Some random thoughts on Creation Evolution Dinosaurs and the Bible
A few thoughts around Christianity and the creation evolution dinosaurs and the Bible debate – leaving aside faith and belief for a moment.
If you accept (or believe) one viewpoint to start with, you won’t accept the other unless something changes. Firstly, is this true? If it is, it works both ways, and it is no surprise in a fallen world that there are many weird theories and rumours and options since the Bible tells us this will happen. The fact that something is ‘weird and wacky’ (perhaps not to everyone) doesn’t necessarily make it wrong. Current science is often stated as fact (or at least part fact) until new science discoveries superceed it or adding, or taking away from it.
Man doesn’t know everything. In fact, most of the time, in the exciting world that we live new discoveries only create more questions to answer – another sign that there is something more to all this than meets the eye – a bigger picture, some of which we can’t yet see and is veiled from us. The world was flat until science prooved that it was round (sorry flat earthers, but the truth is the earth is spherical and not flat – science and maths can prove it). However, even now, there are people who still believe the earth is flat – even we would agree that they are misguided!
Creation vs Evolution
The account of creation at the beginning of Genesis and indeed the first few books of the Bible are of course actually very short covering the critical information that humankind needs to know in relation to God to understand better humankind’s place in the world and why.
This is indeed profound from books that were written long, long before the kind of ‘factual’ science we have and indeed are taught today (which still only produces more and more questions than answers).
So, its a given not all the detail is included…
True enough, science today can perhaps sometimes even help to fill in some of the gaps of understanding depending on your viewpoint (the evolution theory, however, is not necessarily one of them!) Perhaps creation rather then evolution is more of a possibility and more plausible perhaps than many would give credit. Evolution sounds good and is easy to understand for many – but that doesn’t make it right – but it does make it convenient.
Why are dinosaurs mentioned in the title of these musings?
It has been said that ‘Dinosaurs and humans were created together and lived together in perfect harmony’. Well we all know dinosaurs are at least ‘proved’ in science by the existence of fossil remains, so we can’t shy away from the question of dinosaurs.
In terms of the statement about being created and living together, we don’t see this directly in terms of dinosaurs indicated in the Bible (though it might have been the case in the beginning, if the dinosaurs were created at that time in the garden of eden – we don’t know, there isn’t enough detail recorded to know this for sure even though there si mention of giant people such as the Nephilim Num 13:33), and neither do we see a lot of evidence for dinosaurs and humans co-existing together and living in perfect harmony today.
For one thing, the big dinosaurs, if they were as described in science, have died out – millions of years ago according to science (this is open to the possibility of dating techniques still not being necessarily accurate in terms of timescales). Yet humankind is still populating the Earth. Some evidence may have been found that dinosaurs and primative humans could have co-existed for at least a while from archieologyand science.
However, Christians understand from the Bible that God’s time and our time (as we understand it) can be quite different.
Our understanding of time is understood through a limited knowledge of time and space. The units of measurement of time that we have decided to use helps us standardise time-frames across the globe and breaks time down into manageable small chuncks which coincide with the day and night and helps us to make more sense of it. Of course, and perhaps of notable interest is that right at the beginning of Genesis, the day is divided into day and night (Genesis 1:3–5), but without the units of time as we know them.
Perhaps towards the beginning of creation, a full day and night was a very different length to the days and nights we have now – we don’t know, but there are two common views which are a literal 7 days of creation or perhaps creation covering a much, much longer time condensed into the 7 ‘days’ for the recording of the order of creation in Genesis.
Adaptation is not necessarily evolution nor at odds with Christianity unlike evolution.
Adaptation, as opposed to evolution, can bring factual science closer to Christianity without conflict, and there is nothing wrong with this. Getting back to the statement ‘dinosaurs and humans were created together’. Does the adaptive issue often talked about fit any better? Perhaps they may have been creatures that were created initially recorded in Genesis 1:21 (rather than evolving, and not in the image of God in the same way that humans were) before the flood.
It is worth noting, however, Noah saved one pair of every type of living thing according to the detail in the account of Noah so perhaps its more likely the dinosaurs died out before the flood as the Ark would probably have needed to be bigger to accommodate the larger dinosaurs. There is some evidence of catastropic global events which could support that possibility.
It is difficult to stay away from the question of dinosaurs completely as archeology proves the existence of bones – it doesn’t prove how they got there. Some folks jokingly suggest that God put them in the ground to give us more things to discover and help satisfy the need for us to puzzle over things and look for answers – but they don’t really help us now or serve any other purpose!
Seriously, though, very few complete skeletons have been found. Many theories about how the dinosaurs looked, from what I understand, has been proposed from many different fragments. Could it be possible many of these guesses are incorrect? We don’t know. The Bible can’t help us here – it would seem that as the focus of the Bible is humankind’s relationship with God, great details about all the animals was not necessry and perhaps the detailed recording of them was not important enough to record in the Bible.
We’re growing up in an environment today where technology can even bring these proposed creatures ‘alive’ through computers, special effects and AI which makes them all the more ‘real’. But again, we should remember that a lot of this is pure speculation. No-one really knows exactly what they might have looked like.
Add to that the fantasy world of computer games etc where man is using his own imagination and gift of creativity to create even more weird and wonderful creatures in the virtual world, and its easy to see how we can all so easily find ourselves believing and assuming it all to be real without really thinking about it too much (a different case of belief and faith without question / reason perhaps?)
Evolution vs Adaptation
Adaptation is plausible – and crosses to what some people’s understanding of evolution actually is. Adaptation is possible as a scientific concept to be compatible with Christianity because it is not definitive like evolution vs creation is – though there is still time-scale issues! Evolution and creation are opposed in that you can only have one option from the two – either man was created instantly in form and function without evolving, by God as the Bible says, or evolved over millions of years going through many phases as evolution says.
Christianity says that man was created miraculously in the image of God – instantly, not starting off from as as near as makes no difference nothing and going through several alternative transformations until (just as miraculously) really by chance – remembering science says we wouldn’t be here if it were not for the fact that the earth is pretty much exactly the right distance from the sun, and even that it is necessary for the moon to be pretty much exactly where it is too etc etc – arriving at what we have today in terms of supporting life and human form.
Believing all this happening by chance is in many ways less plausible than the orderly notion of a creator God and also requires a great leap of faith. Many scientists it seems agree that there appears to be order even in the ‘chaos’ of creation.
Again, because there is not enough detail, we could spend a life-time on debating these things especially as new discoveries raise more questions, but it is interesting that the Bible effectively tells us as we read on through it that knowing the answer to the questions of the dinosaurs and even creation vs evolution isn’t the most important issue relative to where we all are today and relative to our relationship to God, and Jesus (assuming you believe there’s even a possibility God exists – thats another topic!)
About Jesus
Many, many people that believed in all kinds of spiritual things until Jesus caused them to change and brought understanding – there are many writings that document his actual existence – not all ‘religious’ scriptures either – to substantiate it. In this article, we are talking about one of the bigger questions, but the fact remains there is not an answer so definitive so as not to allow free-will and choice – and as God has allowed us to have – otherwise there would be no choice.
Perhaps this makes it easier than one might think to be able to accept creation over evolution, even though many are interested in the science of it all and trying to reason and prove or disprove ‘natural history’. Add back into all this the un-logical, un-scientific spiritual dimension – which is not so easily defined because it involves such things as faith, hope, love – such things which in many ways can’t be simply defined and remain partially hidden except from God himself.
God is interested in it all ( he created it, and upholds it), but the Bible reveals that humans stand apart from the rest of creation. Science doesn’t (and may never), though nit keeps trying, can’t adequately cover love, free-will, hope, faith, spirituality etc – things not fully definable, and without bounds, not tangible, often irrational things which can cause the ‘rule book’ to be re-written at a moments notice.
In the same way, it follows that humankind – if truely made in the image of God who created all things will ‘naturally’ be interested in science and also other people, and even the birds in the air – and it seems this is proved time and again just even because humankind keeps asking and wanting to answer the ever continuing big questions in this amazing, miraculous, wonderful, colourful, awesome universe which surrounds us all. An emotional, ordered, yet irrational, logical yet illogical, simple yet complex, varied yet ordered place we call home – the Earth.
More reading and related links
Some links to other Christian websites with information possibly related Creationism and Evolution debate (none of these sites sourced in the writing of the above article):
Example of creation vs evolution debate – always been a ‘hot’ topic
Christians in Science article on creation
