PlanoSuds

How do christians "explain" this one? A christian that I work with says that just because man dates them back millions of years doesn't mean they are that old. Tests were developed by humans and are not accurate.

Must have been hard for Noah to get 2 of ever dinosaur on that boat! Got a bit cramped I bet.

What is the timeline that christians believe?? Is it like 2000-3000 years ago that god made earth???

This may be an old topic...not sure...kinda new to forum so I apologize if this has been discussed b4.

Toto

There's a whole forum devoted to evolution/creationism. Check it out.

Most Christians believe in evolution as a tool of God and accept modern scientific estimates of the age of the earth, and think that Noah's flood was a metaphoric event.

Inerrantists/creationists believe that the world is 6000 years old, and that dinosaurs perished in the flood (or some other rationalization.)

ETA - welcome to the forums!

jgibson000

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How does he know that he himself or, say, his house, is as old as he thinks he/it is, since the tests used to evaluate the evidence he has for determinng his/its age (or to verify what he thinks in this regard) are also developed by humans?

Jeffrey

Sarpedon

Most fundies will say that Noah brought dinosaur eggs on the boat...no word on how he was able to tell which ones were male or female.

EricK

Did dinosaur eggs need incubating? Were dinosaurs like modern day crocodiles in having temperature dependant sex determination (ie eggs are not male or female but can go either way depending on temperature of surroundings)?

flintknapper

No dinosaur fossils have ever been dug in the Rift Valley of Africa in the layers where hundreds of Hominin fossils have been found. Conversely, no Hominin fossils have ever been found at the many dinosaur fossil collecting sites around the world.

Clivedurdle

What happened to the gap theory of Genesis 1 v 1, 2 that I was brought up with to explain the discrepancy between Genesis and evolution? (Dake).

Amaleq13

This thread needs to take a decidely biblical turn or it will have to go over to E/C.

ggazoo

From godandscience.org:

Why would God have left out a description of the dinosaurs from the creation account found in the Bible? Skeptics claim that this omission proves that the Bible wasn't written by God's inspiration, but is just a compilation of the words of fallible men. First, we should understand the origin of the Genesis creation account and its purpose in the Bible. The first five books of the Bible, including Genesis, were written by Moses. Since nobody except God was present at the creation, the Genesis creation account was given to Moses by God. If one is attempting to second guess the Author of Genesis, one must take these facts into account.

God was not interested in giving Moses a scientific treatise on the creation of the world. The Bible indicates that God's communication to Moses was centered on the relationship between God and man and the rules by which God wanted man to live. Therefore, the creation account mirrors the content of the rest of the Bible, which centers on mankind and his relationship to God. The question, "Why would God leave out a description of the dinosaurs?" is a bad one to begin with. A more appropriate question should be "What would God want to relate to man about His description of the creation?"

There are some technical problems that God would have faced in including dinosaurs in the creation account. There is no word for "dinosaur" in the Hebrew language. Now, God could have invented a Hebrew word for dinosaur and explained what those animals were like and how they had died out. However, this is a one page description of the creation of the world and life in it. Trying to explain about an extinct group of creatures would have taken a lot of space and distracted from the rest of the creation account.

Obviously, there were a lot more creatures than just dinosaurs that were left out of the creation account. If God were to have included every creature in the creation account (well over one billion), such inclusion would have completely lost the spiritual significance of the passage (and would be much longer than the Bible itself). The purpose of the Genesis creation account is to give an account of how God created mankind and provided for him. The account, like the entire Bible, centers on God and His miraculous workings for mankind. Therefore, in the creation account, we find the supernatural creation of the universe by God, indicating that the universe wasn't always here, but created by God for man. Next, it talks about the creation of plants, which are important to humans, since we eat them, and also important to the animals that we rely upon, which also eat them. Then, it talks about the sea creatures and birds, which we also eat. It next talks about the beasts of the field, which we eat and use for labor. Then it talks about the creation of mankind and how he is to have dominion and manage the earth and its creatures.

The second chapter of Genesis gives a spiritual account of the creation of mankind and man's relationship to God. The entire account is centered on God and man. Therefore, one would expect the creation account to describe events that are important to mankind.

Those who claim that the lack of dinosaurs in the creation account is a mistake are looking at the topic on the basis of our modern perspective, which values sensationalism over practicality. Dinosaurs are fascinating! The idea that these creatures walked the same earth that we live on intrigues us. However, the fact that they lived has virtually no effect upon our practical lives.

Some might say that dinosaurs were important in providing fossil fuels (which products were important even in biblical events1). Even the fossil fuel argument is not a strong one, since the overwhelming majority of oil came from the bodies of plants and trees - not dinosaurs. Most of those who complain about the lack of dinosaurs in the Bible are looking at the natural world from an evolutionary perspective, in which mankind is just an evolutionary fluke - a recent upstart who doesn't figure prominently in the overall evolutionary history of the earth. Even from an naturalistic perspective, dinosaurs are a failed evolutionary experiment that couldn't compete with their mammalian descendents.

The fact is that dinosaurs are as unimportant to us as they were to the Hebrews to whom the creation account was given. The purpose of the creation account is to provide an explanation of how God provided for mankind and created him as the one spiritual animal on earth. The account is purposely brief and centered upon mankind - the only creature God created on earth to enter into a personal relationship with Him. The Genesis creation account contains all the information necessary to fulfill the purpose given for the recording of the pages of the Bible. As an exercise to illustrate the point, you might want to write your own one page creation account. In doing this, you should center the account on mankind and the creation miracles God used to prepare the earth for him. What you will find is that there is not room to discuss dinosaurs or any other extinct species of life.

hatsoff

Nice. Very appropriate, and sufficiently succinct.