Designed to Die?

There is a mystery, a paradox, regarding death and the Bible. Originally, everything was created very good and death is an interloper. When Adam sinned, death entered the world (Rom. 5:12). It is the last enemy and will be destroyed (1 Cor. 15:26). Death was not used in God's creative process.

Yet death is beneficial in some ways. The Creator implemented a kind of cleanup crew to take care of dead things and be nourished by them. Before the Genesis Flood, some folks lived 900 years but that drastically changed. Even cells are designed to die.

Skull, flowers, and butterflies, Pixabay / Ron Hoekstra

After the return of Jesus, death will be done away with. Many animals are designed to have short life spans. (I saw a video where a woman had a pet jumping spider, a creature that only lives a few months.) On the other hand, some critters live an astonishing number of years. Creation theologians should be able to answer this, but this child speculates that with the fall of man and the entrance of death into creation, other things were put into place by God to use death as a tool.

In all of our experiences, death accompanies life. But what if that weren’t so? What if death never terminated the existence of some form of living organism? For example, simple, single-celled bacteria reproduce asexually through binary fusion, with a doubling time as short as 30 minutes or less. If such bacteria remained untouched by death, their population would increase exponentially. 

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Biological life without death can quickly get out of control for more complex species of life as well. Mice can have a growth rate of 100 percent per month. What does this translate to if death is eliminated? Well, in just under three years, the number of mice would multiply so drastically that there would be over three mice for every square foot of land on Earth.

To read and ponder the entire article, see "Death by Intelligent Design? A Biological Enigma."