At a glance

The book’s “fantastic” list includes vegetarianism, and its physics chapter extends the theme: predation, painful toil, and decay are read as features of the original good creation rather than newcomers at the Fall. This response reads the same passages — Genesis 1, 3, and 9, and Romans 8 — for what they actually say about food, curse, and subjection.

Some arguments are about rocks; this one is about Eden. Noah’s Flood Revisited gathers a family of readings that flatten the story’s hinge: carnivores existed from creation and serve good functions, Genesis 9’s diet change concerns humans only, work and pain predate sin, and Romans 8’s decay is a creation ordinance rather than a Fall consequence [1][2]. If those readings hold, then nothing fundamental changed at the Fall — only degrees of difficulty — and a long biological history of predation and decay before human sin becomes not merely permissible but expected.

That is a consequential set of claims, and it should be said at the start that they are readings, not proofs, and that the book presents them with visible care. This response will test them the same way: text first, inferences labeled.

The book’s case, stated as strongly as it deserves

  • Predation is original and good. Carnivores, on the book’s reading, were part of creation from the beginning and carry out genuinely beneficial ecological functions — regulation of herbivores, structure for whole landscapes [1].

  • Genesis 9 changes human diet only. The permission to eat flesh, on this reading, is addressed to Noah and his descendants; the text never says animals began eating meat there [1].

  • Genesis 1:30 is a food chain, not a menu. The green-plants clause is read as identifying the base of terrestrial food webs, not as requiring exclusive vegetarianism for every animal [1].

  • The human command stands distinct. Genesis 1:29 is read as a dietary instruction for humans specifically — a real command, not a proto-food-chain description [1].

  • Decay is constitutive, not cursed. Romans 8 is read as teaching that creation has been subject to a law of decay from the beginning — thermodynamic entropy as the very condition of digestion and work, and therefore a beneficial feature of physical life [2].

  • The curse heightened ordinary conditions. Work and pain, on this reading, precede sin in Genesis 2–3; the curse increases their difficulty rather than introducing them [2].

Paraphrase

The book’s presentation deserves its distinctions. It does not claim the Fall was nothing; its thesis is narrower — which conditions preceded it — and it keeps a genuine dietary command to humans in Genesis 1:29 rather than dissolving the text’s food language entirely. For the animal question it leans on ecology: the wolf studies it cites are real biology about real ecosystems, and some of them cut against a simplistic “predators are disorder” picture. For Romans 8 it leans on theology: if entropy underlies digestion and motion, then a world without decay is not obviously a better world, and the text’s subjection can be read as the shape of creaturely finitude. The readings are hedged as readings. The question this response presses is whether the texts chosen actually carry them.

[1] Noah’s Flood Revisited, chapters 15 and 18

What the book gets right

Four acknowledgments, stated plainly.

Genesis 9 is indeed a human grant. The permission in Genesis 9:3–4 is spoken to Noah and, through him, to humanity; animals are not addressed. The book is textually correct that nothing in that passage announces a change in animal diets — a point worth remembering when the verse is enlisted for other arguments.

Work before the Fall is in the text. Genesis 2:15 has the man placed in the garden to work it and keep it — before any sin. The book is right that work is not itself a curse, and any theology that makes all labor post-Fall is reading against the chapter.

Predators do real ecological work now. The Yellowstone literature is genuine science about genuine effects, and the studies the book gathers are not fringe. A conversation that begins by treating predation as chaos misreads ecosystems; the book is right to say so.

And the book’s modesty about its own move deserves noting: it presents these as readings that allow a long pre-Fall history — an interpretive option — rather than as knockdown exegesis. Disagreement below is therefore with the option, not with the honesty.

Test one: the two grants, read together

Begin where the food question starts — the two grants of Genesis 1:29–30. The first is to humans: every seed-bearing plant and every fruit tree “shall be yours for food.” The second is to everything that lives: “every green plant for food.” Both grants are the same kind of act — a gift of food — and both are plant-based. To read the second as a description of food chains rather than a grant of diet is to import an ecological category into a sentence whose grammar matches the first gift exactly. If the human clause is a menu, the animal clause — same verbs, same construction, one verse later — is a menu too.

The book’s own internal logic then points the other way from its conclusion. If Genesis 1:30 never meant “plants only,” then Genesis 9:3’s “as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything” loses its point: the analogy works precisely because the first grant was the green plants, and the second extends beyond it. An expansion presupposes a previous boundary. The text’s own sequence — plant grant, then curse, then flesh grant to humans — is a sequence of changes; flattening it costs the narrative its hinges.

One more witness belongs here, from within the canon: the prophets depict the peaceable kingdom as the predator’s menu changing — wolf with lamb, lion eating straw like the ox [1]. If carnivory had been original-good, that imagery would be oddly regressive, a promise to undo creation’s goodness. Read as restoration toward an earlier peace, it makes its own kind of sense. This is imagery, not a legal brief; but it is the Bible’s own picture of what predation’s end looks like.

Test two: what the wolf studies can and cannot show

Now the ecological evidence, which this response takes at full strength. The Yellowstone wolves research is real, the ecology-of-fear paper is a landmark, and its findings — that predation risk restructures where herbivores browse, with knock-on effects through the landscape — have reshaped how ecologists think [3]. The book is entitled to every bit of that.

It is not entitled to the inference from it — and the literature itself polices the boundary. The same research program’s cascading claims are actively disputed, including in the debate survey the book cites, where leading ecologists argue publicly about whether the Yellowstone story has been overread [4]. More fundamentally, the question at issue is not what predators do now but what predation was at creation. A wolf’s present role — regulating elk, weaving riparian systems — is compatible with both readings: a world designed with predation from the start, or a broken world where surviving ecological functions still serve. Present function cannot adjudicate past constitution. The studies were never designed to, and the book’s argument needs them to do more than they can. What they do accomplish is worth keeping: they refute any picture in which predator presence equals disorder, and this site does not hold that picture.

Test three: the evidence that isn’t evidence

One source-level note, because the site’s readers check footnotes. Among the ecological citations stands a paper on wolf reintroduction that is philosophy, not biology: an environmental-ethics essay about restoration’s “substitution problem” — whether engineered nature still counts as nature — arguing normatively that wolves belong in intact systems [5]. As normative argument it is interesting; as evidence about creation’s original diet it is inert. The verification behind this response confirmed what the paper is, and named it so that no reader mistakes its presence for data. This is not a scandal — books weave arguments from many cloth — but the weave should be visible.

Test four: Romans 8 — subjection or ordinance?

The deepest claim comes last, and it gets the closest reading. Romans 8:18–23 says four things in sequence: the creation was subjected to futility; the subjection was not its own choice, but the act of one who subjected it in hope; the creation will be set free from its bondage to corruption; and until then, it groans, with believers groaning alongside it for redemption [2].

Read the grammar and the argument together. The subjection is an event — something done, “in hope” — and the passage’s whole energy points forward to a liberation: the creation itself will be freed from decay. A constitution of nature is not something you liberate; a bondage is. The book’s reading requires that the bondage language be read as ordinance language, and the text simply does not lend itself to that reading. Note also what the passage does not do: it never dates the subjection to creation. “Since creation” is the book’s addition, filling a silence with a claim the verses do not make.

Our response

The distinction between entropy the physics and phthora the bondage matters for the same reason. The second law of thermodynamics is creation’s furniture — this response grants that digestion, work, and motion depend on it, and nothing in the text’s lament requires saying otherwise. What Romans 8 laments is not heat flow but frustrated purpose: a creation that cannot be what it was made to be, awaiting its repair. That is the register of the passage — moral and eschatological, not thermodynamic — and collapsing the two is the move that makes the book’s reading possible. A fair reading can say both things at once: physics keeps its laws, and the story keeps its rupture.

The parallel claim about pain follows the same rule. Genesis 2 shows work, yes — and shows no pain, no suffering, no thorns. Those enter in Genesis 3:16–19, in the judgment speeches, named in the curse: painful toil, cursed ground, thorns and thistles. The text’s plain sequence is work (before), painful toil (after). To say “pain before sin” requires redefining the word from the pain the curse names to unspecified sensation — a move the passage does not ask for and its sequence does not support.

What this leaves standing

Take the ledger. Granted to the book: Genesis 9’s diet change is a human grant; work precedes the Fall; predators exert real, beneficial functions in present ecosystems; and ecosystems are not chaos. Not granted, because the texts do not carry them: that carnivory is original-good (the grants of Genesis 1 are plant grants, and the food-chain reading is an ecological inference over a dietary sentence); that decay is creation’s ordinance (Romans 8’s subjection is an event oriented toward a liberation — a bondage, not a constitution); and that pain precedes the curse (the curse names it upon arrival).

What remains is the story the texts actually tell: a good creation, a real rupture, a promised repair — the same shape this series has presupposed from its first response, where the judgment’s scope followed the covenant’s scope, and where the world that will be freed from decay is the world the flood narrative already showed under judgment and mercy. The book’s flattened version — creation, and then everything running on largely unchanged — is available, but only at the price of reading the hinge out of the passages most built to carry it. That is an exegetical price, not a scientific debt; and the science the book brings, kept in its own lane, survives the trade intact.