote from the Triassic period," a periosteal osteosarcoma on the femur of "the shell-less stem-turtle Pappochelys rosinae" from Germany, specimen SMNS 91680.¹⁷  A 2020 letter in The Lancet Oncology is titled "First case of osteosarcoma in a dinosaur: a multimodal diagnosis."⁴³

Infection is commoner than cancer.  A 2026 study of sauropods from the Upper Cretaceous Bauru Group of Brazil described six specimens with osteomyelitis, bone infection, and found that "Healing tissues were not identified, which implies that the individuals died when the infection was still active."¹⁹  A 2024 review of South American abelisaurid theropods found spondyloarthropathy in one holotype and concluded that "Among non-avian theropods, traumatic injuries are better represented than other maladies (e.g., infection, congenital or metabolic diseases, etc.)."⁴⁴  Traumatic injuries in large theropods are, in the main, injuries from fighting and hunting.

The size of the commitment

The Paleobiology Database, queried on 5 September 2026, returns 24,745 fossil occurrences for Theropoda, the clade that contains every large carnivorous dinosaur, and 13,097 for Carnivora, the mammalian order of cats, dogs, bears, and seals.²⁰  An occurrence is one taxon at one collection site, so the number of individuals is larger.  Every one of these, on the young-earth reading, lived and died in the 1,656 years between Adam and the Flood or in the Flood year itself, and their carnivory is a post-Fall condition.  The parent article records the same commitment for fossil thorns from the Devonian upward, in Creation Ministries International's own words:  "these Devonian spiny plants cannot have been buried and fossilized until after Adam sinned."⁴⁵  Thorns are a few hundred specimens.  Predators are tens of thousands.

None of this is an argument against a young earth by itself.  It is a statement of what a young earth must include.  If the Flood laid down the Phanerozoic column, then the Flood laid down the predators, the tumours, the venom, and the infections, and the young-earth reading of Genesis 1:30 costs nothing more than the Flood geology already costs.  The reader who wants to know whether the Flood did lay down the column should go to Fossil Order and the Flood and Catastrophic Plate Tectonics.  What the reader should not accept is a version of the argument that treats the fossil record of predation as a minor detail.  It is the whole fossil record.

What the movement says about how carnivores came to be

If lions were made to eat plants and now eat meat, something changed.  The young-earth literature offers three accounts, and Osborn's summary of them is fair enough to quote:  "One can imagine three possible replies (or a combination of them) to this riddle that would conform to highly literalistic interpretations of Genesis that assume all death in nature to have resulted directly from Adam's fall."²

The first is that the structures were there and were used for something else.  James Stambaugh's 1991 paper in the Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal, still the movement's fullest treatment, argues from living animals:  "Most bats, although they have teeth that can cut flesh, are either insectivores or fruitivores."  "Although it eats only bamboo, the teeth and jaw structure of the Panda, like the other bears, appear to be designed for eating meat."  "The bear family in this sense could be the strongest link to the pre-fall world among modern carnivores."  He concludes from the lizards that "the rarity of carnivory is consistent with the idea that carnivory is a late introduction to God's creation."²²²²  Sarfati adds spiders:  "Before the Fall, many attack/defense structures could have been used in a vegetarian lifestyle.  For example, even today, some baby spiders use their webs to trap pollen for food, and there was the case of a lion that wouldn't eat meat."¹¹

The second is post-Fall change by ordinary biological means, which the movement's own creation biologists study under the name of rapid post-Flood diversification.  The third is that God changed the animals at the curse, which is what the older writers held;  Luther's "venomous and noxious beasts and reptiles first came out of the earth as accursed for the sin of man" is the plain form of it.²⁶

Osborn's objection applies to all three, and it is a theological objection, not a scientific one:  "But why, we must ask, should Adam's disobedience have required placid, plant-eating sea creatures to be rapidly transformed into great white sharks and killer whales plying the oceans in search of seals to be devoured in dark places where no human eye ever falls (not to mention velociraptors and tyrannosauruses)?  What kind of just and loving God would not merely permit but positively require this to happen?"²  Murray states the same objection as the "Fragility Objection":  "how could it be the case that the moral sin of Adam could yield the result that animals become subject to pain, suffering, and death?  What transformation could animals undergo?"³²

The weakness of the first account is easy to state.  A panda's teeth are a bear's teeth used for bamboo;  they are not evidence that a bear's teeth were made for bamboo.  A fruit bat is not a vampire bat.  A single lion raised by people that would not eat meat is an anecdote about imprinting.  The account shows that carnivore anatomy is not always used for carnivory, which everyone grants.  It does not show that any carnivore's anatomy is better explained as a plant-eating design.  The weakness of the third account is that it makes God the designer of the venom gland, which is what the young-earth reading was meant to avoid.  Osborn's point stands:  the young-earth reading does not remove the theodicy problem;  it moves it from creation to the curse.

The honest young-earth position is Wood's.  The fossils show carnivory, the text is read as putting it after the Fall, and the mechanism is unknown.  That is a defensible position.  It should be stated in those words.

Church history is a divided witness, and two of its greatest names are on the other side

The young-earth literature presents the pre-Fall vegetarian creation as the historic Christian view.  Sarfati:  "We have documented that Basil the Great, John Calvin and John Wesley also understood Genesis 1:29-30 as teaching that animals were all created vegetarian.  So it's Ross's view that is the aberration."⁴⁶  The record is more divided than that, and the division runs through the two most influential theologians of the Latin church.

Augustine: some animals are the food of others

Augustine's De Genesi ad litteram (about 415) is his longest and most careful commentary on Genesis 1-3.  In book 3, discussing the sixth day, he raises the question directly and answers it.  The Latin, from the Nuova Biblioteca Agostiniana text at augustinus.it, at 3.16.25:

Dicet aliquis:  Cur ergo invicem bestiae nocent, quibus nec peccata ulla sunt, ut vindicta ista dicatur, nec ullam recipiunt tali exercitatione virtutem?  Ideo nimirum, quia scilicet aliae cibi sunt aliarum.  Nec recte possumus dicere:  Non essent aliae quibus aliae vescerentur.  Habent enim omnia, quamdiu sunt, mensuras, numeros, ordines suos.¹

In English:  "Someone will say:  why then do beasts harm one another, since they have no sins for this to be called a punishment, nor do they gain any virtue by such exercise?  Plainly because some are the food of others.  Nor can we rightly say:  there should not be some for others to feed on.  For all things, as long as they exist, have their own measures, numbers, and orders."  He goes on to say that these movements of the lower creation, "from the greatest elephants to the smallest worms," give a man wholesome warnings about his own salvation, and that "some seek the refreshment of their own body from the bodies of others" (quaedam refectionem corporis sui ex aliorum corporibus quaerunt).¹  The question he answers is the question of this article, and his answer is that predation belongs to the order of creation, not to the curse.

He confirms it two chapters later on the thorns of Genesis 3:18.  He allows that thorns may have begun to grow at the curse, but prefers the reading that the earth "was bearing these things even before, but not bearing them for man's labour; rather as suitable food for animals of every kind," so that the word tibi, "for you," is the point:  thorns now began "to grow for you, for your toil, which before grew only as pasture for other animals" (quae ad pastum tantummodo aliis animalibus antea nascebantur).¹  Augustine, in other words, read the curse of Genesis 3 as a change in man's relation to a world that already had thorns and predators in it.  That is Hugh Ross's reading, sixteen centuries early.  It is not a reading forced on Augustine by geology;  there was none.

Aquinas: the nature of animals was not changed by man's sin

Thomas Aquinas took the question up in the Summa Theologiae, in the question on man's mastership over the animals in the state of innocence (I q. 96 a. 1).  The second objection is that "many animals are hostile to one another, as the sheep and the wolf."  His reply, in the Dominican Fathers' translation:

In the opinion of some, those animals which now are fierce and kill others, would, in that state, have been tame, not only in regard to man, but also in regard to other animals.  But this is quite unreasonable.  For the nature of animals was not changed by man's sin, as if those whose nature now it is to devour the flesh of others, would then have lived on herbs, as the lion and falcon.  Nor does Bede's gloss on Genesis 1:30 say that trees and herbs were given as food to all animals and birds, but to some.  Thus there would have been a natural antipathy between some animals.²³

The Latin at the decisive clause is "Non enim per peccatum hominis natura animalium est mutata, ut quibus nunc naturale est comedere aliorum animalium carnes, tunc vixissent de herbis, sicut leones et falcones."²³  Aquinas knew the vegetarian-creation view;  he calls it the opinion of some, and he calls it "quite unreasonable" (omnino irrationabile).  He also read Genesis 1:30 as giving plants to some animals, not all.  Murray, who cites Aquinas for the view that "all death must be a result of the Fall," is quoting Aquinas on human death;  on animals, Aquinas is on the other side.³²

Theophilus, Irenaeus, Luther, Calvin, and Wesley tie animal ferocity to the Fall

The other tradition is older than Augustine and continued after Aquinas.

Theophilus of Antioch, about 180, in To Autolycus 2.17:  the wild beasts were "not as if they had been made evil or venomous from the first -- for nothing was made evil by God, but all things good, yea, very good -- but the sin in which man was concerned brought evil upon them.  For when man transgressed, they also transgressed with him ... When, therefore, man again shall have made his way back to his natural condition, and no longer does evil, those also shall be restored to their original gentleness."²⁴  This is the earliest Christian statement of the view, and it is explicit.

Irenaeus, about the same date, in Against Heresies 5.33.4, applying Isaiah 11 to the resurrection:  "it is right that when the creation is restored, all the animals should obey and be in subjection to man, and revert to the food originally given by God (for they had been originally subjected in obedience to Adam), that is, the productions of the earth."²⁵  He adds that he is "quite aware that some persons endeavour to refer these words to the case of savage men," so the allegorical reading of Isaiah 11 was already current in the second century, and he rejected it.

Basil of Caesarea is claimed for this side, and the claim rests on a passage this article could not verify.  His Hexaemeron, which was read and checked, says in homily 9.5 that bears, lions, and tigers "have short necks buried in their shoulders; it is because they do not live upon grass and have no need to bend down to the earth; they are carnivorous and eat the animals upon whom they prey," and that prey animals bear many young "for fear lest these species should disappear, consumed by carnivorous animals."²⁹  That is a description of the present order as designed.  The passage the young-earth side quotes, in which "vultures were not yet looking over the earth at the very moment when the animals were born," is attributed to a different homily, on the origin of humanity, and reaches the creationist literature through Seraphim Rose's 2000 book from the Greek in Migne's Patrologia Graeca volume 30.⁴⁷  No primary text of that homily could be reached for this article, so the quotation is in quarantine.md and not used.  Basil may well have held both views;  a father who says God made the lion's neck for meat and also that no animal died in Eden would not be the last to hold the two together.

Luther, in the Lectures on Genesis (1535-45), held the view plainly and drew the consequences.  On the third day:  "It is quite evident that in the beginning of the world the food of man was herbs."  On 1:30:  "I have no doubt also that Adam would have refused to taste those various kinds of flesh," and "I believe also that venomous and noxious beasts and reptiles first came out of the earth as accursed for the sin of man."  On 2:1-3:  "It is moreover true that if Adam had not fallen by sin, there would not have been that ferocity in wolves, lions and bears, which now characterizes them.  And most certainly also there would have been nothing in the whole creation noxious or annoying to man.  For the text before us plainly declares that all things God had created were 'very good.'"²⁶²⁶²⁶  That last sentence is the whole young-earth argument from Genesis 1:31, in Luther's words.

Calvin is more careful than either side reports.  On 1:24 he wrote that some Hebrew commentators distinguished cattle, which eat herbage, from beasts of the earth, which eat flesh, "But the Lord, a little while after, assigns herbs to both as their common food."²⁸  So Calvin read 1:30 as vegetarian.  But when he came to the question whether men ate meat before the Flood, on 1:29 he refused to decide:  "I think it will be better for us to assert nothing concerning this matter.  Let it suffice for us, that herbs and the fruits of trees were given them as their common food."²⁸  On 9:3 he leaned the other way and again refused:  "I affirm nothing on the subject."²⁸  On Romans 8 he held that the whole creation "undergo[es] punishment for our sins."⁴⁰  Sarfati's "Calvin ... understood Genesis 1:29-30 as teaching that animals were all created vegetarian" is defensible from the comment on 1:24;  it should be paired with Calvin's refusal to say what the animals or the men actually ate.

Wesley's sermon "The General Deliverance" (1781), on Romans 8:19-22, is the fullest statement of the view in English.  Of the animals in paradise:  "And they were all surrounded, not only with plenteous food, but with every thing that could give them pleasure; pleasure unmixed with pain; for pain was not yet; it had not entered into paradise.  And they too were immortal."²⁷  Of the present:  "Is it only the lion, the tiger, the wolf, among the inhabitants of the forest and plains -- the shark, and a few more voracious monsters, among the inhabitants of the waters, -- or the eagle, among birds, -- that tears the flesh, sucks the blood, and crushes the bones of their helpless fellow-creatures?  Nay; the harmless fly, the laborious ant, the painted butterfly, are treated in the same merciless manner, even by the innocent songsters of the grove!"  He estimated that "an immense majority of creatures, perhaps a million to one, can no otherwise preserve their own lives, than by destroying their fellow-creatures!"²⁷  Wesley, notice, counted the insects.

The tally

Murray, who has no stake in the young-earth reading, summarises the history this way:  "premodern theists were not much inclined to apply this reasoning to explain pain and suffering in the nonhuman-animal world," and the flat denial of pre-human animal pain "was the most common form of Fall CD prior to the seventeenth century, since the most frequently endorsed cosmology had it that human and nonhuman animals were created together in the garden of Eden."³²³²  Both halves are true.  Most premodern writers assumed the animals were created with man and that the world was young;  few of them asked the question this article asks;  the two who asked it most carefully, Augustine and Aquinas, answered that predation is not a curse.  The young-earth side cannot claim the fathers as a bloc, and the old-earth side cannot claim that the vegetarian Eden is a modern invention.  Theophilus had it in 180.

The old-earth replies, and what they cost

Four old-earth treatments are examined here, from the most popular to the most rigorous.  Each is quoted at the point where it concedes something.

Ross: spiritual death, soulish animals, and suffering plants

Hugh Ross's Creation and Time (1994) gives the argument a chapter and answers it in four moves.  First, Romans 5:12 is about spiritual death:  "The book of Romans discusses four kinds of death: death to the law, death to sin, physical death, and spiritual death.  Romans 5:12 addresses neither physical nor soulish death.  It addresses spiritual death."³⁰  Second, Paul's "all men" excludes animals.³⁰  Third, the animals that matter are "soulish" birds and mammals, and even for them "The difficulty with this adjusted interpretation remains: Are birds and mammals condemned to 'death through sin'?"³⁰  Fourth, plants suffer too.³⁰

The second move is sound and this article agrees with it.  The first is not.  Cranfield's discussion of 5:12 assumes physical death throughout, Genesis 3:19 is about dust, and Ross has to concede a page later that "Adam and Eve had the potential for eternal physical life before and after sinning against God," which is physical death entering by sin under another name.³⁰  The fourth is not serious.  Ross's real position is the one he states in a sentence:  "no reason is found to deny physical death for nonhuman life previous to Adam's sin."³⁰  That is a claim about the silence of the text, and it is correct, but it is a claim that the text does not forbid his reading, not that it supports it.

Munday: the curse is on the ground, and the alternative is Flood geology

John Munday's 1992 article in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society is the most careful old-earth evangelical treatment of the texts.  His method is to read each curse in Genesis for what it names.  "The key conclusion is that the curse of Genesis 3 involves the ground's response to man's disobedience to God.  Neither this curse nor any other, in context, explicitly involves a fundamental alteration of the law-order of the cosmos or of the life-death cycle of the animal realm.  No such changes even seem to be implied."³¹  From the texts as a whole:  "it is concluded that Scripture does not require that the curse of Gen 3:17 initiated animal death."³¹  His final paragraph:  "The conclusion is that Scripture does not demand the absence of animal death before the fall.  The consequence of concluding otherwise leads to flood geology."³¹

That last sentence is the one this article most agrees with, from the other direction.  Munday means it as a reductio:  the young-earth reading leads to Flood geology, and Flood geology is false, so the reading is false.  The young-earth reader accepts the first step and disputes the second.  Either way, Munday has located the argument correctly.  The animal-death argument is not an independent proof of a young earth.  It is a reading of Genesis that stands or falls with the Flood.

Osborn: the young-earth reading does not solve the theodicy, it relocates it

Ronald Osborn's Death Before the Fall (2014) is a theodicy, and its central claim about the young-earth reading is that it fails on its own terms.  "It is time that biblical literalists at least candidly acknowledge that the challenges they face are not only scientific but theological and moral as well, and that these problems are no less great for them than for process creationists or theistic evolutionists."²  The problem is the curse:  a God who transforms plant-eaters into sharks to punish a man is not a smaller problem than a God who made sharks.  Osborn's own answer, that creation was "mortal, free, ongoing and very good from the start," rests on the Job speeches and on the silence of Genesis.²

His concession is on Genesis 1:30, and he makes it in the same paragraph in which he argues around it:  "The strongest argument against such a reading is Genesis 1:30, in which the animals are given 'every green herb for meat.'  But we must note that while this verse hints against predation being willed by God, it does not resolve the question."²  "Hints against" is the right phrase, and both sides could adopt it.

Murray and Southgate: the "only way" and what it assumes

Michael Murray's Nature Red in Tooth and Claw (2008) is a philosopher's survey of every explanation of animal suffering a theist might give.  He calls the young-earth explanation a "flat denial" of pre-Adamic pain, and his treatment of it is fairer than most.  "It is clear that the weight of empirical evidence available to us gives us overwhelming justification for rejecting any explanation of evil that trades on rejecting PAP [pre-Adamic pain].  For that reason, this CD will not pass muster for most.  Nonetheless, those young-universe creationists who also accept the Fall and who, given the information available to them, are warranted in rejecting the reality of PAP, are in a different position.  These theists might have a Fall CD which avoids the objection arising from PAP.  For them, PAP is not a problem."³²  The remaining problem for them, he says, is the Fragility Objection:  what transformation could animals undergo, and why would a good God set the world up so that Adam's sin could produce it.³²

Then he turns on the alternatives.  Of the view that God created a world of predation in advance because he foresaw the Fall, he asks:  "Why must the world have a natural history that precedes the existence of Adam at all?  Wouldn't God secure all the relevant goods and avoid a massive array of evil simply by creating the universe in much the way the young-universe creationist believes it was created?  If God were to so create it, none of the goods supposed to arise from animal pain and suffering would be lost, and a great deal of natural evil would have been eliminated."³²  That is the young-earth argument in a philosopher's mouth, and it is why the argument has force even for people who reject a young earth.

Christopher Southgate's The Groaning of Creation (2008) is the most developed evolutionary theodicy, and it is built on a premise its author labels:  "I hold to the (unprovable) assumption that an evolving creation was the only way in which God could give rise to the sort of beauty, diversity, sentience, and sophistication of creatures that the biosphere now contains."³³  In full:  "far from the universe being fallen through human action from a perfection initially given it by God, I hold that the sort of universe we have, in which complexity emerges in a process governed by thermodynamic necessity and Darwinian natural selection, and therefore by death, pain, predation, and self-assertion, is the only sort of universe that could give rise to the range, beauty, complexity, and diversity of creatures the Earth has produced."³³  He dismisses Fall-based approaches as "scientifically dubious" and "theologically unfruitful."³³

Set the two costs side by side.  The young-earth reading has to say that God rebuilt the animal world at the curse, or built it with latent weapons, and it has to carry the fossil record of predation on the Flood.  The old-earth reading has to say that a God who could make anything could not make a biosphere without predation, and its best defender calls that unprovable.  Neither side is entitled to call the other's position absurd.

Common Objections

Objection 1: "Romans 5:12 says death entered the world through sin. That settles it."

It says death spread "to all people" (eis pantas anthrōpous).  Cranfield:  "According to this verse, human death is the consequence of human sin."¹⁰  Sarfati's own chapter summary grants that "Some of the passages explicitly refer only to human death."¹¹  The young-earth argument for animal death rests on Genesis 1:29-30, Isaiah 11, and Romans 8, and should be made from them.  A young-earth reader who opens with Romans 5 has opened with the weakest text.

Objection 2: "Genesis 1:30 gives plants to every animal. That is a vegetarian creation, full stop."

It gives plants to every land animal and bird.  It does not mention the sea, and it does not mention death.  Cassuto reads a prohibition into it and says the prohibition is "inferred."⁸  Westermann reads none and says "An assignment or conveyance does not imply any prohibition."⁷  Aquinas read it as giving plants "not ... to all animals and birds, but to some."²³  The verse is the best young-earth text and it is still an inference.  A reader who calls it "full stop" is claiming more than Cassuto.

Objection 3: "The young-earth view is a modern invention of Ellen White and George McCready Price."

Theophilus of Antioch wrote in about 180 that the beasts were "not ... made evil or venomous from the first" and that "when man transgressed, they also transgressed with him."²⁴  Irenaeus, Luther, and Wesley say the same.  The vegetarian Eden is one of the oldest Christian readings of Genesis 1.  What is true is that the fathers did not agree:  Augustine and Aquinas took the other side.  See The Age of Earth in Church History for the separate question of the age.

Objection 4: "Augustine and Aquinas prove that the church never taught a vegetarian creation."

They prove that two doctors of the church rejected it.  Augustine answered the question "why do beasts harm one another" with "because some are the food of others," and Aquinas called the vegetarian view "quite unreasonable."¹²³  Neither had geology to reconcile;  both reasoned from the goodness of an order that includes predation.  That is evidence that the old-earth reading of Genesis 1:30 is not a modern rescue.  It is not evidence that the church never taught the other view, because Theophilus, Irenaeus, Luther, Calvin on 1:24, and Wesley did.

Objection 5: "If no animal died before the Fall, Adam could not have stepped on an ant or eaten an apple."

The young-earth position is that plants and, on most of its statements, invertebrates are not nephesh chayyah, and their deaths are not the death the argument is about.¹¹¹¹  That is a defensible line, and the count in this article shows that the phrase is never applied to an invertebrate by name.  The objection that is not answered is fish.  Genesis 1:20-21 and Leviticus 11:10 apply nephesh chayyah to what lives in the water, so the young-earth reading is committed to no fish having been eaten before the Fall, and the fossil record of fish predation goes to the bottom of the vertebrate record.

Objection 6: "Psalm 104 says God feeds the lions. Predation is God's design."

The psalm describes the present world, and it asks in its last verse that sinners disappear from the earth, so its author knew the world was fallen.³⁴  Sarfati's reply, that "Psalm 104:21 deals with the present day, not the original creation," is correct as far as it goes.¹¹  What the reply cannot remove is that the psalmist and the author of Job 38-41 describe predation as God's provision without a word of apology.  A reader who holds that predation is a curse must hold that two of the Bible's longest praises of creation praise God for the effects of the curse.

Objection 7: "The fossil record shows death for hundreds of millions of years, so the question is closed."

The fossil record shows death.  Whether it shows hundreds of millions of years is a different question, argued from radiometric dating, sedimentation, and the order of fossils, and this site takes it up in Dating the Earth, Radiometric Concordance, and Fossil Order and the Flood.  What this article establishes is that the young-earth reading of Genesis commits its holder to placing every fossil predator after Adam.  That is what a young earth costs.  Whether the cost can be paid is the geology's question, not the text's.

Objection 8: "Animal death before the Fall makes God the author of evil."

That is the argument, stated by Luther and by Answers in Genesis, and Murray's version of it is the strongest:  a God who could have created the world "in much the way the young-universe creationist believes it was created" and did not has some explaining to do.³²  The reply from Osborn is that the young-earth reading does not escape the charge;  it makes God the author of the curse that made the sharks.²  The reply from Augustine is that predation is not an evil at all but part of an order in which "all things, as long as they exist, have their own measures, numbers, and orders."¹  The reader should notice that this is a dispute about the goodness of predation, and that the Bible's own descriptions of predation in Psalm 104 and Job 38-41 are on Augustine's side of it.

Sources

Route notes.  "CCEL" means the Ante-Nicene / Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers or Calvin Translation Society HTML at ccel.org, downloaded with curl and read locally, with the printed page fixed from CCEL's Page_NNN anchors or, for Calvin, from the archive.org scans of the 1847 and 1849 volumes read with bin/iapage.py.  "IA-pd" means a print-disabled archive.org item read by paragraph search with bin/iapdsearch.py, with the leaf-to-page offset taken from the item's BookReaderJSIA map and checked against the book's own index or running heads;  nothing read that way is stored in the library.  "Europe PMC" means the abstract or full text pulled from the Europe PMC REST API.  No quotation, page number, or numeral in this article was established through a summarising fetch tool.