Question to you, Stanley N,

I do not see a predator-prey relation as bad. Predators follow their nature, their instincts as instilled by God, and that's good. (Animal evolution would be subject to divine Providence, so even with evolution, animals would have their instincts instilled by God.)

Before man, carnivores killed and ate other animals according to their natures. Once Adam was created, animals were subject to man's governance.  When Adam sinned, man lost full governance over animals. I do not believe animal natures were substantially changed by Adam's sin.

Personally, I find it odd that people who reject evolution think predators such as sharks were herbivores and suddenly changed to carnivores, yet both are sharks?

That means neither man nor animal needed to kill to eat. Killing and death came into the world through the sim of Adam. Do you deny this?

That's your interpretation.

St. Thomas, Summa Theologica, I, 96, 1 ad 2. https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1096.htm

In the opinion of some, those animals which now are fierce and kill others, would, in that state [of innocence], 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. They would not, however, on this account have been excepted from the mastership of man: as neither at present are they for that reason excepted from the mastership of God, Whose Providence has ordained all this. Of this Providence man would have been the executor, as appears even now in regard to domestic animals, since fowls are given by men as food to the trained falcon.

It's human death that came into the world through sin.

It also means that the animals were created the day immediately preceding the creation of man. Does scripture give us falsehood?

You are aware that a decision of the Biblical Commission under St. Pius X permits interpreting "day" as a period of time?

There's probably about 30 minutes of obviously fake footage there ... in addition to the Challenger problem.  And the U.S. moonlanding was obviously faked as well.

You mean allegedly fake footage.

Weiss is a con-man. Most of what he says is nonsense, but he says it with a veneer of conviction so the rubes eat it up.  His fantasyland FE makes less sense than a fiction series called Discworld.

The moon landings were one of - perhaps the - most docuмented events in recent history. They happened around 50 years ago, with plenty of eyewitnesses including the astronauts themselves, many of whom are still alive. It seems absurd to say the moon landings are not credible. There may be some anomalies in that huge mass of evidence, but in most cases, these anomalies have been explained, by people with relevant training.

It seems absurd to say the moon landings are not credible.

...
Can't agree on ability to see stars in space: 4:40

All of which are easily understood, if you have an open mind.
But a shout-out to the last one. Nice job putting together clips from different contexts to create the appearance of a dilemma where none exists.

All of which are easily understood, if you have an open mind.
But a shout-out to the last one. Nice job putting together clips from different contexts to create the appearance of a dilemma where none exists.

These "clips" of NASA fraud go on for HOURS.  It was demonstrated conclusively that the pictures NASA had from a Mars Rover were actually done in Greenland, and another Mars rover was located on Google earth ... on Devon Island.

This whole flat earth thing could be put to be very easily by just taking a an actual video of the rotating earth from space, from some kind of probe or whatever.  Build something just for this purpose.  By NASA's own admission (or, rather, the admission of people who worked for NASA), every single official picture of the globe earth is composite and/or CGI.  They released ridiculous versions where the continents were different sizes, one where North America was absurdly large.  In addition to the "glitches" in footage from ISS, there are pictures of spacewalks where air bubbles can be seen, making it clear that they were actually filming in their underwater training facility at Johnson.  This garbage goes on for hours and hours and hours ... and cannot be reduced to a "few clips taken out of context".  There's a short video where George H.W. Bush was being rolled through NASA in a wheel chair and --oops-- you could actually see the "astronaut" who was allegedly live from space doing his act in front of a green screen.  It's to the point of being absurd.

Just as flat earth could be put to bed with simple technology, so also the entire branch of science that arose out of rejecting the results of Michelson Morley could be decided very quickly by putting a Michelson Morley apparatus on the moon.  But they're absolutely terrified.  If M-M were to show movement of the moon through ether, then it would blow away all of modern physics ... and would prove that the earth is motionless.

If you actually opened up your mind and took the trouble to look.

In other words, with St Augustine's immediate creation, there was no time for carnivores to indulge before the Fall.

I wanted to thank you for bringing this up. Had I brought it up, I suspect Ladislaus would have dismissed it as modernist.

I rather like St. Augustine's view of immediate creation. I tend to think of Gen 1 as organised chronologically, but the structure of 3 days of separation and 3 days of adornment is also clear. I wouldn't exclude St. Augustine's logical rather than chronological organisation.

And overall, this was one of your best posts. You combined things said in the thread, came up with a hypothesis, and composed a post without a bunch of cut-and-paste. (And the font is uniform.)

I wanted to thank you for bringing this up. Had I brought it up, I suspect Ladislaus would have dismissed it as modernist.

Now you're straw-manning here.  This part is pure speculation and is not indicated by Scripture.  I'm talking about where Scripture does actually teach something.

Nevertheless, here, there's a future-state indication of the "lion laying down with the lamb" ... which may be a metaphor, or it may be real.  Again, this is pure speculation.  Despite the fact that these animals appear to be designed to be carnivores, that could have been done by God in anticipation of the Fall.  Even animals that are now carnivores could have survived without actually indulging in the behavior ... eating various fruits and nuts that may have been available at the time.  But it's pure speculation and has nothing to do with your other Modernist tendencies.

Also, there have actually been some situations where scientists assumed that some animals were carnivores due to various physiological considerations and found out later that they had been mistaken.  I can't recall the scenario exactly, but I did hear about it somewhere.

Even if animals ate other animals, it's also possible that they did so immediately after the animals just happened to die, or else only hunted or attacked other animals when necessary for food.  I could see an in-between state, where even if some carnivorous activity took place, there was little other aggression between the animals.

Also, there have actually been some situations where scientists assumed that some animals were carnivores due to various physiological considerations and found out later that they had been mistaken.  I can't recall the scenario exactly, but I did hear about it somewhere.

Some good examples of this would be the cases of the Grizzly bear and the Black bear: 

Bears are omnivores that have relatively unspecialized digestive systems similar to those of carnivores. The primary difference is that bears have an elongated digestive tract, an adaptation that allows bears more efficient digestion of vegetation than other carnivores (Herrero 1985). Unlike ruminants, bears do not have a cecuм and can only poorly digest the structural components of plants (Mealey 1975). To compensate for inefficient digestion of cellulose, bears maximize the quality of vegetal food items ingested, typically foraging for plants in phenological stages of highest nutrient availability and digestibility (Herrero 1985).

The food habits of grizzly bears in Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) have been described in detail by Knight et al. (1984) and Mattson et al. (1991). Overall, army cutworm moths, whitebark pine nuts, ungulates, and cutthroat trout are the highest quality food items available to grizzly bears in the GYE. These foods impart the greatest nutritive value in exchange for the least foraging effort (Craighead et al. 1995). Grizzly bear food habits are influenced by annual and seasonal variation in available foods.

Source: https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/nature/bearfoods.htm

Another case would be that of the common, or spectacled caiman, which has been observed to occasionally eat plants in the island of Puerto Rico, where it is an invasive species. 


See here for general info regarding this animal: https://nas.er.usgs.gov/queries/factsheet.aspx?SpeciesID=222


Here for research concerning its diet in Puerto Rico, page 5 is especially notable: https://data.fs.usda.gov/research/pubs/iitf/ja_iitf_2016_Bontemps001.pdf


These are two different kinds of animals that one would not expect to consume plants or berries as food based on their fierce appearances and reputation, but yet they do.