Mark says in this post:
There may still be unanswered questions, of course. For instance, just what can we imply from the fossils of dinosaurs so many million years ago? And yet the Bible is not the slightest bit interested in such things. Its concern is the death of human beings in the light of God's own nature and his purpose borne out in creation.
I can't agree with him in putting a limit on the scope of the biblical opposition to death that the Bible itself does not apply. The creation, of which mankind is part, is one in its relation to and rejection of God. Man as 'federal head' has brought the whole creation crashing down, and so the death that marks our separation, the creation's separtion, from the life-giver must echo throughout the creation the discord that it brings. To hope that it is only human death that is a concern (and it indeed is) is to ignore God's intention in the new creation. For instance Isaiah 65:25 and Romans 8. References could be multiplied to show that God does not forget his creation in total, because it is the creation in total that bears the marks of dissolution, not only mankind.
Mark's acceptance of the notion of deep ages showing death presumably before humanity is troubling. Would death, the mark of alienation from God, could death, being such, pre-exist the rupture between God and man? It seems hardly likely and seems to me to misunderstand the reason that death came at the point at which the rupture was made. It is no good to say that the Bible is silent on the pre-existance of death, rather to concentrate on the Bible's positive statements on the matter. The introduction of death would seem logically to exclude it being a phenomenon prior to the change of state between God and his creation.
I've covered some of this ground in 'Death's line'
