Quote:
the notion that there was no death in the world until humans introduced it via our sin

You've mentioned this before, and it was a surprise to me then, too. This is an extrabiblical tradition, presumably? I can't find any suggestion of it in Genesis (Yahweh's blistering curse in Genesis 3 includes saying to Adam "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken", but it's not clear that this "returning unto the ground" is new information, especially as he doesn't mention it to either Eve or the snake).

After all, if there had been any deaths of humans before that point, we'd not be here to hear about it, as there'd've been no breeding stock and no humankind. And what about deaths of non-humans? What were lions and tigers eating at this point? (We don't hear about a second wave of animal creation with all the carnivores.) Come to that, what were Adam and Eve eating? Even if meat were off the menu, with most vegetables need you to kill the plant to gather the food. It's "recorded" that they ate the fruit of the trees in the Garden of Eden -- so if aborting a foetus is the moral equivalent of killing a person, why isn't eating a walnut the moral equivalent of killing a walnut tree?

Peter