The sceptic might ask many questions about possible complications arising from the long lifespans of our antediluvian ancestors.
1.) Were our "antediluvian ancestors" slower to mature?
And I wonder what your take is on this, Sister Basilissa. This seems a very plausible explanation of what we see in the genealogy of Genesis 5, where no one sired a son before the age of 65. It makes sense that if our antediluvian ancestors lived much longer than we do owing to their superior design, then there would be no rush to reach sexual maturity. They would be fertile for centuries (see point 2, below). While Genesis 5 is silent on the age of the mothers, we know God would never design women to mature faster than men; and "If they're ready to bleed, they're ready to breed", as the saying goes.
2.) Was the onset of menopause delayed?
It must have been. God would not have allowed women to outlive their usefulness by almost a millennium and so spare them the penalty for Eve's sin – pain in childbirth (Gen 3:16). No doubt antediluvian women had larger ovaries than today's women and were born with many times more eggs, the genetic quality of which did not decline as rapidly, as evidenced by the fact that the majority of antediluvian ancestors were not mongoloids but intelligent people capable of building cities (Gen 4:17), farming (Gen 4:20), making music (Gen 4:21), and metalworking (Gen 4:22).
3.) Did our "antediluvian ancestors" have very very very long telomeres?
Well, yes, I think that's a given.
4.) Did our "antediluvian ancestors" go bald or grey around the same time as humans today do?
It is actually possible that our pre-Flood ancestors spent most of their lives bald and grey. There is no shame in this according to the Bible.
Lev 13:40-41
40 And the man whose hair is fallen off his head, he is bald; yet is he clean.
41 And he that hath his hair fallen off from the part of his head toward his face, he is forehead bald: yet is he clean.
2 Ki 2:23-24
23 And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head.
24 And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them.
Pro 16:31 The hoary head is a crown of glory, if it be found in the way of righteousness.
5.) Why weren't the lives of our "antediluvian ancestors" cut short by cancer?
If you live long enough, you will eventually get cancer. Perhaps canopy theory, which Brother Swallows mentioned, can partly explain why our antediluvian ancestors did not die from cancer at an earlier age. I believe genetic entropy, already mentioned by Dr White, may also help explain this. God created the world perfect. It was very good (Gen 1:31). Before the Fall, there was no death, predation or disease (Rom 5:12). Adam and Eve's genetic makeup would have been perfect. Their cells would have reproduced perfectly, without mutation. But as the generations went by, the quality of man's genes declined and became corrupted, making him more prone to diseases like cancer.
6.) If our "antediluvian ancestors" lived in cities, why did they not die younger due to communicable diseases?
As we saw earlier, at least some of our pre-Flood ancestors dwelt in cities (Gen 4:20). Yet they apparently did not succumb in large numbers to the contagious diseases usually associated with the squalor and cramped conditions of ancient (and even many modern) cities. Perhaps they had stronger immune systems. Perhaps they practised basic sanitation. Perhaps the little microevolution that had occurred since the Fall – before which there was no disease – was not yet sufficient to have created the fatal strains of bacteria we know today.
7.) Why is there no evidence of an "antediluvian population explosion"?
It stands to reason that if humans were fertile for centuries, were not susceptible to early death from disease, and had no access to modern contraception, the earth would have been overpopulated centuries before the Deluge; yet there is no evidence that this ever happened. The Bible, however, does not mention that the world was overpopulated before the Flood, so of course we would not expect to find evidence of overpopulation. Let's not complicate matters by thinking up problems flowing from reasonable conclusions drawn from what God's Word says. If God wasn't worried about the maths when He inspired Moses to write Genesis 5, then we shouldn't be either.
8.) How could humans have changed so much in 6,000 years? Isn't that like a form of evolution?
No. Creationists accept that there was rapid speciation after the Flood, which is nothing like Darwinian macroevolution.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Answers in Genesis
Two questions that are often asked about Noah’s Ark are: how could Noah have fit all those animals into his big ship, and how could only he and seven other people have cared for them? Bill Nye brought up these questions in his debate last month with Ken Ham.
These questions arise from an exaggerated view of the number of animals that were actually involved. God didn’t tell Noah to save every species of air-breathing, land-dwelling animal, only two (and in a few cases, seven pairs) of each kind of air-breathing, land-dwelling animal. The obvious question is: what constitutes a “kind”? Is a kind what we’d today call a genus? A family?
The answer is still being researched, though evidence suggests in most instances it’s the family level. The higher up the classification levels we climb, the numbers of individual animals that Noah needed to bring aboard the Ark becomes fewer. We need to remember that the standard Linnaean system of classification is man-made; it is not God’s system of classification.
According to a recent study, there may be only 137 different mammalian kinds alive today. Add those to the now-extinct kinds, the bird kinds, the reptile kinds, and the amphibian kinds, there may have been fewer than 1,000 . . . . The most-recent research indicates that Noah only needed maybe 2,000-3,000 animals.
Even so, that’s a lot of critters to tend to on a daily basis on the Ark. But don’t forget that humans were still recent creations of God. As such, they would have been very intelligent and resourceful. It’s not a stretch to imagine Noah, his family, and possibly hired labor being able to build all sorts of clever, labor-saving inventions to help in the year-long task of tending to perhaps 3,000 animals.
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If the microevolution of Ken Ham gave us all known deadly and disease-causing bacteria and viruses within the 6,000 years since the Fall, and all existing mammalian, reptilian, amphibian and avian species from the 1,000 created kinds aboard the Ark within the 4,300 years since the Flood, then we can safely conclude that the human baramin has also undergone some microevolution in the same period.
This ties in wonderfully with what Dr White was saying about the Hamites lacking Neanderthal DNA and lends weight to the "Out of the Middle-East" theory proposed by the Bible. As humans migrated into Africa after the Tower of Babel, they lost – perhaps by Divine means – some of the genetic information retained by Europeans, Americans, Asians, and Arabs. And microevolution, as we all know, is caused by the
loss of genetic information, not the creation of new genetic information.
Sister B.'s study shows us that atheism and evolutionism simply can't stand up to the cold hard facts of Scripture and True Christian™ logic.