Three arguments that Eden was in a different physical world

These three arguments assume the truth of evolution and also a quite realist understanding of the Genesis creation accounts.

First, the Edenic Paradise is described as a place where Adam and Eve could in theory have lived in perfect happiness forever. The perfection of such a physical Paradise is such that it could not have been achieved in a place that could be visited today. Long before the advent of humans, our world had tectonic activity, (causing earthquakes and tsunamis), lightning strikes, disease, annoying insects like flies and dangerous animals like lions, cancer-causing sunburn and wind-storms.  None of these would be expected to exist in a perfect Paradise, yet all are understood to have been ubiquitous in our world since before humans were on Earth.  There is nowhere we can find in our world where these things could ever have been escaped by humans.  Therefore the Paradise in Eden was necessarily physically cut off from our world. 

Second, the fact that Eden is physically distinct from our world is suggested by its geography, as described in Genesis 2:10-14.  Wenham suggests the possibility that Eden is not in our world.  He does so by means of his understanding that the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers described in Genesis 2:14 is reversed from the flow in our world.  He writes, 'Maybe the reversed flow of the rivers suggests that paradise is beyond man’s present experience. Their names (the names of the rivers mentioned in Genesis 2:10-14) affirm that there was a garden there, but maybe the insoluble geography is a way of saying that it is now inaccessible to, even unlocatable by, later man'.  That is, Genesis itself suggests by its geography that Eden was not a part of our physical world.

Third, evolution has taken a long time in our world, in the order of millions of years.  This does not square with a creation of Adam from dust around 4000 B.C.  It squares even less well with a creation of all animals from dust around 4000 B.C.  The only viable solution to this problem is to see that Adam and Eve's world was different from our world, and additionally to see that the time frames of creation in the two worlds are very different.  Once we accept that there are two separate worlds, we can conclude that in our world human (and animal) evolution took millions of years, while in the pre-flood world, the creation of humans and animals was very swift.  Thus we can embrace both the scientific consensus and the biblical account of human and animal creation.

This post is taken from the Draft Thesis.  I recommend you start with the Draft Journal article, not with the Draft Thesis.