I have a question for Christians concerning early history...?

Question

The Bible says the earth is around 6,000 years old which makes no sense to me. How do you explain the dinosaurs? Please do not tell me you believe humans and dinosaurs lived together.

My bad for being so specific, but a lot of bible scholars estimate the earth is around 6,000 to 10,000 years old(is that any better)? Science has proven so much, religion has not proven anything. So when my religious friends tell me that humans and dinosaurs lived together I have a hard time believing that when dinosaurs have not existed for 65 million years!

And, oh yeah, mculasso...I find your answer funny and ironic. I am not a hippy or a liberal...I dont go around calling all christians fundies and conservatives..the fact you judge me based on my religious beliefs is pretty low.

DeslokofGammalon: You are wrong, I have read the bible. I was raised Christian but religion in general does not make sense to me. Again, I find that when asking a simple question about God, I get so many people getting defensive and sometimes hateful. I don't follow the bible but I still have morals.

Answer 1

I believe that not only did they live together, but they had inter-species relationships with each other and drank primordial ooze like body shots.

Sorry. that's what i believe. that or the flying spaghetti monster.

Answer 2

Hello! God is not a scholar & scholars are not God. As for dinosaurs: The Bible does not say there were dinosaurs. Here are the verses I found about giants: If I have left any out, I hope someone else will let us know: Genesis 6:4; Numbers 13:33; Deuteronomy 2:11, 20; 3:11, 13; & Joshua 12:4; 13:13; 15:8; 17:5 & 18:16. The Bible does talk about animals; therefore, I think it is best that you read the entire Bible.

Answer 3

Until the first dinosaur fossils were discovered in the late 1800's, theists believe the word of the bible was literal. God created the heavens and the earth in 7 days. End of discussion. God created man on the 6th day. End of discussion. However, with the discovery of the dinosaurs this believe was dragged kicking and screaming into the light and the religous were forced to do some revising because science had proved a) gigantic creatures existed on earth that the bible never mentioned unlike other animals such as lions and elephants and b) these creatures did not live in concert with man based on the fact that their fossils were found in layers of earth much deeper than any fossils of human remains had ever been found. Science was also proving that the earth was not thousands of years old, as the theists had been touting, but rather that it was MILLIONS of years old. So the theists had to do some backpeddling and came up with this: "Oh, to God one day is millions of years." Pretty lame but it's the best they could do in the face of indisputible evidence that blew a huge hole in the Genesis story.

Um, peacefulwaterwolf, a score is 20 years, not 40, and I think you're confusing the Bible with Lincolns Gettysburg Address. "Four score and seven years ago..."

Answer 4

If that were true, then the better question would be, who was able to figure out, "Hey, I should write all this stuff down so that people will know what happened." Also, if that were true, there is no mention of the creation of pen and paper for someone to take notes. They were busy eating apples and chilling with that snake.

I think what you're really trying to ask is, " The Bible states that God created the world in seven days. Within those seven days, he created Adam and Eve. If this is true, and we have phyiscal evidence of dinosaurs, does this mean that man and dinosaur existed at the same time or is something not right?" This exact question is what made me question religion.

Answer 5

The Bible does not say the earth is 6000 years old.Stodgy old theologians say that. The first line says "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth". That's all it says.There could have been millions of years between that and the next line.Why do I say that? Because when God created Adam and Eve,he said "Be fruitful and multiply and "Replenish" the earth.Now ,why would God say re plenish,instead of "fill"?
As far as Dinosaurs go .Job 40 and 41 talk about them .Behemoth is a brontosaurus type dino with a tail like a "cedar tree".God also says they were created along with us.Now this Behemoth ate grass,stood in the rushing river,and had a huge tail.Elephants and Hippos have teeny little tails,crocodiles have a big tail but don't eat grass.Look up "Ica Stones" on Yahoo search and you'll see ancient cave paintings depicting men and dinosaurs together.

Answer 6

I believe the others have made it clear the Bible doesn't say anything about the earth being 6K years old...who gives a crap how old it is? Isn't the real question, how did it get here. So I will discuss the dinosaurs....

The Bible says that God finished making all the animals the day before He created man. This means that dinosaurs were created before man. Did they exist together?

I dunno. But the question I have is: How do you know that what God calls a "day" is a 24 hour period? What if one of God's 'days' is a million years?

"The Bible refers to many the common animals we know today. The list includes lions, wolves, bears, sheep, cattle and dogs along with various kinds of birds, rodents, reptiles, and insects. What is interesting is that this extensive list includes three animals that we no longer recognize. These three are (in the original Hebrew language) tanniyn, b@hemowth (yes, it’s spelled correctly—at least as close as we can get in Roman characters), and livyathan.

Although we alter the spelling of behemoth and Leviathan slightly, we still use those same words in bibles today. However, tanniyn is always translated into another word when we write it in English. Tanniyn occurs 28 times in the Bible and is normally translated “dragon.” It is also translated “serpent,” “sea monster,” “dinosaur,” “great creature,” and “reptile.” Behemoth and Leviathan are relatively specific creatures, perhaps each was a single kind of animal. Tanniyn is a more general term, and it can be thought of as the original version of the word “dinosaur.” The word “dinosaur” was originally coined in 1841, more than three thousand years after the Bible first referred to “Tanniyn.”


Behemoth has the following attributes according to Job 40:15-24"
It “eats grass like an ox.”
It “moves his tail like a cedar.” (In Hebrew, this literally reads, “he lets hang his tail like a cedar.”)
Its “bones are like beams of bronze,
His ribs like bars of iron.”
“He is the first of the ways of God.”
“He lies under the lotus trees,
In a covert of reeds and marsh.”
Some bibles and study bibles will translate the word “behemoth” as “elephant” or “hippopotamus.” Others will put a note at the edge or bottom of the page, stating that behemoth was probably an elephant or a hippopotamus. Although an elephant or hippopotamus can eat grass (or lie in a covert of reeds and marsh), neither an elephant or a hippopotamus has a “tail like a cedar” (that is, a tail like a large, tapered tree trunk).

We would expect behemoth to be a large land animal whose bones are like beams of bronze and so forth, so whatever a behemoth is, it is large. A key phrase is “He is the first of the ways of God.” This phrase in the original Hebrew implied that behemoth was the biggest animal created. Although an elephant or a hippopotamus are big, they are less than one-tenth the size of a Brachiosaurus, the largest (complete) dinosaur ever discovered.[1] A Brachiosaurus could therefore easily be described as “the first of the ways of God.”
----www.clarifyingchristianity.com

Answer 7

The Bible has several passages that refer to dinosaurs. They cannot refer to any other living thing on earth today.

Genesis is clear that dinosaurs were made within the same week man was.

Cave drawings show man's depiction of dinosaurs.

Remember that dating methods are not exact science; they sometimes use circular reasoning. "If this strata of rock was formed 40 million years ago, then the bones in it must be around 40 million years old." You have to believe the earth was billions of years old, not because you have proof of the age, but because you reason that it takes time for man and animal to evolve. That is science!?

Answer 8

Actually the Bible says nothing of the sort. You can gather that Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden around 6,000 years ago, but it makes no mention about how long they were in the Garden. You can also find no mention either way about what was going on outside of the Garden while Adam and Eve either way. For all we know they could have been in the Garden 2 days or 2 trillion years maybe more maybe less, we don't know. From the Bible record we have no justification to claim that noting was happening outside of the Garden of Eden. Just because we are not told about something does not mean that it did not happen. God gave us the capability of thinking, so we should use that gift.

Answer 9

Just lean back and forget the notion to measure the Holy Scriptures on a perceived human scale. Nobody with his/her intelligence (given by God) would take it literally that the world was created a few thousand years ago. The numbers in the Bible are just highlighting for the reader that it was a long long time ago. Therefore, there is no conflict with history reaching way back to dinosaurs and before that.

Answer 10

First lets me make clear that you truly understand the Genesis story. The Bible doesn't teach that there was no death in the world. Apparently the first parents understood the concept because God told them the punishment for disobeying Him was death.. Genesis 2:17 "for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." With that little problem out of the way.. You will have to tell me how long Adam was in the Garden. They were protected by their purity, but if they were to sin they would "surely die". So as long as they were pure they would live... A lot could have taken. Adam and his wife were not contaminated by sin like we are. Millions or years could have passed. During this time terrible things could have been happening outside the protection of the garden. things like an asteroid strike that would devastate all life of the world. Ever wonder how life recovered so quickly after be so completely devastated? You thought processes exclude God so none of my idea are possible to you. But you theories of life popping out of a chemically charged pool of water after a lightening bolt is beyond logical thinking.... Jim

Answer 11

Read Job 40, the dinosaurs are referred to as Behemoth and Leviathan. When the bible was translated into Greek from the Hebrew and Aramaic languages they left the names the same because the Greeks did not have a word for those or the discriptions of them.