Hey i bet this has been covered but i am new 
Dudes - Religions like the mormons totally disregard dinosuars …
But the Christian chruch says nothing - there is no mention of these in the bible - nor no explanation of them in genisis.
Yet the Chirstian church does not bother to argue the point.
Is there a place for Dinosuars and Creationlism ?
Can someone explain why and how ?
Calvin Grondahl cartoon (or possibly Pat Bagley) from Salt Lake City:
Father to son looking at a T. Rex skeleton (probably at the Museum at the University of Utah): “Uhhh, God put it in the Garden of Eden to …uhhh… keep the mice down.”
(I know there’s no T. Rex skeleton anywhere in Utah. But it’s a joke.)
I would think that only a small minority of Christians beleive that the Book of Genesis gives a literal account of the creation. For the others, obviously, the existence of dinosaurs poses no problems.
Those who do take a literal view of Genesis have given some thought to this problem, but as I am not one of them I will not pretend to represent their views.
My girlfriend and I recently went to the field museum in Chicago to see the dinosaur bones. She is Christian, I am agnostic.
There was an exhibit detailing evolution, to which she took slight offense. I accidentally let loose a chuckle, and asked her if she thought “god planted the bones”, resulting in hurt feelings.
Is there a place for Dinosaurs and Creationism?
I say yes, if you can believe that god planted the bones to throw us off or to test our faith.
Fundies I Have Known® point to descriptions of lizards in Ezekiel as evidence of divine knowledge of dinosaurs.
Thy this thread for more discussion on this question.
Or you could try it even. If you like.
There have been lame attempts to pass off Biblical accounts of behemoth and leviathan as dinosaurs, but I’ve yet to see any creationists running off in search of fossils of any other strange beasts that might be described in there; it’s just another case of trying to make the evidence fit the idea, or disregarding it with a little hand-waving.
Thou art getting all biblical there, Aro!
While I subscribe to virtually none of their beliefs, I suspect that it is only fair to ask Creationists how they reconcile the evidence with their beliefs.
One large site that pushes that agenda is the Institute for Creation Research.
On their Acts and Facts page (linked from their home page), there are a number of essays dealing with their views of the world, including: Dinosaur Mania Strikes Again. (They also have a place to buy books explaining the issue in detail.)
In addition, there are other sites, including http://www.sixdaycreation.com/ where they have an entire section devoted to dinosaur questions and another devoted to Flood questions (scroll down a bit from the top).
I hate wading into religious debates, but since the only voice from the “other side” is from ultra-fundamentalist webpages, I want to try to offer a little balance. After all, would you want me to base every agnostic or athiest opinion on the rantings of Madeline Murray O’Hare?
I’m a Christian, and attended a fairly moderate congregation of the Church of Christ in my “formative years”. I have no problem with dinosaurs not only existing, but existing for millions of years before man set foot on this planet. The Bible does not list every single animal that God created, but it does state that they were created before Adam. No mention is made of the duck-billed platypus or the ruby-throated hummingbird, but they exist. No timetable is given other than the “days” mentioned - who says God is limited to 24-hour days? The Bible itself later states that He isn’t - it says that a day to Him can be as a thousand years (or words to that effect - I’m no Bible scholar so I can’t just open the book to any quote I want). Who says that a day for Him couldn’t last, oh, say, 35 million years? Where is each step of the creation process listed - it only says that He made it happen, not how. Maybe the dinosaurs were steps in the process of creating the animals we’re all used to - which science says they were. Maybe talking about creatures that don’t exist anymore wasn’t useful to the purpose of spreading God’s message, and so such confusing and irrelevant concepts were left out.
I’m so sick of the ultra-fundamentalists insisting that dinosaurs and geology are fake, or were planted as a “test of the faithful by God” - and I’m even more sick of the anti-Christians out there pointing to ignorant arguments by zealots as “proof” that the Christian faith is wrong. Beleive or disbelieve whatever you want, I’m not going to try to stop you, but damn it, stop using the term “fundies” to describe any Christian who believes what the Bible says - it’s offensive and prejudiced. Why is it ok to use offensive little nicknames to describe Christians, but we’d all get riled up if somebody referred to devout Muslims or Jews by similar offensive little labels?
I know for a fact that it’s possible to have a religious conversation without the name calling and snide comments I see all the time on the SDMB - I’ve successfully had conversations about religion with athiests, other Christians from different belief systems, Muslims, agnostics, Wiccans, and Buddhists. Do you know what the difference seems to have been? They had respect for my right to believe as I wanted, and I had the same respect for thier rights. That seems to be missing around here sometimes.
Fighting ignorance requires an open mind.
Last weekend, I campled at Dinosaur Valley State Park just outside of Glen Rose, Texas. Dinosaur Valley got its name because the Paluxy river has washed away the soil that lies over a limestone layer, exposing lots of dinosaur tracks in the limestone.
Right outside the entrance to the park is the Creation Evidence Museum. The CEM claims that dinosaurs and man were contemporaneous. The guy who runs it (who is a Baptist minister with a bogus PhD from some mail order outfit in Australia) has determined that other tracks near the three-toed ones are from a giant man, and that all men must have been giants back then, when there was much more oxygen. Others have found that these tracks are just from other kinds of dinosaurs who didn’t impress their toes when they walked, but the CEM goes on undiscouraged.
Actually, I camped, not campled.
I used to work at a printing company that was owned by a fundamentalist family. The daughter of one of the owners, about 5 at the time told me “Land Before Time” was one of her favorite movies. I thought it was ironic. Later, I overheard her grandmother say to her while holding a dinosaur toy that dinosaurs had lived “thousands of years ago”. She was a nice lady, so I bit my tongue. I have a feeling many conservative Christians don’t think too much about the whole issue. The truth or otherwise of evolution just isn’t that important to them.
I don’t think you have to be ‘anti-Christian’ to be worried about fundamentalists.
Remember that they believe the Bible is literally true. (None of your messing about - a day is a day!)
I teach at a school founded by a Christian, which has chapel services. I’m an atheist, but we get on just fine.
As a teacher, I dislike the fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible to ‘prove’ that life on Earth is thousands of years old, and that evolution is just a ‘theory’.
Our Christian biology department teaches evolution as science, and our Christian religious department occasionally mentions creationism as one of many such religious myths.
Hear, hear.