I understand that the world was built in 6 days, approximately 7000 ? years ago, according to a popular interpretation of the Bible.
Listening to the news today, scientists are excited about discovering evidence of a bird from 64 million years ago.
One explanation I’ve heard from a Christian with strong beliefs (my dear mother) was that God buried dinosaur bones. (For a joke? For oil?)
I guess faith trumps science or common sense for some. (Many?)
If you mean that dinosaurs existed, then yes, the vast majority of Christians believe, of course, that they existed. What is disputed is the millions-of-years part. Those of us who are young-earth-creationists believe that they were thousands of years ago, not millions.
(Not everyone who claims to be a Christian is a young-earth-creationist.)
Only a small proportion of Christians believe in Creationism. Especially Young Earth Creationism.
After some difficulties with science (back in the Renaissance), the Roman Catholic Church has accepted Evolution. But some of the Bible Thumpers don’t consider Catholics really “Christian.”
How much/little is “small?” I would put it as the majority.
Even in the United States, a country of many religions and also many atheists as well, over 40% of Americans are creationists. So I would guess that among the subset of Americans who are Christians, creationism is the *majority *belief.
Slate cites a detailed study of the various sorts of Creationists:
Of course, your definition of “Christian” is “Protestant.”
I am culturally Christian but agnostic in practice. I was raised Christian (Methodist) however and we were certainly never taught Young Earth creationism and we certainly knew all about dinosaurs.
You have to break this question down by denomination because “Christian” is meaningless as a descriptor. Mainline Protestants (Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians etc.) do not believe in Young Earth Creationism as a whole and neither do Catholics or Episcopalians. You have to go the Southern Baptists, Pentecostals or various fundamental or evangelical churches for that. Even then, only some members believe in Young Earth Creationism or creationism of any sort.
I always question those surveys that say that 40 something percent of Americans are Young Earth Creationists. I grew up in the Bible belt and I don’t think it was nearly that high even there. Then again, my mother was a science teacher and it wasn’t something that people brought up that much. I never personally heard anyone claim that dinosaurs weren’t millions of years old even among the fundies. The hot topic was always whether people were descended from apes (we are apes but you have to start with baby steps).
The mainline Protestant and Catholic view is that the book of Genesis is an allegory and the ‘days’ aren’t real Earth days. They simply represent steps in the creation of the universe, the Earth and life itself even if some of the steps are billions to millions of years long. I was always impressed by how accurate it is because it would be easy to get any part of it much more incorrect if someone just decided to make up any old folklore. It describes the formation of stars, the Earth and evolution in a fairly accurate order when you read it that way.
This might be a good resource for the official stances/positions of various Christian denominations. Most of the major Christian denominations would probably fall somewhere around old earth creationism/intelligent design.
Creationism, at least of the young earth variety, is not as prevalent in European Christianity, particularly since mainline Lutheranism, the Church of England/Scotland, the Roman Catholic Church, and Eastern Orthodox are the biggest sects there and by and large they all accept evolution and implicitly reject young earth creationism (though there is a split in the various Eastern Orthodox churches about the compatibility of science with religion).
Not even in the US. And even there, many of the people who “believe in Creation” believe in it in ways that are not the literal view of YECs.
I believe in a Creator God. I believe that “He created us in His image” means, among other things, that in our own ability to create we are akin to Him. That doesn’t mean I believe God is an old dude with a beard and a dick; if I was speaking my native language, the word “He” wouldn’t even be there and the other pronouns would be neuter. And I don’t believe that He created the world in seven calendar days.
*We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
Maker of all that is, seen and unseen. *
Says he made everything, but doesn’t say it was in seven calendar days.
*We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
Maker of all that is, seen and unseen. *
That’s the beginning of the Nicene Creed. Every Catholic is supposed to believe (or at least not reject) the idea of God as originator of the universe: that doesn’t mean we’re expected to agree with the vision of Creation that YECs have. In fact and as others have already pointed out, current doctrine about Faith and Science indicates that we’re not.
Genesis says there were trees bearing fruit before the sun was created. I’d be interested in what you think could be “much more incorrect” than that.
My theory:
Dinosaurs are fricking sweet.
If they existed in the Bible times, the Bible would’ve mentioned them, because c’mon, dinosaurs!
Therefore they were long dead when the Bible was written.
I assume you’re talking about Galileo. It wasn’t an issue of science vs. superstition at all. Many religious people supported him, and many “secular” (as much as you could be in those days) people thought he was a crackpot.
Honestly, some of these polls sound like push polls. If one of the questions is: “I believe in God(s), but also believe the early is 4.5 billion years etc.” then you’ll get a lot higher proportion rejecting both YEC and OEC than if the options are weasel words like: a) species created by evolution without God, b) evolution was guided by God c) [del]a Wizard[/del] God did it. The option “b” should be covering “theistic evolution” beliefs, but instead sounds like ID, while “a” sounds too atheistic, so “b” is simply the more palatable but still wrong answer.
Whew, I was beginning to think I’d have to create a very different mental image of you!
Six, he needed a nap after.
In the seventh day, God created the day of rest and the nap. And He examined the day of rest and the nap, and found they were good.
Eventually the Brits improved upon the day of rest and created the weekend, but there aren’t any books in the Bible describing that important achievement. The writers may have been napping.
Where do questions like this come from? The vast majority of Americans are Christians. The vast majority of Americans love dinosaurs. Therefore, it’s simple to conclude that most Christians believe in dinosaurs. How could it be otherwise?
Now, surely some people have wrong ideas about dinosaurs, like that humans and T-rexes coexisted, or the like. And it’s possible that those wrong beliefs might be somewhat correlated with religion. That might be a reasonable thing to ask about… but it’s a few steps beyond what the OP is asking.
It’s a fun game which plays on the tendency of a relatively small proportion of Protestants to always call themselves ‘Christians’ as if exclusively. Nowadays many don’t actually believe eg. Catholics aren’t Christians, but still refuse to identify themselves as what they are: Protestants, or whatever particular sect like Baptists. Then the fun comes as anti-religion types take the more extreme views of some of them (far from even all Evangelical Protestants are YEC’s) and attach those to ‘Christianity’. They say they are the real Christians, right?
Interesting. Thanks for the input.
Re the (hopefully not widespread) belief that T-rex and homosapian existed together.
I remember a Hollywood starlet interviewed when the original “Jurassic Park” movie was released. Commenting that CGI was so good she couldn’t tell which Dinosaurs in the movie were CGI, and which ones were real.:smack:
I was raised going to church every Sunday. (Methodist, and Baptist. - I just did as told)
Certainly we were assured GOD made the world in 6 days, followed by the famous day of rest.
There was never any suggestion that he made all sorts of odd creatures which he allowed to roam the Earth for hundreds of millions of years, before coming back and making Adam…
Just wondering.
Have a great day!
Let’s conduct a thought experiment … we are Roman scribes tasked with chiseling into a piece of hard ass granite the age of the Earth … after a half dozen M’s maybe, just maybe, we would think that’s old enough for any practical purpose.
Christianity is something of a “here and now” doctrine … we are here today to feed the hungry and end oppression … the existence of dinosaurs or not is pretty much immaterial to the homeless young widow woman dragging her seven kids through the snow banks.
Next time you’re sitting at the table eating chicken pot pie, just remember … that’s a dinosaur with feathers …
Wow. Maybe it’s because I’m older but I was raised Episcopalian and we believed that the earth was several billion years old and that dinosaurs never coexisted with man. And my pastors and Sunday school teachers taught the creation story as allegory. And I had friends and family of all Protestant denominations that believed just as I did.
I even have the T-shirt
https://www.cathedralbookstore.org/image/popup?imagePath=%2Fimages%2FProduct%2Flarge%2F773.jpg
Or as my father would say “the God I believe in wouldn’t want you to be stupid”.
Now, I did know a few kids that went to a weird rural church that was a prefab building with folding chairs and I now suspect they believed in YEC, although I didn’t give it any thought at the time. But these were the same kids that were really skinny and showed up at school with bruises and belt marks. My friends and I used to use our allowances to buy them protein drinks.
Seriously, I didn’t think anyone believed in creationism until I was in my late thirties and I believe that it was more of a political position than a religious one.
There’s quite a difference between a creationist and a literalist.
I was raised in the ultra-conservative fundamentalist “Churches of Christ” – a lot of people believed that dinosaur bones (and ancient human predecessors like Australopithecus, for that matter) were put there by either God or Satan in order to either test believers’ faith or lead them astray. Or they came up with some other cockamamie and convoluted explanation as to why things didn’t align neatly with a six-day creation.
I never really bought into that wackiness, myself.