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How is it that the bible explains the earth to be 6,000 to 8,000 years old when we know that dinosaur bones are at least 65 million years old?
Answer to Question 345
The Bible doesn't mention dinosaurs but then it wouldn't because the word dinosaur was coined by a famous British scientist, Dr Richard Owen, in the middle of the 19th century. Dinosaur is a Greek compound word meaning “terrible lizard,” which is what he thought of when he saw the huge bones. So the word dinosaur certainly would not be in the Bible. But even though they are not mentioned it doesn't mean that they didn't exist. None of the animals are mentioned by name except the serpent, sheep and cattle and a few other animals. Dinosaurs certainly did exist because fossils of dinosaurs have been found all over the world, and their bones are displayed in museums for all to see. Scientists have been able to reconstruct many of their skeletons, so we know much about how they may have looked.
Evolutionists claim that dinosaurs evolved over millions of years. They imagine that one kind of animal slowly changed over long periods of time to become a different kind of animal. For instance, they believe that amphibians changed into reptiles (including dinosaurs) by this gradual process. This would mean, of course, that there would have been millions of creatures during that time that would be “in between,” as amphibians evolved into reptiles. Evidence of these “transitional forms,” as they are called, should be abundant. However, many fossil experts admit that not one unquestionable transitional form between any group of creatures and another has been found anywhere. If dinosaurs evolved from amphibians, there should be, for example, fossil evidence of animals that are part dinosaur and part something else. However, there is no proof of this anywhere. In fact, if you go into any museum you will see fossils of dinosaurs that are 100% dinosaur, not something in between. There are no 25%, 50%, 75%, or even 99% dinosaurs—they are all 100% dinosaur!
According to many evolutionists today, dinosaurs are not really extinct but rather have evolved to become birds like the common pigeon or budgie that we keep as pets. For them birds are simply dinosaurs. The Bible tells us that God created all of the land animals on the sixth day of creation. As dinosaurs were land animals, they must have been made on this day, alongside Adam and Eve, who were also created on Day Six (Genesis 1:24–31). The birds and the sea creatures were created before this on the fifth day.
According to evolutionists, the dinosaurs “ruled the Earth” for 140 million years, dying out about 65 million years ago. However, scientists do not dig up anything labelled with those ages. They only uncover the bones of dead dinosaurs and their bones do not have labels attached telling how old they are. The idea of millions of years of evolution is just the evolutionists’ story about the past. No scientist was there to see the dinosaurs live through this supposed dinosaur age. In fact, there is no proof whatsoever that the world and its fossil layers are millions of years old. But because they believe in evolution they must allow millions of years for this to happen, because simply something cannot evolve into something else overnight. Evolutionists also believe that dinosaurs lived long before the existence of man and that they were long extinct before man came into the picture. They therefore have to reject the Bible that has man and the animals created on the same day because then they would have to reject their own theories of evolution.
If the Bible is correct then dinosaurs lived just a few thousand years ago but not necessarily in the same places as man. We do not live together with wild animals today so why should we assume that they lived alongside each other in the beginning. But even if they did, dinosaurs were mainly vegetarians and had no need to attack man for food. Just because they had big teeth doesn't mean that they used their teeth to tear up man flesh or any other animal.
According to evolutionists dinosaurs died and became extinct very suddenly about 65 million years ago. They give many theories to explain this: Dinosaurs starved to death; they died from overeating; they were poisoned; they became blind from cataracts and could not reproduce; mammals ate their eggs. Other causes include volcanic dust, poisonous gases, comets, sunspots, meteorites, mass suicide, constipation, parasites, shrinking brain (and greater stupidity), slipped discs, changes in the composition of air, etc. It is obvious that evolutionists don’t know what happened and are grasping at straws.
In a recent evolutionary book on dinosaurs, “A New Look At the Dinosaurs,” the author made the statement: "What caused all these extinctions at one particular point in time, approximately 65 million years ago? Dozens of reasons have been suggested, some serious and sensible, others quite crazy, and yet others merely as a joke. Every year people come up with new theories on this thorny problem... Alas, no such one explanation exists." (Alan Charig, p. 150)
But, one such explanation does exist. If you remove the evolutionary framework, get rid of the millions of years, and then take the Bible seriously, you will find an explanation that fits the facts and makes perfect sense. With the Flood all the animals outside of the ark died. If representatives of dinosaurs where taken aboard then they would have been young adults because the reason for taking them into the ark was for them to repopulate the earth. The majority of dinosaurs are not very big in size, many being the size of a lamb. Dinosaurs are said to be like reptiles that grow as they live so the large dinosaurs were probably very old ones and not taken into the ark. After the flood the new world was very different and all the animals had to compete for food which was no longer in abundance. This and other catastrophes and man killing for food soon lead to the extinction of many species of animals including the dinosaurs. Extinction seems to be the rule in Earth history not the formation of new types of animals as you would expect from evolution.
It is generally accepted that Fossil formation requires a sudden burial. When an animal dies, it usually gets eaten or decays until there is nothing left. To form a fossil, unique conditions are required to preserve the animal and replace it with minerals, etc. To form the billions of fossils worldwide, in layers sometimes kilometers thick, the organisms, by and large, must have been buried quickly. The land animals that were not on the Ark, including dinosaurs, were preserved in the layers formed by the Flood, thus giving us the millions of fossils we have today. The contorted shapes of these animals preserved in the rocks, the massive numbers of them in fossil graveyards, their wide distribution, and some whole skeletons, all provide convincing evidence that they were buried rapidly, testifying to massive flooding.
But are all the dinosaurs dead? There are many places in the Bible that mention dragons. If the word dragon is the equivalent to what we today call dinosaurs, then there is clear evidence in the Bible that dinosaurs lived at the same time as men. Dragons are not to be dismissed as some mythical creatures; there are legends of dragons from all over the world. China is renowned for its dragon stories, and dragons are prominent on Chinese pottery, embroidery, and carvings. Christianity retains the story of St. George, who slew a dragon that lived in a cave. There is the story of a tenth-century Irishman who wrote of his encounter with what appears to have been a Stegosaurus. In the 1500s, a European scientific book, Historia Animalium, listed several living animals that we would call dinosaurs. A well-known naturalist of the time, Ulysses Aldrovandus, recorded an encounter between a peasant named Baptista and a dragon whose description fits that of the small dinosaur Tanystropheus. The encounter was on May 13, 1572, near Bologna in Italy, and the peasant killed the dragon. Also, there are many very old history books in various libraries around the world that have detailed records of dragons and their encounters with people. Many of these descriptions of dragons fit with how modern scientists would describe dinosaurs, even Tyrannosaurus.
Unfortunately, this evidence is not considered valid by evolutionists. Why? Only because their belief is that man and dinosaurs did not live at the same time!
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