Christians - i believe in God but also have a science background - please tell me the timeline of....?

Question

i have read some of the bible but I need explained to me how dinosaurs millions and millions of years ago work into the creation???
Before Adam and Eve....after....?

Answer 1

Many Christian Scholars and researchers believe that dinosaurs lived at the same time as early created man. Some believe that God placed dino's here first and just didn't mention too much about it in the Bible. However there are many references to beasts in the Bible that could definitely be what we now call dinosaurs.

The bottom line is that this issue is still being debated.

Answer 2

There are two "camps" when it comes to the Bible and whether it supports evolution.

The first is commonly known as those who believe in the "gap theory". In order to fit millions of years into the creation week, they insist that the "days" in the creation week lasted millions of years. They do not always agree on which "days" lasted that long. This theory provides the time necessary to "marry" evolution and the Bible.

On the other side, there are those who read the Bible and understand that the creation week took 6 literal 24 hour days. There are numerous verses in the Bible that support this idea. The verse reads .. the evening and the morning were the first day. If this "day" was millions of years long, why was Morning and Evening mentioned? Man measures a "day" as the combination of morning and evening. There is no explanation from the Gap Theory people to explain this.

There is no doubt that "dinosaurs" were created by God.

“For in six days Jehovah made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is...,” Exodus 20:11

The Bible makes it clear that the entirety of God’s earthly creation was brought into existence during those six days.

The apostle John added that “all things were made by Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made” (John 1:3). If God created the Earth, the heavens, the seas, and everything in them in six days, what does that omit? It omits absolutely nothing!

The Bible also states very clearly that man has been around from the BEGINNING of creation, not in the middle or millions of years after it started.

“But from the beginning of the creation, male and female made he them” (Mark 10:6)

"And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female," (Matthew 19:4)

There also exists evidence that man and dinosaurs co-existed. Much of this evidence has been ignored by scientists for years.

See the source articles for more info.

Answer 3

With a literal young-Earth interpretation of Genesis, they don't.

But you're clearly a thinking person and can probably figure out that sometimes the Bible presents things as metaphor, story, parable, and myth. It's important to be able to distinguish when things can be True (God had a hand in creating the world; we can't know exactly how or when), but not factual (a six-thousand-year-old world--yeah, right!).

To anyone who says that every word of the Bible must be factual, I respond, "Read Song of Songs, and take a look at Jesus's teachings, especially the so-called parables; Are all of these factual?"

Answer 4

Adam and Eve is a metaphor -- not literal history. It's poetic history in parable form -- not the literal story of two people.

The Bible is a collection of 66 different books, some history, some poetry, some songs, some letters, as well as the rules of an ancient religion . . . written over the span of thousands of years. Problems arise when people can't tell one from another, and confuse them into each other.

Problems arise when you try to take a rule written for and by a certain group of people, and apply it to your life today (taking your disobedient child to the gates of the city to stone him, for example).

People tend to focus on the words in the Bible, and miss the message behind the story. The creation story of Genesis 1 and 2, for example, are poetry, the message is that God is powerful, neither of which is a history lesson.

The Bible is a fantastic collection of stories written by, about, and for the followers of the God of Abraham, and the followers of Christ.

I'm a pastor in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ.) Look for one of our churches, or a United Church of Christ church, or a church with a pastor who actually attended seminary.

Godspeed.

Answer 5

Here is the view and perspective I always look use. The parts of the Bible talking about the beginning of time are just examples and little stories pasted down to us by God to help us understand that we were created by him. Those stories are not to be taken literally, word for word. Rather the way in which it truely came about is that dinosaurs ruled the earth millions of years ago and became extinct. Other animals evolved and began to rule the earth. At some point in human evolution God gave a soul to an animal (possibly an ape) and it immediately became a human and had the ability to think and had freewill. From there the rest is history. :) Hope that helps you.

Answer 6

According to Genesis 1:20-25, God made sea creatures and birds on the 5th day; He then made the rest of the animals the first part of the 6th day and Adam later on that day. So we know animals (including dinosaurs) existed before humans.

Although the "creation account" within Genesis uses the word "day," the Hebrew word used there does not necessarily imply a 24-hour day. Instead, it only means a measurable amount of time. And since God exists outside of time, there's really no way of knowing what a "day" is to Him. Some scriptural sources suggest 1,000 years, but I believe this is figurative since the number 1,000 was often equated with "an innumerable number" (see Psalm 50:10, for example). Using this logic, one "Genesis day" could equal 10,000 years or 1 millisecond. We just don't know.

Answer 7

Some Christians think that the story about Adam and Eve is only a metaphoric way to explain creation.
Bible is NOT a scientific proof !
Dinosaurs died before humans'birth.

Answer 8

The Bible is full of a lot of stories and timelines that aren't true, and for a long time I didn't belive in God because of that. The Bible is not fact and should be taken with a grain of salt and it should be used as a guide and not as a text book. There is a balance between science and religion.

Answer 9

The timeline is most likely closest to the ones held by the vast majority of the scientific community through fossil dating and geological factors.

Stick with your sound scientific knowledge. Also know that science does not necessarily mean your spirituality is wrong.
You just have to be a little more intelligent and less literal about scripture.

For example, just because the bible says in Leviticus that birds blood and ashes cure Leprosy does not mean you rally the entire modern medical community to adopt that cure. Use your common sense and separate myth, allegory and symbolism from actual historical fact.

It will make you stronger in your faith in the end.

Best of luck!

Answer 10

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 Genesis 1:24-31. 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” (Genesis 1:31). Exodus 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 may ask, “But what about Genesis 1:30?” It says, “...to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to everything that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food.”

Yes, all the dinosaurs were vegetarians at first, before Adam’s sin. We see that people and animals only ate plants, not other animals. The carnivorous part of the present “food chain” didn’t exist. There were no animals to rip you apart in this “very good” creation—lions, bears, crocodiles, T. Rex, and Velociraptor ate squash for dinner.

But what about those sharp teeth? After Adam’s sin in Genesis 3, God changed the serpent (I think as a visual reminder to us that Satan is still out there). He changed childbirth, the ground, and brought in physical death to man. It could also be at that time He changed the animals (that had previously only eaten plants): creatures given teeth and claws designed to rend flesh, venom to paralyze, mouths to suck blood, coils to constrict, expandable jaws to swallow prey, etc.

God could have changed them after the fall, but the fact is, there are many sharp toothed animals living today that are vegetarians like the giant panda, the fruit bat, and some apes and bears are totally vegetarians. They have those big carnivorous looking teeth and yet they are plant eaters. And there are some plants that require sharp teeth to eat—can you imagine trying to bite into a coconut? Some evolutionists say the panda evolved sharp teeth so it could eat bamboo.

And then, look at Genesis 6:18-20 about Noah and the animals. It doesn’t say two of every kind except dinosaurs. Now, keep in mind that God brought the animals to Noah; it says they will “come to you”; he didn’t have to go out and catch them.

The response that often comes from the skeptic is: “Noah couldn’t have fit all those animals in the ark—especially the dinosaurs!” And you ask them, “How many animals had to go in the ark?” “I don’t know.” “Well, how big was the ark?” “I don’t know.” So, you don’t believe an unknown amount of animals could have fit in an unknown sized ark?

First of all, Genesis 6:20 states that representative kinds of birds and land animals boarded the Ark, not all the different species and subspecies. People say, “But there were over 600 names for dinosaurs.” Yes, and there are many names for the different types of dogs in the world, but all the dog “species” came from only one original dog kind—one Genesis kind. There were many different Ceratopsia dinosaurs that probably all came from one Genesis kind. Many creationists believe there were fewer than 50 distinct kinds of dinosaurs that had to be on the Ark.

Second, you also need to remember that the ark didn’t look like those cutesy Sunday School pictures. The ark was 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet tall (and that’s using a small cubit measurement; it could have been quite a bit larger). The space in the ark would have held more than 520 modern railroad boxcars, and I’ve read that shippers allocate up to 250 sheep per boxcar when moving them by train.

Third, not all dinosaurs were huge, many were as small as chickens. Some scientists say the average size of the dinosaurs was about that of a sheep or a small pony. Very few of the dinosaurs grew to extremely large sizes.

And fourth, who says that he took full grown dinosaurs on board? It would be foolish to fill up space on the ark with the oldest, biggest adults. The largest fossil dinosaur eggs found are about the size of a football. Reptiles normally grow till the day they die so the enormous dinosaurs were probably just very old. Would God want to use senior citizens to populate the new world? Their main purpose was to reproduce after the flood. I don’t think there were old adults of any of the animals on the ark.

So why did they die off? Well, many Creationists believe the flood would have drastically changed the climate of the earth (cooler temperatures, more radiation, etc.), and that there was a short ice age after the flood. Some Creationists think the dinosaurs that survived the flood where not able to cope so well in the new environment. They also believe that is the reason why man’s life-span shortened so much after the flood.

Another possibility is that dinosaurs may have become extinct for the same reason that many animals become extinct today. Why do we have endangered species programs? Extinction is the rule. Why? People killing them, lack of food, man destroying the environment, catastrophes, disease, genetic problems, and so on. I’ve read that in the last 350 years, about 400 species have disappeared and some say the number is much greater. Of course we are talking about species and not Genesis kinds.

Let’s think for a minute—countries all over the world have stories of dragon slayers. Perhaps man killed them for food, sport, or because they were a nuisance. I think we just didn’t start our endangered species programs early enough.

Answer 11

the bible does not say how long adam and eve were in the garden of eden. evolutionary progress may have been going on outside the garden. There is also discrepency on the creation timeline itself (whether 1 day equals 1 day or more according to God's timeline) point is - both could have been happening at the same time.

there is also the idea of intelligent design, where evolution happens, but is directed by God's hand.