I adored this article so much that I want to reprint it here. Sorry Holly, it was only written, not one of the videos I watched.
by Paul Smithson
What About Dinosaurs? From children’s books and toys, to Hollywood movies we see the images of these creatures of the past. This is a important subject to study as our children are faced with the teaching of evolution in school with its assertion that the earth is billions of years old. You can’t watch programs on public television, such as National Geo., Nova, or Nature, or Wild America, or the Discovery channel without being exposed to it. And dinosaur fossils and how they are dated play a role in this. The evolutionist declares that the dinosaurs were in existence roughly 165 – 170 million years ago, and for some reason became extinct some 65 – 70 million years ago. But what is the truth of the matter? What do we teach our children? First of all we do not deny their existence. To say that they did not exist is absurd. We have thousands and thousands of dinosaur bones, they fill our museums. So the question is not did the dinosaurs exist, but WHEN did the dinosaurs exist and HOW did they come into existence.
Of course this is where the evolutionist and the Christian are divided. The evolutionist believes that the dinosaurs evolved from lower animal life over a period of millions of years and existed billions of years ago. But the Christian, listening to what God has to say in His word, knows that God brought all things in to existence at the creation, and does not accept the idea that the earth is millions, let alone, billions of years old. From the time frame given through biblical history the earth is relatively young, being only somewhere between six to ten thousand years old.
Before we can teach our children about such things we must know what to teach them. So in our study we want to present some evidences from the Bible and from science, which support the Scriptures, that we might answer the question, “What about dinosaurs?”
Let’s begin first by turning to the Scriptures, and looking first of all at Ex. 20:11. Here is a very important passage. It is in the middle of God giving the 10 commandments. It is a passage where God does something in Scripture that He rarely does, and for that reason alone it becomes important. In verses 8,9,and 10 of Exodus 20, God has just given the commandment of remembering the Sabbath day and keeping it holy. But that is not all God said. In this rare instance God not only gave a command but also gives a reason for the command. Now this is rare, and God does not have to give reasons, of course, because all the commands He gives do not come from malice or bitterness, but from love and are for man’s benefit. (1Jn. 5:3) But, nevertheless, here God did give a command and with it gives the reason why. And it is in this statement that we find something important to our study. He has said “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” WHY? v.11 “For in six days the Lord made the heavens and there earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” Now the question is, If in six days God created the heavens and all that is in them, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them, what does that leave out that God did not create? And the obvious answer is that it doesn’t leave anything out. And that is important to our study of dinosaurs. On what day was man created? Day six. And on what days were the animals created? Well it wasn’t days 1-4 Day 4– God created the Sun, Moon and stars Day 3– The vegetation Day 1-2– such things as the waters and the expanse, the skies, so on. The animals were only created, according to the Scriptures, on days 5 & 6. And the Bible declares that these are literal days. For after each creation it is stated that “there was evening and there was morning , one day”, or “a second day,”etc. At the most, how many days could have separated man and the dinosaurs? The Bible makes it clear, at the most just one day. And how do we know that there was nothing created after day 6? Because it is plainly stated in Gen. 2:1-2 “Thus the heavens and the earth were completed, and all their host. And by the seventh day God completed His work which He had done…” (KJV FINISHED) The term in the original that is translated, “finished” and “completed”, is in the Hebrew, past, definite tense, which indicates an action completed once and for all in the past, not continuing into the future. In other words, God created, He is now through creating, a will not do any more creating. So all that there was to be in the world God created.
Now of course it is true, that God allowed variation in the gene pools of animals and humans. But that God created concerning basic kinds and types God was finished. So doesn’t that then mean that men and dinosaurs must have been contemporaries? That men and dinosaurs lived at the same time? That is exactly what it means! And, as we will see in a moment, there is also good scientific evidence that that is the case. But, I say this, if we never found one single bit of evidence from science that would not negate what the Bible says here in Ex. 20:11.
There is another passage that is of interest to us in this study and that is Job 40:15-24. In this passage Job is being ask a question by God. In fact in Job chapters 38-41 God ask Job a lengthy series of questions to show Job just how pitiful and limited he really is compared to the God of Heaven, and he need not to question Him, but simply trust Him. He had ask Job question like, Job where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth.
(Read Job 1: 8, 16, 25, 31)
We remember the effect that these questions had upon Job, in 42:1-4 Job said “Therefore I have declared that which I did not understand, Things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. God got His point across very well. But we are interested in the question that God ask.
(READ 40:15-18)
Well what is this creature to which God is directing Job’s attention? His message to Job was, “I made that great creature Job, can you do that?” What is this creature, the Behemoth? Some have suggested, and in fact some versions put a marginal note, saying maybe this Behemoth was a hippopotamus. Well, did you ever see a hippopotamus, either on T.V. or at the zoo? And did you ever see the tail of a hippopotamus? If you’ll notice not only did God say that this creature had bones like tubes of bronze and limbs like bards of iron, but He also said in v.17 that it had a tail like a cedar tree. And a hippopotamus’ tail is hardly like a cedar tree. It is a tiny little stub on the end of a relatively short legged animal. The cedar of that area were not like the juniper cedars that we have around here, but much larger. Such as the Cedars of Lebanon that are mentioned in Ps. 92:12. Zondervan’s Pictorial Bible Dictionary says of these trees “a magnificent evergreen often 120 feet high and 40 feet in girth.” Some have suggested that this could possibly be referring to an elephant. Did you ever see the tail of an elephant? Small in diameter and about a yard long. Not hardly what you would describe being a tail like a cedar tree! But the Behemoth, had a tail like a cedar tree, and v. 19 says he is “the first of the ways of God.” And we do not know of a land living creature that would have been bigger than the Brachiosaurs type dinosaur, that would have weighed in at over 110 tons. Over 3 1/2 stories tall, his breastplate was taller than a 6 foot tall man. There are many scholars that believe that this is describing the dinosaur type creature, and I agree with them. If you tie this in with the facts concerning Ex. 20:11 and Gen. 2:1-2 that man did coexists with the dinosaurs, and look at the point that God is making in this statement, “Look what I’ve done, can you do that.” The dinosaur was the chief of all living creatures and what better illustration to use to make His point to Job.
Ch. 41 goes on to make the same point with a great sea creature, the Leviathian, which seems to have been one of the numerous types of dinosaurs that lived in or near the water that was large and fearsome. There is no question that the bible teaches that dinosaurs co-existed with man. But what happened to them?
There have been many ideas to explain this question. There have been at least 55 different theories suggested and then thrown out because of problems. However, most agree that what ever happened to the dinosaurs it must have also affected the whole world. The latest dinosaur extinction theory suggest that the earth was struck from space by a six-mile-wide asteroid, or meteorite. Supposedly this collision threw 3 billion tons of dust into the air, blacking out the sun for several years and causing most plants to die, and so the dinosaurs died out of lack of food. But what is wrong with this theory is that scientists have not found a six-mile-wide crater hole where the supposed meteorite struck the earth, and if it did and what they say did happen, then why did other forms of life survive, why did just the dinosaurs become extinct? No one knows for sure and the God did not see this fit to explain this in the Scriptures.
However, from things stated in the Bible concerning the flood and the changes that took place on the earth as a result of the flood may explain what happened. It is believed that the earth before the flood had a great water vapor canopy around the earth, Gen. 1:7 speaks of “the waters which were above the expanse…” It would seem that before the flood the earth had never received rain as Gen. 2:6 states “But a mist used to rise from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground.” This would have maintained a fairly uniform mild, warm climate, with none of the wide temperature changes that cause the necessary conditions for rainfall. There was no rain, and therefore no rainbows. So the earth’s climate after the Flood was radically different from the what it was before. Some parts of the world would have gotten much hotter after the flood, and some places would be much colder. The earth would receive much more harmful radiation from the sun than before. All of these radical changes would have killed many animals. In fact we learn from the Scriptures that where as before the flood human life expectancy before the flood was in the hundreds of years, where as after, as we see in the genealogies of Gen 11 they length of life steadily declined. But, regardless of the reason for their extinction, the fact remains that they did live and die off within human history.
But then someone ask, but how could they survived the flood? The answer is just like all other animals survived the flood, they were taken on the ark. The bible doesn’t list the names of all the creatures on the Ark, but it does say in Gen. 6:19-20, “And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring tow of every kind into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. Of the birds after their kind, and of the animals after their kind, of every creeping thing of the ground after its kind, two of every kind shall come to you to keep them alive.” The notion that dinosaurs could not have fit on the ark is false. Noah’s ark was a barge-like structure much larger than most people imagine. According to Gen. 6:16 it was 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, 45 feet high. In other words it was as long as 1 1/2 football fields, and taller than a four-story building. It could hold more than 530 railroad stock cars, and had a volume of 1,396,000 cubic feet. In fact, calculations have been made to demonstrate that the ark easily could have carried representatives of all creatures, living and extinct, with room to spare, with the ark being only about half full leaving room for food, and animal growth during the time spent on the water. And furthermore, it would be logical to assume that younger animals could have been brought to Noah rather than older larger ones.
So the question becomes, were did the fossils come from? And how old are they? Just because something is “fossilized” doesn’t mean that it is millions (or even thousands) of years old. When conditions and materials are right, a bone can became filled with minerals fairly quickly. The main ingredients for fossilized are: 1. Quick burial. 2. Water, in the right amounts. 3. Suitable minerals. Conditions during the Flood were ideal for “fossilized” millions of animals and plants. In fact “All across the planet, huge numbers of animals are found–broken, buried and fossilized. Violent flood waters created most of these mass graves. Researchers have found that chicken bones and wood can be replaced with minerals in just five to ten years. Civil war buttons have been found imbedded in coal. A hammer head was found in one of these coal shafts with it’s wooden handle already coalified. A huge dinosaur bone might take hundreds of years but certainly not millions and billions. In fact many dinosaur remains are still not completely turned to rock. More than half of the fossil is still original bone, not stone. Some even have chemicals from the living animals such as proteins and amino acids! When some dinosaur fossils are cut with a diamond saw, the distinct odor of burning bone can be smelled. And there is much more scientific evidence that men and dinosaurs lived together, which refutes the evolution theory and its ridiculous dating of the earth.
Of course time will only allow us to only begin to touch on this overwhelming evidence. Several years ago Dr. Samuel Hubbert, who was the honorary curator of the Oakland Museum of Natural History, Made a trip to a canyon in Arizona. Dr. Hubbert was well known among archeologist for his work in Indian artifacts. Dr. Hubbert had suggested that the Indians had lived in that area long before we know that they were there. So he went to this canyon with his team to see if he could find come artifacts. In fact he did find some artifacts, and his theory was proven to be true that the Indians ancestors long years before we had ever had placed them in our time tables. But he not only found some artifacts, he also found something else of interest. On the canyon walls, in a beautiful preserved state, carved in solid rock were some wall drawings. And in the wall drawings he found such creatures as cattle, sheep, dinosaurs, buffalo, oxen…..and YES, DINOSAURS! pictured with cattle, sheep, dinosaurs, which men had drawn. His description of these drawings. “Taken all in all, the proportions are good. The huge reptile is depicted in the attitude in which man would be most likely to see it. Reared on its hind legs, balancing with the long tale, either feeding or in a fighting position, possibly defending itself against a party of men.” Can you image a statement like that coming from a archeologist? But the evidence was clear. Now if these Indians had never seen a dinosaur, them having supposedly lived billions of years before, how in the world would they know what one looked like in order to draw one? And, why draw it along with other animals they saw during their time?
The foot prints of humans that were discovered fossilized in coal veins of Kentucky by Dr. Albert Ingels. Now according to the evolutionist geologist the coal veins are supposed to be in the carboniferous period, (a period according to them was even before the rise of the dinosaurs, that was to come millions of years latter in the Triassic and Jurassic time periods). And what is more astounding is that Ingels found them not only in the coal veins of Kentucky, but also in Virginia, and West Virginia, and even out around the Rocky Mts. in the west. Yet the evolutionist deny a young earth, and that man and dinosaurs co-existed.
There are foot prints of mammals that were suppose to only exist in the latter times when man came into existence that have been found along with 3 toed dinosaur prints in the same fossilized mud.
There is one other thing I would like to share with you that has to do with the giant creatures of the sea that could have survived the flood, like Job’s Leviathan. Of course the climate changes after the flood would have affected the creatures too. However, in 1977, the nets of a Japanese fishing ship, the Zuiyo Maru, caught the decaying body of a large, strange reptile near New Zealand. Photographs, measurements and tissue samples all show that it was probably one of the great marine reptiles like the Plesiosaurs. This find was so important that the Japanese honored it with a commemorative postage stamp. And as the scientific discovery of the year, the plesiosaur was used as the official emblem for the 1977 National Exhibition which celebrated 100-years of scientific discovery.
There are many, many other things that we could look at but I hope this has helped you to see that Dinosaurs fit in perfectly with the Bible’s record of history. That the dinosaur fossils show the reality of the Great Flood when huge numbers of dinosaurs and all kinds of other animals were destroyed along with men. All of these thing are simply reminders of the great power of our God. All that men do to disprove the Bible ends up proving it to be true for it is inspired word of God, and as our Lord said even though “heaven and earth shall pass away, My word shall not pass away.” And if we will simply study it and put our faith in it we won’t feel intimidated by those with their evolutionary theorizing and ridiculous dates for the earth. And we will know what to teach our children whether it be concerning dinosaurs or eternal life beyond this realm.
decafmama 