“So do you think there were dinosaurs on Noah’s ark?” She said with a hint of hope in her voice. I thought for a moment, trying to find a way to break it to my young earth friend.
“Well, no there were not” I replied gently, not sure if this conversation was about to end suddenly with a flip of the hair and a hasty exit.
“Not even dinosaur eggs?”
“Not even eggs. But reptiles grow for their entire life, so you could have squeezed a few babies on board, if they hadn’t all died off 65 million years before Noah ever picked up a hammer” I said calmly. I could see the dread in her eyes. I might as well have told her they smuggled extra puppies on board to keep the crocodiles from getting bored with the menu.
Ah yes. Dinosaurs on the ark. Where does one begin to poke holes in this fragile raft of creationist logic? For starters, if young earthers truly believed that dinosaurs had been assigned bunks aboard Noah’s ark, they would publish images showing this. But wait! They have something close. Turns out The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky features a display with animatronic dinosaurs walking with humans. According to the museum’s founder and CEO, Ken Ham, there were dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark.
“Evolution has claimed dinosaurs evolved over 200 million years ago, that nobody ever lived with them… But the Bible gives a different history. God tells us that he created all land animals the same day he created man, about 6,000 years ago. What’s more, there are even dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark because God told Noah to take pairs of every land animal.”
According to Creation Research Institute, the team behind the Creation Museum, dragon legends from cultures throughout the ancient world (St. George and the dragon, for example) describe creatures which match the dinosaurs that have been reconstructed from the fossil record. “These depictions match what we know from the fossil evidence of certain dinosaurs.” Says CRI. Funny how when they like the evidence they “know it” and when they don’t like the evidence they attack it as unsubstantiated glop from the mind of an atheistic neo-naturalist.
Hold it. Did somebody say dragon? The people at CRI actually rely on the legend of St. George to flesh out their theory of recent dinosaurs. Even the Brits, who claim George as their patron saint, will quickly point out that he was born in Turkey about 900 years before the legend surfaced. In this famous dragon story, the monstrous villain had succeeding in eating all the sheep set before him by the villagers. The dragon then demanded (as dragons are wont to do) that the townsfolk feed him their young daughters. Unconfirmed reports maintain that when the townsfolk asked the hungry dragon what he was thinking about he replied “mutton”. To those readers offended by jokes about dragons with speech impediments: I just nailed it!
Let’s pretend that the Creation Research team didn’t rely on the unsubstantiated legend of St. George when they decided to pump millions of dollars into their dinosaurs in the Garden exhibit. Instead, let’s jump straightaway to their exhibit B nestled in the pages of the book of Job. According to CRI, the behemoth mentioned in Job 40:15 – “Now behold the behemoth which I made with thee” – is a dinosaur. “Its description matches that of a sauropod… this statement affirms that both behemoth and man and were made on the same day.”
The debate here centers around the phrase “which I made WITH thee”. Does this verse mean WITH as in cheeseburger WITH bacon, part of a unified whole, or “as well as”. Sort of like Abraham Lincoln is on the list of American Presidents AS WELL AS Barak Obama. Lincoln wasn’t president WITH Barak Obama. Now that would have made for a difficult administration.
Obama: “How will people tell us apart Abe? ”
Lincoln: “I’ll keep my hat on.”
There are a variety of opinions as to the identity of this mysterious behemoth. Some Bible scholars have speculated that it was a hippopotamus that the Biblical author was referring to, and that the cedar trunk appendage wasn’t a tail at all. Of course, this kind of potty talk is commonplace in the Bible and only reinforces the notion that the writer of Job was stuck in the seventh grade. Or a Scot. (In a related matter, I am still searching for the Hebrew word that translates as “wedgie”. Will keep you posted.)
Dinosaurs on the Ark. I don’t think so. What’s your take?
No, I think the dinos could possibly have drowned during the flood. Are there any of them whose fossil remains you don’t have to pick out of a clay-like material, probably deposited by massive amounts of water and hardened into rock? We don’t have to go very far from the city to see massive gravel beds which conjure up even more massive amounts of fast-running waters that it would have taken to build them. These are often found to be the graveyards of the Woolly Mammoth and not dinosaurs, so dinos probably bought the farm long before the Mammoths did.
I also think that the bible does not account for time in a way that leaves no holes to pick open. For instance, how much time elapsed from when Adam was created to when The Fall occurred? Genesis doesn’t say. Could it have been millions of years? Why not? Time was not counting until it was counting down at the Fall of Man and with that the impending doom of Satan as the clock ticks down to zero.
And if, as some Christians think, we have to die on how old the earth is, then why does not the bible state this number plainly? Deriving the age of the earth from Adam’s creation leaves another time-gap wide open: was it 130 years after The Fall that Adam begat Seth or was it 130 after Adam’s creation, at a time when time was not counting down?
I’m certain that for some Christians there is a question at the Pearly Gates that Peter asks and if we don’t say 6K or 10K, we’re out of consideration for heaven no matter what Jesus did for us at the Cross.
So then, which is it, 6K or 10K?
For another topic, Calvin, I’d like to suggest that you open up the subject to look at what we lose in our fascination with the 6K vs 50Mil+ years debate/discussion: What did the earth look like prior to the Fall?
Just for starters, animals did not chase each other down for food. Can we even begin to imagine that world? Lion King animators might have only scratched the surface of scratching the surface of that before/after subject.
What did the rest of the world look like like when considering the ‘mighty cisterns of the deep’ were broken up at the time of the flood, not to mention the waters above and refraction of sunlight that did not happen until after the flood with the rainbow?
Jim,
I apologize for not posting your comment earlier. Thanks for the suggestions on future blog posts. I would like to dive in and come up with something for you on why THE FALL may or may not have looked like what we imagine.
Regarding your question about why the Bible doesn’t just tell us the age of the earth. There are a lot of things the Bible doesn’t tell us. I think we get into trouble when we try to make the Bible say things it doesn’t and ask it to do things it was not intended to do. The Old Testament was never intended to be a scientific manual. That’s what science is for. God didn’t tell us in scripture because He knew we would eventually arrive at the answer. 4.5 Billion years give or take a few million seems a bit squishy, but I don’t think the experts are too far off on this one.