Ken Ham is such a disappointment. He has this regular series of short radio-style bits of apologetics, and they are dreary and boring. I had hopes for this one, about “Carnivores Before the Fall (Leopard Seals)” — I expected some juicy stories about what these big, large-fanged predators ate before the Fall. This, for example, is what a leopard seal looks like before it bites your face off. (But don’t worry, there are very few examples of them attacking people.)
Big, hungry, sharp-toothed animals — what did they eat if all animals were vegetarians, once upon a time? Let’s ask Ken Ham!
(Note: if you start listening to this and find yourself gagging over Ham’s sing-song “I’m talking to stupid children!” voice, there’s a transcript of the relevant part down below.)
It is the second largest seal species reaching lengths of 11 and a half feet length and 840 pounds. Using their strong jaws and inch long teeth, leopard seals will kill and eat almost anything, including seals, squids, penguins, seabirds, and shellfish. Now did God originally create leopard seals to be such vicious predators? No, he didn’t! Genesis tells us that originally animals were created to be vegetarian, including leopard seals. It was because of sin that death and carnivory entered into the creation. Death was never part of God’s original design.
He punted. After describing the voracious eating habits of leopard seals, he just asserts that they were vegetarians. No explanation. No discussion of what an animal so well adapted to killing and eating meat might have gnawed on with those canines and incisors. Kelp, maybe? Plankton? Oh wait, those are small animals, can’t have that. Did they desperately scrape algae off of rocks? What?
That was a pathetic effort, Ken.
But I did notice something. Perhaps you’ve heard that common refrain in apologetics, that because the Bible predicts the universe had a beginning, and physicists have confirmed that their was a Big Bang, science has effectively validated the Bible. It seems to me that if the Bible says that organisms were all immortal and undying 6000 years ago, and science has shown that animals were dying 500 million years ago, the science has effectively refuted that interpretation of the Bible.
Oh, come on, PZ. Before the fall, kelp reproduced via pods that looked, smelled, and tasted just like penguin! They would bob to the surface, and the leopard seal was designed to be able to hunt down scads of ’em, to prevent them spreading too fast.
You just don’t have the hang of Christian biology!
Just what WAS god’s original plan, anyway? Couldn’t he see what was going to happen? Even _I_ could see that one coming – give man (and woman) free will and curiosity, then put a tree there from which they cannot eat. Wait an infinite amount of time, and – even _I_ can see what’s going to happen.
And then, to have to send his son to be tortured to reopen the gates of heaven, which were never needed in the first place, in the original plan – why couldn’t he just say, “New rule! New rule!”
So much for all seeing and all powerful. The story just doesn’t make any sense.
“Death was never part of God’s original design.”
Sorry Ken but if death did not exist before ‘the fall’ then how could Yahweh have used it as a threat earlier?
The mildly deranged penguin — who strenuously denies opening the value labeled “DO NOT OPEN” — says most early kelp tasted like various cheeses (exact taste depending on growing and incineration conditions), and the regrettable modern penguin-molesting is an attempt to intimidate them(the penguins) into revealing the location of the cheese plantations. Seal, she says, is much taster than penguin, and also lays fantastic eggs.
value → valve…
He’s convinced he’s so important that the ‘sin’ of his species dooms every other animal species. But apparently God didn’t think plants were included in this sin. Or had he created then pre-sinful so everyone else had something to eat? Why would animals suddenly be made cruel to other animals but it’s ok to becruel to plants? I mean we dig them up and eat their babies and pull pieces off them, that they’ve put quite a lot of effort into growing for their own benefit. And where does fungus belong in all this?
But all he poor vegan Leopard Seals were all drowned in the Great Flood. The ones, today, are just the Leopards that Noah saved, some of whom adapted to live in the sea. (no, they did not e.v.o.l.v.e, they just “adapted”). That Flood there messed all the sciencey things confounding all those people who call themselves scientists. Gotcha! QED, hummana, hammana.
Where is the one where Ken explains that T. rex had those six inch, razor-sharp teeth to open coconuts? Or maybe the one that said that spiders spun webs to catch grapes falling from the vine, then proceeded to use their fangs to suck the juice out of them, thus leaving raisins for Adam and Eve to eat?
(But don’t worry, there are very few examples of them
attacking peopleleaving witnesses.)Even if seals and other carnivores were all eating plants before the fall, in what sense is that not “death” for the plant? This simply makes no sense.
Do plants not have souls? Is that the claim that’s lurking behind the scenes somewhere? Then the implication is that leopard seals and/or their animal prey do have them. And all dogs go to heaven, etc. That’s the Sunday school version that he probably expects the kiddies to be thinking, without really saying it.
But no, once that’s out in the open, we’re not supposed to seriously entertain that idea either, because human beings in particular are supposed to be special like that, not all animals much less all living organisms.
So it just makes no fucking sense.
Ken Ham:
Hey, Ken and I agree on something! God didn’t create leopard seals; to be vicious predators or to be anything else for that matter.
Too bad he had to do stuff like keep talking and ruin the moment. And it was going so well. I was even trying to remember what I did with that bridge building Erector set I had as a child.
Ehm, if death wasn’t part of god’s plan, what about the plants? I mean, they objectively die when they’re eaten.
Coconuts! The leopard seals ate coconuts before the Fall.
No, what really happened is that one leopard seal sinned, and the others could eat him, but that was a sin, so others could eat them.
Or, to be really silly, an omnipotent god made some critters that had no knowledge of right and wrong, and told them to not do something, assuming that they would understand that doing it would be wrong, not right. And he threatened the newborn innocent immortals with death, which did not yet exist.
There’s at least one recorded case of a leopard seal killing a human. There’s also one recorded case of a leopard seal trying to feed freshly killed penguins to a photographer’s camera. So, yeah.
Apparently they can also eat krill. Does krill count as living creatures that god loves? Or is it just small enough and boring enough that it gets classified as a plant, and therefore fair game? Maybe that’s what the unfallen leopard seals ate, I dunno. I’m not really well versed in biotheology, so maybe I’ll leave questions about things like photosynthetic dinoflagellates for another time…
If “Death was never part of God’s original design”, why the hell did He make it a possibility?
Either God’s an incompetent bungler, creating situations in which unplanned things happen (like eating from the tree of life, drowning the planet, or killing his own son) or it clearly *was* part of the plan.
It seems a fragile kind of creation that can be tipped – by a single act of disobedience – into a planet-wide chaos of death and destruction lasting millennia.
I suppose there’s a simpler explanation – even simpler than “God did it” – that Ken Ham is talking out of his arse with a story that doesn’t stand up to even the slightest scrutiny. Has he heard of the food chain?
So … if death was never part of this hebrew god’s plans, what did he need with an immortality tree?
Genesis ch2 vs9:
From the soil, Yahweh God caused to grow every kind of tree, enticing to look at and good to eat, with the tree of life in the middle of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
So … if death was never part of this hebrew god’s plan, how would Adam have stopped living ?
Genesis ch3 vs22:
Then Yahweh God said, ‘Now that the man has become like one of us in knowing good from evil, he must not be allowed to reach out his hand and pick from the tree of life too, and eat and live for ever!’
A minor oversight on the part of the sky faeries. The first attempt to fix was the Triffid, where they/it/she/him basically got it backwards, long pigs eaten by plants objectively die. The attempted rapid repair job introduced Global Warming, where the plants don’t die because all the extra CO₂ is good…
Clarissa, the veggie lioness
Sat gnawing on a sprout,
And wondered, as she did so,
Why God made her without
Dentition and intestines
More suited to her needs.
But, sad to say, her diet
Of shoots, and nuts and seeds,
Though admirable, did naught to keep
Her in health and breath—
And, midst a herd of wildebeest,
Clarissa starved to death.
I’d say that it’s pretty obvious: prior to the fall, leopard seals ate Swedish Fish.
I really don’t like deGrasse Tysons “I’m talking to stupid children, who I dearly like!” voice any better.
Swedish Fish are made of boiled cow feet.
So maybe not.
Thank you so much for printing the transcript. Once again I was saved from the necessity of jamming an icepick into my ears.
It’s the littler mercies that help so much.
John Pieret: Morning coffee, your comments, keyboard.
Not a good combination
So if it was their god’s plan for everyone to be vegetarian, why aren’t Christians vegetarians now? I get that the Fall mucked things up, but wouldn’t vegetarianism be closer to their god’s original plan? Shouldn’t eating meat be more sinful, or more of a mark of the Fall, and thus something to be avoided?
from krambc:
Yeah, that’s pretty hard to fit with Ham’s absurdities. I mean, what does it mean to say trees are growing (without overrunning the whole planet) if there’s no death? And why is anything “good to eat”? There could have been a world without eating or growth, just organisms that are consistently alive, in some kind of a stable and peaceful condition for however long. So the idea goes, perhaps leopard seals didn’t eat plants or anything else, nor did they or any other living things die. That’s one possible way the world could have been, and you could have called that the “Garden of Eden” if you want. It’s utterly ridiculous to think carnivores would’ve been made from the very beginning with useless teeth, reproductive and digestive systems, hunting instincts, growth patterns and life cycles, migration patterns, etc., in a scenario like that, as if that were the plan all along which inexplicably changed and made it all useful because of sin, but that at least gives you a way out. However, that’s clearly not what the Biblical myths say about it, assuming you’re supposed to take them literally. So you shouldn’t take them literally, Ham. So WTF are you even thinking?
Don’t just focus on the teeth. The entire digestive systems, from their structure and enzymes produced to the
types of microbiota present, are different between herbivores and carnivores.
Also where detritivores and decomposers herbivorous before the fall?
You silly atheistic doubters! Obviously sea cucumbers were really cucumbers before The Fall. They were just really tough cucumbers, so seals needed big teeth. Sort of like tyrannosaurs and the wily and devious Jurassic Carrot.
Why does Ham insist that all animals were vegetarian before the Fall? Where does he get that insanity from?
So, if death wasn’t part of the plan, neither was an afterlife. No judgement, no souls being welcomed in heaven (or sent to hell). Just living outside, naked, in a jungle for all eternity as the population of humans and other animals just grows and grows.
It makes the kiddies happy in Sunday School and looks like an answer to their questions, even though it isn’t one and doesn’t even correspond to what the Bible actually says (and just forget about the physical evidence). It’s apparently also satisfying for some actual grown-ups, to the extent that they don’t think about it.
People like to hear that, and it sells tickets to his theme park, which is doing the Lord’s Work. (The Lord has the day off, apparently.) That’s why. Since Jebus made us to sell tickets to theme parks, not be honest or thoughtful, we can’t blame Ham for doing what is right and just.
Ken Ham takes the “if I have to defend it, I’m already weak” attitude. God creating the world is six days just doesn’t make any sense (and creating a deathless Eden as an original plan makes even less). It really simply doesn’t work. However most creationists before Ham would come up with excuses; “The dinosaurs died in the flood”, “The grand canyon was a single act of anger” “God redesigned all the carnivores after the fall” etc. Ham’s approach is that excuses look weak … so he just denies there is any problem. “Dinosaurs lived with humans, why not” “The grand canyon took about a week to form; nothing weird about that” “leopard seals could just as easily be vegetarians; there’s nothing specific to say that they couldn’t survive on seaweed” etc.
@#2, wcorvi
He also didn’t give them “the knowledge of good and evil” — which means they could not possibly be able to know that disobeying an order was evil, and therefore giving them orders (“don’t eat the fruit of this tree”) was the act of either a fool or, if planning to blame them for disobeying, a monster.
But vis à vis free will: ask any Christian you like the following two questions.
1. Do people in heaven have free will?
2. Do people in heaven commit sins? (Serious ones, if that’s important.)
If they answer “yes” to both questions, then they are saying that the division between heaven and earth is entirely arbitrary; people in heaven are (potentially) just as bad as people who were condemned to hell, and thus god’s judgement is unjust. If they answer “no” to both questions, then it means that heaven, the greatest reward they believe god can give a human, means being stripped of free will — which means god doesn’t love human beings, or else he would simply have stripped them of it to begin with, thus preventing sin and permitting all of them to go to heaven. If they answer “no” and then “yes”, then it means god wants humans to sin, and all judgement is necessarily unjust. If they answer “yes” and then “no”, it once again means god does not love humans, because there is a type of free will which does not result in free will, but they believe god gave us some other kind, causing some of us to go to hell instead.
There is simply no combination of answers to those questions which does not refute Christianity — or, for that matter, any other religion which believes in both free will and an eternal afterlife with just judgement by a god.
(There’s also another argument: neurologists have reached a point where we can now be certain that if an immaterial soul exists at all, it has no influence over people’s behavior. The brain controls the body, it’s all physical, and there’s no place in the brain where there’s non-understood forces involved. So at best, the soul is like a black box recorder on an airplane — but if a soul can’t control your actions, then it is unjust to either reward it for your good deeds or punish it for your bad ones. This being the case, a religious which postulates an immaterial soul and a judgement based on deeds during life necessarily implies that the judgement is unjust — but Christians say that their god is just, therefore the mainstream “we have souls which go to heaven” version of Christianity is false.)
It is the Doctrine of Original Herbivory, dontcha know. T-Rex loved melons, the lion hung out with the lambs, etc.
How was there originally no death if plants were being eaten? Plants don’t count as alive? They have DNA and reproduce.
Well, I’d argue that, even if a soul were controlling your actions (or is whatever refers to “you,” with or without a soul), actual justice still doesn’t look like rewards and punishments. The whole, stupid, authoritarian, caveman-esque, carrot-and-stick model should be tossed out as a serious candidate. But of course the rest of your argument goes through anyway, since that is supposed to be the point of heaven and hell. It’s still unjust (and pointless and all sorts of ridiculous), for reasons that go beyond the specific claims theists are willing to make.
They’re not admitting the evidence that a soul is ineffectual though. (Nor will they tell you how it has effects.) Because it’s a logical possibility, they’d be right to disagree about what it “necessarily implies.” It gets a little tricky there, because in fact we don’t actually deduce that. We make inferences about what brains do based on the evidence. But their arguments are so full of holes, all over the place, that it hardly makes a difference how you want to structure that part of it.
In Genesis, God gives Adam and Eve and the animals green herbs to eat.
I don’t know of anything that says they could eat meat after the Fall.
After the Flood God says Noah et al can eat animals. I guess that also applied to the other animals.
chigau @35 – wouldn’t Noah have had to wait for a couple generations before chowing down. Maybe that’s what happened to the unicorns – celebratory barbecue.
Genesis 1:26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
Genesis 3:22 Then Yahweh God said, ‘Now that the man has become like one of us in knowing good from evil, he must not be allowed to reach out his hand and pick from the tree of life too, and eat and live for ever’
In both the above passages, I want to know who the hell this “us” is that Yahweh is talking about. No one else is mentioned at this point; one presumes the godbotherers either ignore this or assume it is the angels etc but it certainly seems that there is more than one god at that time.
Yeah, Ham punted that one. I mean really. Vegetarian Leopard seals? WTF? And he didn’t even enumerate a menu. Sheesh.
I’m an omnivore, so I like plants, but I’m absolutely sure that it’s in my DNA that I want to eat meat. It’s right up there with the interest in sex.
And it’s so easy for commenters to bring up scenario after scenario that make Ham look like an idiot.
After he dies, they should study his brain to see if they can find the thing that makes him impervious to reason and evidence.
kantalope
Genesis 8:20 has Noah building an altar and burnt-offering of some of every clean animal as soon as he gets off the boat.
God gives permission to eat animals in the next chapter.
At least dung beetles would have something to eat before the Fall.
Was there reproduction before the Fall?
If nothing died, that would have become a problem.
At the end of the video:
.. .read by a woman who sounds like she’s selling you toothpaste.
Creepy to the nth degree.
Nah, the Unicorns discovered Mr Noah’s plans in time, and slipped out wearing Leopard Seal disguises. Since that escape, they’ve modified the disguises slightly and now call them “Narwhals”.
Traces of polytheism of older Judaism, I believe. Originally, Genesis uses both Yahwe and Eloheim were it now say “God” or “the Lord”, resulting in a split personality god talking to himself. Apologists like to pretend that Judaism was this unchanging monolith, but in fact it picked up elements from other religions along the way.
The whole question of “was there death” and “what did animals eat” before the fall, beg the question at two levels. One; the issue is whether or not the fall actually *changed* anything– after creation did god go in re-edit creation; does god do that on a regular basis. Did god *create* death? When he cursed adam to sowing rocks and thorns and eve to painful childbirth, did he change the world so that plants *now* had thorns and rocks are now more common? When he cursed the serpent to crawl on his belly does that mean the snake *didn’t* crawl before? Did the snake have *legs* before? If the plants didn’t have thorns and he changed them then the matter is the plants changed. They are *different* plants. Well, so did the animals *change*. That’s the obvious implication.
Second, what is the nature of God cursing? Surely he didn’t make Adam and Eve any different but somehow life just got a whole lot harder and it always will. What happened? *why* is sowing and hunting harder now if they’re the same plants, terrain, and animals as before? Are humans just plain … un-blessed … now? God later curses families for generations. This is a natural force. If this god-cursing can make a happy kelp eating leopard seal turn vicious, it’s a pretty powerful force of nature. Aren’t we obligated to study it?
Invariably I always return to my basic complaint of creationism, which is not that it is wrong, stupid, or just plain nuts, but that it is dishonest. They *aren’t* interested in explaining anything by science otherwise they’d be studying the most fundamental and prevalent force they know– god itself. You can’t simply say “everything works fine until you get to this one six-day bubble and at that point you can’t ask anything— it’s off the table! You can’t even ask!”
@37 and @44
Or it’s simply the royal We. It’s not the worst of the offenses.
@diehardth #37:
A point backed up later in the Pentateuch, especially the bit about not worshipping other gods else Yahweh gets jealous. Monotheism doesn’t always start out monotheistic, apparently.
Maybe Yahweh hired some Klingon mercenaries to kill the other gods. Come on, that makes as much sense as anything else!
The vegetarian bit is from Genesis.
Notice also that “everything that has the breath of life in it” — that’s used as a definition of “living”. So things that don’t breathe, like plants, don’t count as “living”.
They didn’t know about plant stomata then, you know.
I’m still not sure how I should picture this. When the “living” things were all bumbling around aimlessly and not dying (only for a few days?) … then what were they standing on? Bare rocks? If there was soil for the “non-living” plants to grow in, how did that get there? I mean, is it that the non-living plants sorta became more-undead as they rotted into what became the ground, retroactively making it possible for them to be there in the first place?
Even the mighty T Rex ate watermelons.
http://cellsinculture.blogspot.com/2008/03/t-rex-ate-giant-melons.html
“Death was never part of God’s original design.”
Horrific overpopulation, apparently was, then.
He disabled the comments, the little chickenshit!
That said, I know what they ate. Supermarket salads; they needed those big nasty teeth to get into those damn plastic clamshells.
Not if you consider the original Eden as part of an infinitely large, or ever expanding Flat Earth. Damn those early observers looking skywards and observing the Earth’s shadow for ruining a good fable.
weatherwax,
I was actually taught that in a public elementary school in the US. For reals.
An alternative both to “horrific overpopulation” and to “infinitely large, or ever expanding Flat Earth” would be physical translation to Heaven (assumed infinite) at an appropriate age, in the style later popularized by Elijah, Enoch, and the Holy Virgin Mary. For all Earth’s biomass, ensouled or otherwise.
I didn’t say it was a good alternative.
#28, Ibis3: “So, if death wasn’t part of the plan, neither was an afterlife. No judgement, no souls being welcomed in heaven (or sent to hell). Just living outside, naked, in a jungle for all eternity as the population of humans and other animals just grows and grows.”
The original idea was for it to be just Adam and Eve tending the garden forever. With the knowledge of good and evil came the knowledge of reproduction. Thus the gods having to throw us out and deprive us access to the tree of life, so we wouldn’t be multiplying AND living forever.
Yes, I know this is trying to make sense of non-sense.
yazikus, that is truly terrifying. But I know some public schools continue to have issues.
well, it was kind of a while back. Hopefully that doesn’t fly anymore. It was in rural Nebraska, and in that same class a farmer once brought in a cow’s heart and lungs for us to examine, that was pretty neat. Oh, and our teacher taught us how to use chop sticks. So, mixed bag?
Well at least he only asked 60 seconds of our time to inform us “Answers? I haven’t got a clue! But just believe.”
What did they eat before the Fall? Their normal Summer diet?
@weatherwax
Not so. At least not if you’re combining the two creation myths in Genesis and treating them as a single narrative.
I once saw a video where a mob of penguins were trying to push each other off into the water. I can’t recall what the narrator said, but I was pretty sure they were wondering about leopard seals. They all wanted to swim, but they all wanted somebody else to go first, and they weren’t going to wait for a volunteer.
Even if they didn’t do that before the Fall, God has some explaining to do.
What about parasites? What did they do before the fall? Did ticks and fleas infest plants instead of animals?
I think it was Ham (I can’t be arsed to go find my book) who “explained” that male mosquitoes live only on plant juices, so “obviously” female mosquitoes used to do the same before the Fall. The mouth parts and the techniques are the same, he says, so any scientist who says the mouth is evolved for sucking blood is wrong.
He also says that fruit bats, who eat fruit, have mouths that seem made for eating meat, so T Rex mouths were for fruit, too. (Most bats are insectivores, not carnivores, and fruit is not all soft.)
And Ham says pandas seem evolved for meat, but eat plants, so scientists are wrong. (Pandas have to eat one thing, they poop most of it out undigested, and they are barely surviving – I think they are a bad example for him.)
Ibis3: “Not so. At least not if you’re combining the two creation myths in Genesis and treating them as a single narrative.”
Well that’s the first no-no, and I believe:
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
is a later interpolation.
But I only study the bible on the side out of a fondness for mythology.
# 64 Menyambal: “And Ham says pandas seem evolved for meat, but eat plants, so scientists are wrong. (Pandas have to eat one thing, they poop most of it out undigested, and they are barely surviving – I think they are a bad example for him.)”
Pandas are related to the American black bear, and are evolved to be omnivores. The all bamboo diet does cause them problems, as you noted, making them a better example of evolution in action, with all it’s consequences, than of creation by an intelligent god.
The “vegetarian bit” is from genesis chapter one and the “first creation” account. The garden of eden and the fall are the “second creation” account and genesis chapters two and three.
I sometimes wonder if the “vegetarian bit” is supposed to describe the world as it is and isn’t at all supposed to be before the fall at all. (Note: It has multiple people being given the permission to multiply and subdue the earth and to spread everywhere. Very much *not* the story of Adam and Eve alone tending the small and isolated garden of Eden.) It does have an air of “I’m god, and I’m giving the world to you and I’m giving you food”. And although it talks about eating veggies and nothing about meat, it doesn’t particularly seem all the peace-and-love-and-magic-no-death. It’s more “here you are; you have food; you’ll be just fine” type air.
Okay, it seems to deliberately omit carnivores but … well, it’s only in the light of “the bible is a textbook” that we assume a creation myth fairy tale ought to explain everything. I think compared to most creation myths it’s simple “Here I am and here you are. I’m god and I made you and here’s some crops for you to eat and water for you to drink. This is the world. Hope you like it.”
What did Venus Fly Traps eat before the fall? Were they Venus Coconut Traps, desperately trying to grow towards the coconuts before the T-rexes grabbed them all…?
Well, sure, apart from that irritating little bit in Genesis 3:22 that suggests that death was part of the design unless one ate a certain fruit to prevent it (“And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:”).
It’s hilarious that someone who insists all the answers can be found in one tiny little section of the one single book can’t even manage to learn all of it himself.
There are in fact creationists who have tried to define life in such a way that plants aren’t included.
The Tree of Life was intended for the Elohim, including Yahweh, to ensure their continued immortality.
After all, the Devas had their Soma, the Olympians had their Ambrosia and the offspring of the top Semitic deity, El Elian (God Most High) had the Tree of Life – nothing special, just standard mythology.
Adam, Eve and the serpent had already been punished by Yahweh. Now that the couple had become “like unto gods” by eating of the Tree of Knowledge, the Elohim simply didn’t want to share the source of their immortality as well with them. So they had Yahweh evict them.
Paul was wrong, it wasn’t Adam and Eve’s disobedience which brought death upon humanity, it was already a potential for them.
No. It was divine, small-minded, miserliness.
If you notice, Noah didn’t carry any plants on the Ark. Plants weren’t really alive, they were just some odd bits of ground sticking up. See, they didn’t breathe. Breath was life – “respire” and “spirit” have the same root word – and plant respiration was not something the early Bible knew about (God was keeping it secret, maybe).
Ken Ham tried to define life as hemoglobin, at least when it came to eating things.
Yeah.
After the Flood, the plants just perked right up.
10.5 months under 8.5 km of water didn’t hurt a bit.
Well, they had to wait on the boat a bit, that gave time for an olive to put out leaves on a branch, which the dove inconsiderately tore off and lugged back to Noah. (Didn’t the boat have a window? Why wasn’t Noah inspired to invent the telecope? Couldn’t Noah just ask God?)
One of the memorable sights of my life was the brown line of dead vegetation where the tsunami had crested in the tropic vegetation. Not debris, or impact damage, just dead grass and trees from the salt water.
Can one predict something that has already happened?
Leopard seals are mammals, and they’re called “leopard” for a reason; they must be degenerated leopards, and leopards ate grass, like the lions and the lambs. Easy.