I remember, once upon a time, back in the 1990s, while reading the usenet group Talk.Origins, that some creationist named Lionel Tun declared that all animals used to be vegetarian, and that T. rex used its teeth to cut down trees and eat tough fruit, like pineapples, and that their jaws were clearly designed to slice open coconuts. This was obviously contrary to the mechanics of these carnivorous animals’ jaws, their anatomy, and their digestive physiology. We laughed and laughed, and this was one of the gleefully cited examples of creationist idiocy that got cited for years afterwards.
It is now 2014, and the creationists at Answers in Genesis now blithely accept this foolishness as fact. Here’s Ken Ham, reciting this story in his annoying “I’m talking to brain-damaged children” voice.
What evidence does he have for this remarkable claim? Only this:
Genesis 1:29-30 King James Version (KJV)
29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.
That’s it. It’s written in a book by priests a few thousand years ago, priests who were patently ignorant about biology or paleontology and whose knowledge of history was almost entirely elaborations of legends, and we’re supposed to just accept it. The Bible is a wicked text, specifically because it is used to teach people not to think.
It was once considered to be a very dangerous book, only available in Latin so the common folk couldn’t read it. The R C Church didn’t want the common people reading it because they might start to think things that the R C Church didn’t want them to think. They then would have to torture & kill all the heretics that would result.
Amazingly, bearing in mind that it’s such a bizarre publication, it doesn’t seem to occur to many of those who do read it, that it’s mostly a crock of shit.
What plants did Anglerfish eat, again? “Tough-to-open fruit”? At the bottom of the ocean, where the amount of sunlight is, um, zero?
And what purpose does their bioluminescent lure serve? To attract nuts and berries?
Usernames! @ 2 “And what purpose does their bioluminescent lure serve? To attract nuts and berries?”
No, free-range kelp, obviously.
Usernames! @ 2:
You have answered your own questions.
Their bioluminescent lure provides light to drive photosynthesis. Then they eat the resulting plants. Duh.
I’m also a veteran of Talk.Origins. One question that came up was: what did spiders eat? Using the same [cough] science as Ham uses, we decided that spiders spun their webs to catch grapes falling off the vines, which they then used their fangs to suck all the juices out of. As a side benefit, that left raisins for Adam and Eve to eat.
Slightly off topic. You wouldn’t believe this but there’s an actual vending machine in a mall in Massachusetts selling creationist bull**** which contains exactly the same creationist canard about animal diets you guys are discussing here. #WorstVendingMachineEver http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/11/20/theres-a-creationist-vending-machine-in-a-massachusetts-mall/
This isn’t a new idea. I have a kids book (The Great Dinosaur Mystery and the Bible, Paul S. Taylor, Master Books, 1987) which includes the following gem:
Oh, and thanks for the trip down Memory Lane. Good times, good times ;-).
It’s odd that someone would try to read this in the context of the modern meaning of the word meat, instead of the ‘food in general’ meaning that was in place at the time the King James Version was written. It’s not even an obscure word semantic change, but a well publicized and fairly recent narrowing of meaning.
Couple of years ago I ran across a children’s book with this premise. Wish I’d bought it…
Aaron@9
Yes, I have heard this, too. When reading cooking recipes, some refer to the good parts of walnuts and such as nutmeat.
The word ‘meat’ as used in the King James Bible has an archaic meaning. It was a generic term that meant food, nourishment or sustenance. Today meat means animal flesh, except among cannibals, I suppose. The KJB was completed in 1611 and is contemporaneous with Shakespeare’s English. Many of the words used at that time have fallen out of use. For example, the word corn was once used for any kind of grain. In America it is now used for maize exclusively. Besides that the KJB is notorious for its inaccurate translation of many Greek and Hebrew words. For example, it translates the word maiden into virgin. And we all know where that can lead you.
Ah, the heady days of Talk.Origins, back in the days when I was young and impressionable and actually argued with people who would dispute basic math, and occasionally came across this guy Paul Myers who was a lot better at it than I was. It was a fairly friendly place – a warm bath of crazy rather than an anger sauna.
Anyway, back to today. What about the parasites, pre-fall? Did parasitic wasps paralyse stringbeans and drag then away to lay their eggs inside? Did tapeworms infest the guts of plums and peaches?
And where did the massive bite marks on the bones of herbivorous dinosaurs come from? Tyrannosaurs that tripped and fell against them with their mouths open, presumably…
I remember this, the good ol Doctrine of Original Herbivory. Learned about it in a Nebraska elementary school, except it was watermelons, not coconuts, that T rex loved.
Another veteran of talk.origins here. I think I was the first to cite the sources to support using dendrochronology to falsify the idea of a 6K year old Earth.
Crazyharp81602 @6 wrote:
Holyoke is not very far from me. Knowing that vending machine is there, just makes me go all Hulk, *smash* *smash*, want to vandalize that machine so it can’t infect more people with that Creationism disease. But me no go vandalizing, me too sedate and humble, just rant at keyboard will keep me sedate. Me just _want_ to vandalize, but will never do so in real space, only in fantasy space. Hope this rant will drain some of that anger out of me….
We’ve got it backwards, people. See, before the fall, plants could move. They ran and jumped and danced and fought back with their thorns and brambles. Coconuts especially could swing those vicious nuts of theirs like clubs. THAT’s why T-Rex needed that anatomy to eat coconuts.
The plants list all thee capabilities due to degeneration after the Fall.
There were Triffids in Eden?
@Usernames! / marcus
…Anglerfish …
Link to New Yorker.
Oh, man, I miss the Good Old Days of talk.origins. There were quite a few exceptionally smart and educated people posting in the group back then, and I learned a tremendous amount just from reading what they wrote to each other.
Even the trolls and loons were more entertaining back then. The Lord of the Lists has returned, but he’s duller than ever. Most of the rest are just are bland, repetitive Assholes for Jesus.
I didn’t want to be a Tyrannosaurus, I wanted to be.. A Lumber-rex!
I cut down trees, I eat tough fruit, I like to press wild flowers..
— Yours faithfully, Brigadier Sir Charles Arthur Strong (Mrs.)
@12, robertfoster
The translation of young woman as virgin actually comes from the Septuagint, which was the first Jewish Bible. It’s in Greek and depending on what version you look at contains some combination of Greek translations from Hebrew and Greek texts. The Hebrew Bible was assembled later as an attempt to reconstruct the original of the Septuagint.
Although there’s room to doubt the meaning of the original Greek and Hebrew words (some compare the English words “maid” and “maiden” which have different meanings in different contexts), it all really comes down to which old text you think your God decided to preserve for you without error.
Anyone who’s discussed biology/anatomy with a creationist must have learned that “sin” causes everything that otherwise doesn’t make any biological or evolutionary sense whatsoever under creationist presuppositions.
Sin creates viruses.
Sin makes animals poisonous and fruit toxic (or the other way around).
Sin makes herbivores suddenly use their sharp teeth against kiwi birds instead of kiwi fruit.
The silence following the question “what’s sin’s mechanism actually, how does it do that, and how is all this part of God’s plan when you just said it wasn’t?”, is only rivaled by the silence when you ask about retroviral insertions in identical positions of genomes of distantly related species.
The very, very few and far between replies to these questions, apart from the sound of crickets and running feet, rank among the simultaneously saddest and most hilarious statements ever composed. My personal favorite is “DNA doesn’t exist, it’s a materialistic delusion”. Another fine one is “retroviral insertions? 98% similarity to chimps means nothing!”.
Of course creationists never bother to learn what the things they’re denying even mean.
@20: I dropped in on the old place a couple of years back, and was amazed to find that the List Lord (which I want to type as “Lich Lord” because it invokes that same creepy feeling of crawling nastiness) was there, banging on about grievances from 15 years earlier.
That boy needs help.
Good luck with using the seeds and fruits of these as “meat” Toxicodendron vernix, Taxus baccata, Aconitum Lycoctonum and Datura stramonium. (Poison sumac. yew, wolfsbane and Angel’s Trumpet)
Probably playing football. (The real one.)
ChristineRose @22
That’s incoherent. What need was there to “reconstruct” a text that was in wide circulation in the Hellenistic world? The Septuagint is a Greek translation made in the 2nd/3rd century BC probably mostly at Alexandria of Hebrew texts composed from c. 9th century BC to the 2nd BC. Many of the details are in dispute, but the direction of the translation is not. For instance, it may be that the dissemination of the Septuagint throughout the Greek-speaking Jewish diaspora effectively “closed” the Hebrew canon of scripture for mainstream, that is, non-sectarian, Jews. But, again, there is no question that the original language of all three parts of the book of Isaiah for instance (which is where the “young woman”/”virgin” translation occurs) was Classical Hebrew, an archaic language known only to scribes and scholars by the time the translation was made.
If God is so keen on vegetarianism, why the hell does he devote four whole chapters in Leviticus to explaining how priests should carry out animal sacrifices?
I was forced to go to church for years, but I never saw a single priest sprinkling bullock’s blood seven times before the Lord, let alone laying his hand upon the head of his offering, and killing it before the tabernacle of the congregation.
It would have been a danmed sight more interesting than listening to sermons and singing ‘All things Bright and Beautiful’.
The stories that these people make up sound very much like stories that small children make up because they simply can’t bear the idea that the cute fuzzy animals that they love might do something so cruel as to kill and eat another cute fuzzy animal.
It is astounding that adults could actually agree with these childish stories. It’s time for them to grow up.
I first came across the idea that all animals were herbivores prior to the Fall reading Marl Twain’s Diaries of Adam and Eve when I was around 12 or 13. I’d heard Christians say that there wasn’t death before the Fall, but I’d always thought what they meant was that only human beings couldn’t die. I couldn’t tell if Mark Twain was mocking these sort of “there was no death before the Fall” by making it cover a group of living things that no Christian thought that it would apply to or if he was mocking something that some people actually believed. So I asked my dad and he assured me that it was a former and that no one actually thought that all animals were herbivores before the Fall.
A few years later, I came across creationists online insisting that T. rex had used it’s teeth for eating coconuts, pumpkins, and watermelons before the Fall. It was disappointing to discover that there were some people who believed something which I’d been assured was so stupid that no one would believe it.
#2 “What plants did Anglerfish eat, again? “Tough-to-open fruit”? ”
Well, there *are* piranhas that eat primarily fruit such as the pacu and Pygopristis. Here are the teeth of the Pygopristis: http://www.opefe.com/images/Pira_bodyMutispec._036_2.jpg
This creationist website then claims that therefore back in the days before “the fall” the pirrana fish could have eaten fruit not meat: http://creationwiki.org/Piranha . This obviously is a very deceptive website and claim since there are many piranha that do eat meat. As young they eat zooplankton and more up to insects and so on. Here’s what I picture a creationist’s to cat look like: http://i.imgur.com/LpxsZTT.jpg
I thought all creatures originally ate pasta, and that T-Rex had those awesome teeth to avoid having to deal with dangling noodles in front of their dates. This was obviously thousands of years before napkins were invented to wipe up any sauce.
Correct me if I’m wrong; I’m under the impression that Hammie wants T-Rex to be herbivorous because he somehow thinks (to use the term very loosely) that herbivores are all docile and shit. So little kids can ride them like in his “museum”. Maybe Hammie should go and rile up a Cape Buffalo. I mean, they’re herbivores, right.
Maybe I’m dense, but where exactly does that passage say that plants are the only source of food?
So did the Venus Fly Trap used to be called the Vegan Fly Trap?
Prior to the flood there were several kinds of plant that had much richer flesh than current plants, including sap that was blood-like in it’s chemistry and consistency [1]. These plants were too rich for current herbivores, but formed part of the diet of creatures which require a higher energy intake (naturally these were the animals which would need to
change their habits and become scavengers and carnivores after the flood). These would include insects which sucked the plant juices [2].
The post flood soil would have been fairly high in salt, and somewhat water-logged, and would be unlikely to be rich enough to support these fleshy plants. Thus, although the seeds would have been carried in the ark and released when the waters receded, this, together with the scarcity of food for the animals exiting the ark causing overbrowsing, would have led to the rapid extinction of these plants [3]. The lower temperature after the flood and the short ice age which followed it would also have contributed to their loss.
This scenario is supported by linguistic analysis of the bible, in which the same hebrew word is used for both meat and plant foods; pre-flood, there would be no need for a word describing meat, so the word for fruit would
have been readily adopted in post-flood society. This would also have helped to overcome the stigma of eating animals. This has been passed down in English in the word “flesh”, which refers to both meat and fruit.
DA
[1] Both blood and sap are considered by evilutionists to be ultimately based on sea-water; the differences may not be so extensive as first thought.
[2] These insects would have to have adapted to the lack of suitable browsing; blood-sucking would be one option. Other means of survival, such as reduction of size enabling survival on the juices of less rich plants, can be demonstrated in the aphids.
[3] Related plants in which the richer flesh was confined to a small part of the plant have survived to modern times; examples include the water-melon and the blackberry.
DA
:-)))))))
http://cellsinculture.blogspot.com/2008/03/t-rex-ate-giant-melons.html
I was trying to link just the second picture in the article. Oh well.
I actually recall reading that when the KJV was being written, “meat” used to mean what we now call “food” and that to refer to what we now consider meat, English-speakers of the time would say “flesh” (which, if true, neatly explains the sayings “meat and drink” and “pound of flesh”). So the argument is even more ludicrous.
Seconded!
I think I dislocated my jaw from laughing so much. Ah, if only it had happened before the Fall. I would easily have been able to survive by sucking the sap from a lettuce rather than having to go to see an actual doctor.
sundiver @ 33:
Like the scene in Jurassic Park where the little girl divides all the park’s dinosaurs into the two categories “veggie-saurus” and “meat-a-saurus”, and reaches out and pets the Diplodocus (?) on the nose on the grounds that this is safe because it does not eat meat. To which my response was and remains NEITHER DOES A LOCOMOTIVE BUT I STILL WOULD NOT STAND IN FRONT OF ONE.
To be honest, I’m a bit surprised that there is this much (folklore) evidence for pre-fall vegetarianism. I seriously thought it was something that Hammers made up completely.
Um… so what if in King James English “meat” = “food”? That leaves the argument pretty much the same.
If I recall correctly there is a drawing of a shark in the background of a Monty Python sketch with labels. One pointed to the jaws saying “Sharp teeth, possibly for biting though hard water.”
I prefer the Monty Python version better than AiG. These comedians need to come up with some new material.
Its not like it hasn’t been redone since either, when I was young my family used to take me to to see a guy wearing the worst clown costume I have ever seen. He couldn’t even remember the gags so ended up reading them all monotonously out of a huge book.
I was taught a lot of silly things in church, but even they wouldn’t have posited vegetarian T-rex. It is a common theme in the bible.
Seanellis @13
Possibly, but you have to allow for the very bad eyesight of tyrannosaurs. Clearly, some dinosaur died one day, and TRexes thought the legs were really large carrots, and bit them. Why bite more than once? They didn’t! There were flocks of TRexes, same as flocks of chickens today. Multiple mistakes. Q.E.D.
yazukus @14
And in the day, those suckers were TINY! Poor old TRex, working night and day to eat enough.
http://www.vox.com/2014/10/15/6982053/selective-breeding-farming-evolution-corn-watermelon-peaches
PDX_greg @32
Not to mention those short arms.
For the sake of Ken Ham’s soul, I assume that he is a vegetarian, if not vegan. those are some strong words from God about one’s dietary restrictions.
And piranhas used their teeth to tear the flesh off grapefruit.
Before the Fall, which created death, animals used to use their teeth and claws to fight… to the pain.
@51 Before the fall plants were not living? T. rex ate zombie coconuts?
There are in fact creationists who try to claim that plants don’t live, they’re just some kind of crystal growth.
*headdesk*
They’ve clearly never looked through a microscope.