Where do the dinosaurs fit into a Christian ideaology of evolution and World creation?

Question

God created the Earth in a week according to the Bible. How long after did he create man? Why did he create dinosaurs first or did he? Do religions believe dinosaurs didn't exist?

Answer 1

Well in Genesis it says God "restored" the earth and therefore we know it was in a different state before... we are only concerned of after the fall of Satan.... for the most part.
The rest doesn't really concern most of us.

Answer 2

Dinosaurs and man co-existed....

We have undenyable evidence that man have seen dinosaurs. Sculptures from Mexico, Drawings from around the World. Paintings, and fixings on buildings. Countless tales of men killing dragons to save their village. Over two thousand scraps of pottery found in Mexico also. One proof that can not be denied is when we found a painting of a dragon eating a man, the dragons skin had circle patterns on it, we found a piece of fossilized dinosaur skin, and you know what? It had circle patterns? How about that?

Tools, human fingers, and handprints suggest that men and dinosaurs co-existed. We found a human footprint inside a dinosaur footprint.

Dinosaurs in the Bible are known as "dragons" since the word dinosaur did not appear until 1841. According to the Bible before the Flood men,plants and animals used to live to be 900 years old. We know for a fact that reptiles never stop growing, could you imagine how big a lizard could get in 900 years? Big enough to be called a dinosaur? There was a canopy of ice hanging over the atmosphere that was held into place by the earth's magnetic field. When this was shattered in the flood, the atmosphere became very different, and "dinosaurs" always didn't get big enough to reproduce, and the ones that did would have been hunted.... Hence we have all the stories of dinosaurs...
Alexander the Great, said that his men were scared by dragons when they went into India...

Dinosaurs are not a contridiction of the young earth theory, they fit in right along with the Bible without contradicting it

Answer 3

Yes, God created the world in a week, but then again, it's also said that one day to God is 1000 years to man. As for dinosaurs, I THINK the Bible mentions something about "terrible lizards." Whether or not that refers to dinosaurs, I have no idea. Personally, I don't think the existance or non-existance of them has any bearing on the infallacy of God's Word.

Answer 4

Two general schools of thought; "Young Earth" types say that dinosaurs coexisted with man, or they never existed and their bones and such were planted by the Devil (or even God, sometimes) to confuse us.

Mainline Chrisitians say that the Bible isn't meant to be taken literally, or that you can somehow interpret the story of creation to line up with scientific understanding of the formation of the earth and population, if you just take some liberl interpretations of the language (like, in the beginning, a day wasn't 24 hours but instead a billion years).

Answer 5

Usually, great beasts that are mentioned in the Bible - such as Behemoth or Leviathan - are brought up to cover the existence of dinosaurs.

Unfortunately for YECs, there are still holes like -

-> Why isn't there more mention of them in any historical evidence? Surely such a problematic predator would be worthy of at least more than the odd note.

-> Why haven't human remains been found that date as far back as dinosaurs? This is usually scoffed at as most YECs don't accept modern radiometric dating techniques as accurate.

Needless to say, if there was adequate proof for humans coexisting with dinosaurs there wouldn't be such a debate - archeologists don't reject evidence simply on principal, any evidence is always considered.

Answer 6

Secular books would tell you that the first discovery of what were later called “dinosaurs” was around 1677 when Dr. Robert Plot found huge bones that were thought to belong to a giant elephant or a giant human. Then in 1822, Gideon Mantell and his wife found some Iguanodon teeth. But that was really when dinosaurs were rediscovered. Adam discovered the dinosaurs when he named the kinds of land animals God had created on the sixth day of Creation.

Take a look at Gen. 1:24-27. Here is a basic form of logic called a syllogism: T. Rex is a land animal. Land animals were made on day 6. Therefore, T. Rex was made on day 6. So, according to the Bible, dinosaurs lived beside man. Dinosaurs were made on day six of the creation week the same as man; they were beasts of the earth.

And yes, these were literal 24 hour days (“And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day”). Ex. 20:11 also makes it clear, “For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the 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.” That’s where the seven day week came from. Besides that, there wasn’t death, disease, and suffering before Adam’s sin in chapter 3, when God cursed the earth. But, we find fossilized dinosaurs with cancer, tumors, diseases, defects, and we also find them along with fossilized thorns and thistles.

You are going to have a hard time trying to fit millions of years into the creation week with the gap or day-age theory, and still be consistent with Scripture.

Dinosaur bones are displayed in museums all over the world, but some people have believed and told their children that dinosaurs don’t fit with the Bible and so they must be a big hoax designed to convince people of evolution. While denying their existence may seem like a quick and simple way to avoid the topic, this response is going to prove to be hard to swallow as people come in contact with the evidence.

The thing is, dinosaurs fossils have been found on all seven continents—from North America to Antarctica. Their traces are even found on a few isolated oceanic islands. We have found the remains of their bones, eggs, footprints, and even some imprints from their skin. There can be no doubt about it, dinosaurs really did exist. The evidence for their existence is too overwhelming. An honest investigation indicates that dinosaurs definitely roamed this earth.

An article in the January 1993 National Geographic boldly proclaimed: “No human being has ever seen a live dinosaur.” Now, does he know that, or does he think that? There is no way for anyone to know that unless they had at least talked to everyone who has ever lived.

If dinosaurs lived with man, you would expect to find legends of dinosaurs in history. Why don’t we read stories about men fighting dinosaurs or dinosaurs eating people’s cows and stuff like that?

Well, most people are unaware that the word “dinosaur” was not coined until the 1840s by Sir. Richard Owen (who was a Creationist by the way). So, if these creatures lived alongside humans prior to that time, they were not called dinosaurs. So what were they called? Dragons. Most cultures throughout the world possess ancient stories about dragons and sea monsters that closely resemble what we today would call dinosaurs. Dragon stories have been handed down for generations in most civilizations.

No doubt many of these stories have been exaggerated through the years, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t have their original basis in fact. I believe many of the dragon legends are simply distorted versions of dinosaur encounters. As Paul Taylor has said, “Most of the dragon legends are full of exaggeration, magic and marvelous deeds. But this is not true of all of them. Many stories seem rather believable.” It is true that many of them are mythical or legendary but it is also true that most legends are based on some truth. It cannot be an accident that so many separate peoples of the world tell such stories.

The same can be deduced from the 250+ different flood stories from around the world. Flood legends in many cultures that have never even heard of the Bible, and yet many of them are very similar to the account in Genesis. Why? Because everyone is descended from Noah. Some of the details have been distorted from thousands of years of telling and retelling, but it is based in fact. I believe the same is true of the dragon legends.

There are hundreds of these types of legends. Evolutionists just say that it’s coincidence that many of them sound like dinosaurs. World Book Encyclopedia says: “The dragons of legend are strangely like actual creatures that have lived in the past. They are much like the great reptiles [dinosaurs] which inhabited the earth long before man was supposed to have appeared on earth.”

Answer 7

This is simply what I believe okay? God created man after he created everything else. So man and dinosaurs existed on the earth at the same time. And I have no problem believing dinosaurs existed.

Answer 8

Many Christians believe that dinosaurs co-existed with man early on, and eventually died off. Some claim that this is where the idea of dragons came from.

This idea doesn't fit the evolutionary model, or archaeological evidence, but it is offered as proof of creationism over evolution.

Answer 9

Right in the evolutionary chain. Many modern animals have throwbacks to the days of dinosaurs.

Answer 10

the bible speaks of a day as being a thousand years,and a thousand years being as a day to god...so measuring time by our standards, is not really a big thing for one eternal...when reading the book of Genisis it good to keep this in mind...also the bible does speak of behemoth and levithian,they seem in theory to suggest dinosaurs