One of our most difficult intellectual problems is that of letting the Bible define perfection. Instead of this, we persist in bringing along our own notions of perfection in order to impose them on the Bible, and particularly on the Garden of Eden. And this seems okay, just so long as we don’t push it very far. But if we start asking specific questions about it, we discover that we have pushed it too far indeed, and have built ourselves ourselves a Platonic Garden of Eden, assembled out of celestial stainless steel and aluminum.
For example, we know that as a result of the Fall, the created order was given over to “vanity” and the “bondage of corruption” (Rom. 8:20-21). For many Christians, this simply means that entropy began with the Fall, instead of saying that entropy slipped its leash in destructive and obviously unpleasant ways. Before the Fall, entropy was an obedient servant.
Think of it this way. The fact that we die and our bodies rot in the ground is a consequence of our rebellion against God. God promised that such death would happen if our first parents disobeyed Him at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That is an example of entropy out of control, entropy that exhibits the created order’s bondage to corruption. The creation is longing, like an overdue pregnant woman, to be delivered from this kind of thing.
But clearly, we cannot say that all entropy was absent before the Fall. To use Gary North’s example, could Adam have shuffled a deck of cards before the Fall? Or would every hand have come out displaying the glory of God in one royal flush after another? When leaves fell off the trees in the garden, did they arrange themselves as giant pixels on the forest floor, creating beautiful pictures after the manner of the Dutch realists? Did leaves fall of the trees at all? Was there such a thing as mulch? Did the animals defecate, and was Adam supposed to use their manure as fertilizer?
We know that Adam and Eve were allowed to eat the fruit from every tree in the garden but one, and this means that the fruit was digested in their stomachs. And that means that their teeth and then their enzymes broke the fruit down from a higher degree of order to a lesser degree of order, at least in that limited space. All this was part of what God clearly defined as perfection. Adam and Eve did not live in Euclidville.
This means that the bondage to corruption and vanity in Romans 8, from which we long to be delivered, is emphatically not bondage to entropy simpliciter. The world as we know it now is certainly out of kilter, and deranged might be a better word. But the Fall did not take us from a realm of Hellenistic perfection down to this.
We can infer some things about that world. From some of the specific promises of restoration (e.g. a lion lying down with the lamb), we can see that predatory animals of the higher sentient orders are participants in the dislocations that came from our Fall. There will be no hyenas as such in the resurrection. But what about insects? Or predatory bacteria? There we have to confess that we just don’t know, and take care only to not imagine a perfection that is too “clean,” the way a persnickety Greek philosopher would have wanted it. Did Adam have to comb his hair in the morning?
We return to our example of the first bloodshed, the creation of Eve from Adam’s side. God loves to divide things. He divided the land from the sea, the earth from the sky, the day from the night. God consistently divides into a higher unity. A fertilized egg, one that is going to become a beautiful woman, does so by means of this kind of division into a higher unity. So God divided Adam into two, in order that the two parts would be recombined in a higher form of union. And, having done so, the woman conceives, and the one woman becomes two, and a child is born into the world. He will marry a woman who came about in a similar way, the two will become one, and then the one woman will become two. Repeat until the earth is full. The whole thing is beyond bizarre.
But pretend for a moment that you have not heard this story a thousand times. Pretend that you are given box seats in Eden to watch God create the first gorgeous woman of history. Pretend that you are watching the spectacle with your current unexamined assumptions about perfection. Would you even make it to the part where the Lord held up a bloody rib? Would your temptation be to leap out of your seat to try to stay the arm of the Lord of all wisdom? Would you be tempted to shout at Him, “Are you crazy?”