Do creationists believe in dinosaurs?
If I’m not mistaken… the Bible states that the world was created in 7 days(and nights). God created animals and birds and such. However it fails to mention the creation of gigantic 50-100 ft long reptiles that would eat everything up! Not to mention the fact that dinosaur bones date back millions of years? (Here I’ve heard the arguement “How do you know they really were here millions of years ago? Maybe the dating thing is incorrect.”) But what about other creature’s bones? Yes, dinosaur bones are frickin huge; but they are composed of the same material as other bones, therefore even small… platypus bones would remain, up to elephant bones.
Re-thought… my question is more: How do creationists explain the existence of dinosaurs?
Prankster god.
Bill Hicks goes into this in a lot of detail in his revaltions show. Rather than stealing all his jokes, I’ll post a link to the script here , although it isn’t as good as seeing it performed. Search for “Fundamentalist Christianity” to find the top of the dinosaur section.
My father doesn’t. He graduated college from Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Mo, and apparently they teach that dinosaurs never existed. He always tells us how they found a little chicken bone and made up dinosaurs. All those skeletons you see in museums are just plaster and imagination.
Hehe-- good luck getting even a semi-coherent answer to this one.
Dinosaurs are one of those “oopsies” that the authors of the bible didn’t know had existed when they wrote it, so it got left out of the, umm… “inerrant”, divinely-inspired work.
“D’OH!,” to quote Homer.
Current day attempts to reconcile the existance of dinosaurs with scripture are truly among the funniest contortions you will ever see creationists resort to.
As a child being reared in a fundie household, I was never able to make a 6,000 year old earth make sense in my mind. I rationalized that a day to God could be thousands or even millions of years to us. Plenty of time for dinosaurs to be around for a while.
I think some use “leviathan” and “behemoth” mentioned in The Bible to denote the dinosaurs.
Obviousy, the lack of description of terrified populations running away from velociraptors and T. rex is problematic, but I’ve come to realize that no problem is too big that it can’t be ignored, for those that truly believe.
I knew a fundie who said dinosaur fossils were put there by Satan to make people doubt the Bible.
I knew a different fundie who said that dinosaurs were actually mentioned in… er… that book in the Bible that sounds like that one dude tripping on acid (someone help me out here) - Ezekiel, that’s it - UFOs allegedly mentioned too.
One of the leading creation “science” groups, The Institute For Creation Research of San Diego, CA does. Their book Scientific Creationism accepts the existence of dinosaurs and cites their fossil remains as evidence of their version of catastrophism, and that is only one of several references to dinosaurs in their publications.
There is a lot of hand-waving in the book to account for there being none on Noah’s Ark.
Most fundamentalists I have known take the mention of behemoth in Job to be a reference to a dinosaur. They will argue against all evidence that man and dinosaurs walked side-by-side.
Note that the position that dinosaurs were killed in the flood is inconsistent with the position that the “behemoth” mention is a reference to dinosaurs. (Job lived after the flood, no?)
And why are they layed down in strata by date, with various species at specific strata instead of all jumbled together if there was a flood? Why are the bones fosilized in the first place, and how is the dating so far off? And why is there no point source for all animals radiating out from some mountain in the middle east? And why did ALL the dinosaurs die off, even the smaller ones that would have had no trouble getting food? And why, if the big ones died off because they were too large, did elephants and large mammals survive? And how exactly DID Noah clean out the Ark. Oh, dont get me started on the Ark!! And why…well, why bother? The list is endless, and there is basically no talking to these people. They are like committed communists.
The one I hear in my wifes family is that the bones are pretty much made up, and that there are far fewer of them than we think…maybe less than 100 bones total (ya, it doesn’t make sense to me either). The other one I hear a lot of is that god put the bones in the earth as a test, sort of like the apple in the Garden of Eden…we are supposed to see the ‘bones’ but realize that as its not in the bible it can’t be true, and thus reject the evidence as false. Thus the path of wisdom. :rolleyes:
I am amazed at the lack of creativity in their explanations… I could make up some better excuses myself. Including the idea that the dinosaurs lived only outside Eden… that they were killed for being gluttons ? How would humans have survived living close to dinosaurs is pretty hard to explain.
Indeed. However, as a nitpick, I feel compelled to point out that contrary to their potrayal in Jurassic Park, real velociraptors would only come up to a little above waist high on a normal human and only weighed about 15 kgs. I don’t think they’d be attacking human villages willy-nilly.
The Bible is inerrant but it does not mean it had to explain every little thing. It does not mention electrons or the speed of sound. Inerrancy means that there are no mistakes in what the author wnated to say. Genesis is not a Science book becuase it wasn’t written as such. it was written for Bronze age people.
dinosaurs pose no problem.
Of course you could say the believing in a 6000 million year old earth requires pretty much faith in science, I believe it, don’t get me wrong, but still 6000 million is a lot.
The list is endless, and there is basically no talking to these people. They are like committed communists.