What Do We Know About Dinosaurs
Vered Shapiro writes for the Davidson Institute that more than 2,100 dinosaur skeletons have been found. Despite this, scientists have constantly developed theories about when certain dinosaurs lived and what exactly they looked like. Some of the more recent theories, for instance, suggest that dinosaurs more likely had a great number of feathers, than previously thought. Dan Vergano explains this more in his article for National Geographic.
Scientifically speaking, it depends on what worldview the scientist has regarding creationism, the age of the earth, and creationist evolutionism. Theres also evolutionary theories that exclude God from the picture, but we wont touch on those in this article. Ill briefly break down the three views of the earths age here and then lightly touch on where macroevolution falls in these three theories.
Those Who Linger Long At The Wine
Who has woe? Who has sorrow? Who has contentions? Who has complaints? Who has wounds without cause? Who has redness of eyes? Those who linger long at the wine, Those who go in search of mixed wine.
Nothing much has changed when it comes to drunkenness!
While the Bible doesnt condemn all drinking, it does forbid drunkenness and warns against the dangers of drinking to excess . It also tells us to not let our freedom be a stumbling block to others .
Are Dinosaurs A Mystery
Many think that the existence of dinosaurs and their demise is shrouded in such mystery that we may never know the truth about where they came from, when they lived, and what happened to them. However, dinosaurs are only a mystery if you accept the evolutionary story of their history.
According to evolutionists: Dinosaurs first evolved around 235 million years ago, long before man evolved.1 No human being ever lived with dinosaurs. Their history is recorded in the fossil layers on earth, which were deposited over millions of years. They were so successful as a group of animals that they eventually ruled the earth. However, around 65 million years ago, something happened to change all of thisthe dinosaurs disappeared. Most evolutionists believe some sort of cataclysmic event, such as an asteroid impact, killed them. But many evolutionists claim that some dinosaurs evolved into birds, and thus they are not extinct but are flying around us even today.2
There is no mystery surrounding dinosaurs if you accept the Bibles totally different account of dinosaur history.
According to the Bible: Dinosaurs first existed around 6,000 years ago.3 God made the dinosaurs, along with the other land animals, on Day 6 of the Creation Week . Adam and Eve were also made on Day 6so dinosaurs lived at the same time as people, not separated by eons of time.
Recommended Reading: Full Episodes Of Dinosaur Train
Is There Evidence That The Flood Was Global
When we look around the world we do indeed find much evidence. Most scientists claim that the past can be understood by what is happening in the world today. The Bible describes a world-wide flood that was so great that it cannot be understood by looking at modern floods. I will list several examples from a study of the earth that a great catastrophe once involved the whole earth.
When Were Dinosaurs Found
The story of their discovery began back in the 1820s, when Gideon Mantell, an English doctor, found some unusual teeth and bones in a quarry. Dr Mantell realized there was something very different about these animal remains, and believed that he had found an entirely new group of reptiles. By 1841, about nine types of these different reptiles had been uncovered, including two called Megalosaurus and Iguanodon.
At this time, a famous British scientist, Dr Richard Owen, coined the name Dinosauria, meaning terrible lizard, for this is what the huge bones made him think of.
Also Check: New Dinosaur Movie Coming Out
The Bible Does Not Use The Word Dinosaur
Bible Verses About Dinosaurs
What does the Bible say about dinosaurs? Many people ask are there dinosaurs in the Bible? Did they really exist? How did dinosaurs become extinct? What can we learn from them? These are three of several questions that we will be answering in this article today.
Even though the word dinosaur is not used, Scripture does indeed talk about them. The words that we see are behemoth, dragon, Leviathan, and serpent, which can be a number of dinosaurs.
Read Also: Jurassic Park Tour Kauai Hawaii
The Bible Describes Two Dinosaur
Bible Authors Believed In The Creation Narrative
Many of the authors of both Old Testament and New Testament clearly accepted the Creation account as accurate history: David , Nehemiah , Isaiah , and Paul . Jesus, Himself, accepts Creation as a literal historical event. Referring to the creation of Adam and Eve, He said, He which made them at the beginning, made them male and female . The expression at the beginning is the same expression used in the first three verses of Genesis, the first book of the Bible. If each day of Creation were a long, indefinite period of time, the Creation of humans, occurring as it did at the end of the sixth day of Creation, would not have been at the beginning of Creation, but after six long eons of time.
Don’t Miss: Jurassic Park Dominion Trailer Release Date
Can Fundamentalist Christians Believe In Dinosaurs
The primary thing that differentiates fundamentalists from other varieties of Christians is their conviction they can prove that the Old and the New Testaments hold and, therefore, the first and final word in any discussion on ethics, geology, and biology. While most Christian authorities have no trouble interpreting the six days of creation in the Bible as figurative rather than literal because we know each day can be 500 million years long! Fundamentalists insist that a biblical day is the same as today. Combined with a close reading of the age of the patriarchs and a reconstruction of the timing of biblical events, this reduces the patriarchs to an age of approximately 6,000 years.
It is extremely difficult to fit composition and dinosaurs into that timeframe. Fundamentalists suggest solutions to this problem:
Dinosaurs were real, but they lived only a few thousand years ago. This is the most common solution to the dinosaur problem: Stegosaurus, Triceratops, and their ilk roamed the earth during biblical times, and even two, two by two, rode on Noahs ark . Through). In this view, paleontologists are at best misinformed and outright fraud when they date fossils to hundreds of millions of years ago because it goes against biblical wording.
Are Dinosaurs Really Extinct
One cannot prove an organism is extinct without having knowledge ofevery part of the earths surface simultaneously. Experts have been embarrassedwhen, after having declared animals extinct, they were discovered alive and well. For example, in the 1990s explorers found elephants in Nepal that have many features of mammoths.44
Scientists in Australia found some living trees that they thought hadbecome extinct with the dinosaurs. One scientist said, It was like finding alive dinosaur.45 When scientists find animals or plants that they thoughtwere extinct long ago, they call them living fossils. There are hundreds of living fossils, a big embarrassment for those who believe in millions of years of earth history.
Explorers and natives in Africa have reported sighting dinosaur-like creatures,even in the twentieth century.46 These have usually been confined to out-of-the-way places such as lakes deep in the Congo jungles. Descriptions certainly fit those of dinosaurs.47
Cave paintings by native Americans seem to depict a dinosaur.48 Scientistsaccept the mammoth drawings in the cave, so why not the dinosaurdrawings? Evolutionary indoctrination that man did not live at the same timeas dinosaurs stops most scientists from even considering that the drawings are of dinosaurs.
It certainly would be no embarrassment to a creationist if someone discovereda dinosaur living in a jungle. However, this should embarrass evolutionists.
You May Like: Museum Of Jurassic Technology Gift Shop
Why Do We Find Dinosaur Fossils
In , we read that all flesh had corrupted his way upon the Earth . Perhaps people and animals were killing each other maybe dinosaurs had started killing other animals and humans. In any case, the Bible describes the world as wicked.
Because of this wickedness, God warned a godly man named Noah that He was going to destroy the world with a Flood . God therefore commanded him to build a great ship so that all the kinds of land animals and Noahs family could survive on board while the Flood destroyed the entire Earth .
Some people think that dinosaurs were too big, or there were too many of them, to go on this Ark. However, there were not very many different kinds of dinosaurs. There are certainly hundreds of dinosaur names, but many of these were given to just a bit of bone or skeletons of the same dinosaur found in other countries. It is also reasonable to assume that different sizes, varieties, and sexes of the same kind of dinosaur have ended up with different names. For example, look at the many different varieties and sizes of dogs, but they are all the same kindthe dog kind! In reality, there may have been fewer than 50 kinds of dinosaurs.
God sent two of every land animal into the Ark there were no exceptions. Therefore, dinosaurs must have been on the Ark. Even though there was ample room in the huge ship for large animals, perhaps God sent young adults into the Ark that still had plenty of room for them to grow.
Who Discovered Dinosaurs
Secular books would tell you that the first discovery of what later were called dinosaurs was in 1677 when Dr. Robert Plot found bones so big they were thought to belong to a giant elephant or a giant human.11
In 1822, Mary Anne Mantell went for a walk along a country road in Sussex, England. According to tradition, she found a stone that glittered in the sunlight and showed it to her fossil-collecting husband. Dr. Mantell, a physician, noticed that the stone contained a tooth similar to, but much larger than, that of modern reptiles. He concluded that it belonged to some extinct giant plant-eating reptile with teeth like an iguana. In 1825 he named the owner of the tooth Iguanodon . It was Dr. Mantell whobegan to popularize the age of reptiles.12
From a biblical perspective, however, the time of the above discoveries was actually the time when dinosaurs were rediscovered. Adam discovered dinosaurs when he first observed them.
Read Also: Walking With Dinosaurs Documentary Free Online
The Week Of Seven Days
If life developed gradually over millions of years, there would be no explanation for the weekly cycle. The day, month, and year are based on natural movements of the earth, moon, and sun. But there is no astronomical basis for the seven-day week. It had its origin at Creation when God made the earth and everything on it in six daysand rested on the seventh day.
If we look carefully at the biblical Creation account, it is very difficult to come to any other conclusion but that Moses, the author, intended to describe literal, 24-hour days. The Hebrew word, yom, has the same meaning as our English word day. In both languages the word can refer to literal days or it can refer to longer periods of time. For example, we may use expressions such as the day of our forefathers. However, in Hebrew, if a numeral accompanies the word yom, it always means a literal day. There are no exceptions. In the Creation account, yom is associated with day one, day two, day three, etc. Moses also makes use of the following expressions: evening and morning , light and darkness , night and day . He could hardly have made it more clear that he was referring to literal days.
If each day in the Creation account is actually a long period of time, plants would have been created long before insects, since plants were created on the third day and insects were created on the fifth day. Yet many plants cannot survive without the pollination provided by insects.
Is There Archeological Evidence For The Existence Of Behemoth And Leviathan
We should keep in mind, paleontologists did not dig up the first dinosaur until 1819. And according to World Wide Fund for Nature, 10,000 species go extinct every year. Researchers still have not uncovered all the creatures that existed in other periods of history, perhaps including ones such as the leviathan.
A lack of archeological evidence does not conclude such animals did not exist.
For instance, 10 archeological finds in 2018 alone bolstered evidence for events and people mentioned in Scripture. But before 2018, those historical events and people still had existed, whether archaeological artifacts proved it or not.
Does it matter?
Yes, and no.
It matters in a sense that we can see Gods fingerprints on all of creation, including the dinosaur fossils we pass in museums. It also matters in the sense that if the animals mentioned in Job are, in fact, dinosaurs, this concludes humans and dinosaurs overlapped in time periods of existence.
However, all in all, whether Job referred to a diplodocus or a hippopotamus, this does not affect major doctrinal issues in the Bible. We should keep in mind Scripture doesnt mention every animal that ever came into existence. This does not mean God didnt have a hand in creating all living things simply because they dont receive a specific remark in the Bible.
Don’t Miss: Does The Bible Say Anything About Dinosaurs
What Came First Dinosaurs Or Adam And Eve
There is no definitive answer to this question, as both theories have a great deal of evidence to support them.
However, if one had to choose between the two, it is more likely that dinosaurs came first.
This is because dinosaurs were around for millions of years before humans even evolved, and there is evidence that they died out around 65.5 million years ago.
In contrast, Adam and Eve are thought to have lived around 6,000 years ago.
Origin Of Sin And Death
The idea of the gradual evolutionary development of living things until humans finally appear makes it difficult to understand sin and the origin of evil. The fossil record gives much evidence of death, disease, predation, and crueltyall supposedly taking place eons of time before Adam and Eve evolved and sinned. Yet the Bible clearly tells us that God said everything He created was good or very good . The Bible teaches that sin originated in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve disobeyed God and that death is the result of sin. But if parasites, predators, disease, and death occurred before the creation of Adam and Eve , then death would be part of Gods original plan.
Read Also: Best Dinosaur Museum In Usa
Does Evolution Contradict The Bible
If being a Christian means believing that the Bible is the authentic, trustworthy Word of God and that Christ is our Creator and Savior, the answer is No. One cannot believe these things and also believe in evolution as the explanation for the origin of life on our earth as we know it.
Some theologians have attempted to reconcile the biblical Creation story with the evolutionary explanation for the origin of life. But to do so requires interpreting the six days of creation in Genesis as long, indefinite periods of time rather than six literal, 24 hour days as the text indicates. Such an interpretation of Scripture cannot be supported by sound principles of Bible study. In many ways evolution and Christianity are not compatible. Here are some points to consider.
Are Dinosaurs Mentioned In Ancient Literature
Interestingly, the word dragon is used a number of times in the Old Testament. In most instances, the word dinosaur could substitute for dragon and it would fit very nicely. Creation scientists believe that dinosaurs were called dragons before the word dinosaur was invented in the 1800s. We would not expect to find the word dinosaur in Bibles like the Authorized Version , as it was translated well before the word dinosaur was ever used.
Also, there are many very old history books in various libraries around the world that have detailed records of dragons and their encounters with people. Surprisingly , many of these descriptions of dragons fit with how modern scientists would describe dinosaurs, even Tyrannosaurus. Unfortunately, this evidence is not considered valid by evolutionists. Why? Only because their belief is that man and dinosaurs did not live at the same time!
However, the more we research the historical literature, the more we realize there is overwhelming evidence that dragons were real beasts, much like our modern reconstructions of dinosaurs, and that their existence has been recorded by many different people, even just hundreds of years ago.
Also Check: Dinosaur Shoes That Light Up