We have to start with this picture, apparently posted at and taken down by Conservapedia, though it’s a joke. Even so, the current Conservapesia page on dinosaurs is very nearly at that level.
Dinosaurs were known pre-Darwin. Anything that scientists gave the name “great thunder lizard” to was going to get some attention. It took good ol’ American hype to raise dinosaurs to public awareness. The perpetrators were Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, who competed for decades in the last part of the 19th century to discover and display new dinosaur species. It’s called the Bone Wars. By the turn of the century every self-respecting natural history museum had a dinosaur skeleton. More importantly, dinosaurs had penetrated popular culture.
Dinosaurs were the greatest beasts ever, so in the bigger is better world of popular culture they were the ideal foe or mount. But that meant that humans had to be the ones fighting or riding them. Writers of early science fiction solved this by having dinosaurs somehow survive until the present day. So did Windsor McCay whose early animated cartoon Gertie the Dinosaur had her visiting the Washington Monument (object: luuuv; OK, not really). But comic strips soon realized that having dinosaurs and cavemen together was an even greater source of comedy. I’m not talking about the *Flintstones *but strips like the 1930s Alley Oop.
You might think that the comic association hurts the reality. It does, for some people. But for the rest it sets the dinosaur up as the pre-eminent image of age and tells them that if they can take down this image the rest of the edifice will follow. If you’re a true believer and you need to have the earth created 6000 years ago then no argument is as powerful as proving that humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs. Q.E.D.
Christians have never objected to the very idea of dinosaurs. That’s a misunderstanding of what is being claimed. Young Earth Creationists object to the postulated antiquity of dinosaurs.
There have been three great waves of fundamentalism in this country. The first rose in the 19th Century, long before Darwin. The second was the revival in the 1910s and 1920s, which also produced Prohibition. (George McCready Price wrote a series of books that used the Deluge, Noah’s Flood, to explain all of geology, starting in 1906. His The New Geology, the ancestor of most of today’s YEC tracts, appeared in 1923.) The third is the current one, which has been building for 40 years. The first two also insisted on Biblical literalism, so that the world couldn’t be older than around 6000 years. While scientists knew that dinosaurs were far more ancient than humans, their overall understanding of all the processes was creaky. In a country where fewer than half the population graduated high school scientific knowledge was minimal at best. Some champions of YEC must have touted the coexistence of man and dinosaur but it wasn’t a topic that excited the average person.
Today’s world is deluged (ha: good one) with science. Every science builds off and reinforces the truths of all the others. Every discipline has an advanced understanding of how things happened and they all call for a several billion year old earth with 60 million years between dinosaurs and early humans, even “ape-men.” The Young Earth has the same force as the Flat Earth.
Belief works differently. If you need to believe in a religious tenet that the world is only 6000 years old, then you rearrange reality to make it so. Mixing dinosaurs and humans therefore becomes not a symbol of your stupidity but of your deep and unvarying faith. It’s symbolism, and symbols are stronger than steel.
Science will never change that. Faith will change gradually so that believers no longer have to adhere to a 6000 year-old Earth. That’s already happening. The lines in the sand keep being redrawn. One day a different uncrossable line will signify the depth of one’s faith and dinosaurs won’t be an issue any more.
