Those who reject the
theory of evolution in favor of a strict and literal creationist interpretation of the
Abrahamic
Creation mythos are stuck with a few problems arising from the
language of the text to which they hew. In particular, according to hardcore Biblical creationists, there were absolutely no meat-eating animals in the
Garden of Eden, because there was no "death" -- they have no choice in adhering to this, as it is clearly specified in Genesis 1:29-30:
And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.
So the Garden of Eden was a garden of eatin' -- but only veggies. Whatever actual
carnivores came into being, they did so after "the Fall," the equally mythical expulsion of Man from the Garden for the sin of eating the
fruit of the
tree of knowledge of good and evil. To be more exact, since the
Bible makes clear that all the creatures were created right there in the beginning, all the carnivores that now exist were in the Garden of Eden, but were then satisfied to survive on 'the green herb' alone in the Garden. They only adjusted to a life of killing for a filling after the Garden was shut down. Thus, the
lions and
tigers and
bears and
wolves and
hyenas and
crocodiles and
killer whales and
sharks and
alligators and
anteaters and
hawks and
eagles and
bobcats and
rattlesnakes and
pythons and
moray eels and
web-spinning spiders and
trapdoor spiders , all of these creatures were purely herbivorous and ate only
fruits and
veggies and
leaves and
grasses and
coconuts up until the Fall, after which they were able to snap-quickly "evolve" into meat eaters.
The popularly accepted date of this expulsion is usually set somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. So, in the geologically infinitesimal space of no more than 10,000 years, each of these animals was able to undergo the drastic physiological
adaptations necessary to change a
digestive tract suitable for digesting nothing but
vegetable matter into a digestive tract suitable for eating nothing but meat. You may be aware that dedicated herbivores have a number of special features to enable them to digest plant matter (
multiple stomachs, flat
teeth,
cud-chewing) while carnivores have an equal number of special features to enable them to not only capture but also digest animal flesh -- not just those sharp flesh-slicing teeth, but also the production of different digestive enzymes and the accommodation of
flesh-dissolving bacteria in the digestive tract. Because the carnivore has a completely different
intake of
raw material from which it must
fuel its own
growth and
life, its mechanisms for turning its food into fuel differ down to the molecular level. The differences between a wholly herbivorous animal and its wholly carnivorous
progeny even far exceed the differences between, for example,
chimpanzees and
humans.
The sum of accommodations required for plant eating animals to become carnivorous -- the development of the right teeth, the physiology for hunting and capturing prey, introduction of new digestive enzymes, a shortened digestive tract, elimination of extra stomachs and digestive processes, is sufficient to make it impossible for a tiger, for example, to reproduce with a hypothetical "vegetarian" tiger that was able to survive only on plants. Their physiological differences would be such that the
union would simply never result in a viable offspring -- and that, my friends, is
speciation. So apparently creationists must not only believe that speciation and the introduction of "new information" in the form of complex new features can occur by evolution, but they believe this can happen thousands of times faster than
science teaches these changes occur by evolution!!