My mother and I were watching Jim Henson's Dinosaurs today and we were watching a clip show with a guy who looks like an archaeologist talking about what the dinosaurs were and what happened to them, in between random clips of the Baby hitting Earl with a frying pan and all that good stuff...and my mother said she never got the whole dinosaur timeline because if God made the earth in 7 days, and made man first and then the animals, where do the dinosaurs come in? And if you do believe in God and don't believe that the earth is hundreds of millions of years old and there was a big ice age as the intervention and then man crawls out of the swamp water and spends years learning to walk upright and all that, it does get confusing.

I had a few theories about this, if anybody else has some they'd care to throw in, go ahead:

One thought I had is in the Bible it talks about what was going on in Jerusalem and Egypt, it doesn't say anything about what was going on in England at that time or Asia or America, so who was living there at that time? Or what if the dinosaurs were put in a part of the world where people weren't? What if the great 'ice age' was the dinosaurs dying out in what today we know to be the Antarctica? Since nobody can say for sure WHAT dinosaurs looked like, and scientists just recently came out saying 'oh wait a minute, we were wrong, there's NEVER been a triceratops'???, you know, how do we know that these drawings of what we see them looking like, is right? If dinosaurs did NOT look like the illustrations in science books, when you see the big skeletons put together like on the T-rex, if not this:




Then what would they look like? But you know, in the Bible it says God created the animals so man wouldn't be lonely, and you hear about horses, donkeys, lions, dogs, you don't hear about monkeys or elephants or racoons, you don't hear about domesticated boa constrictors, so obviously a lot more was going on in Biblical times than just what the Bible shows, but where WOULD the dinosaurs fit into it?

If you're going to take the Bible as literal fact dinosaurs don't fit at all. The Earth is not 6,000 years old.

Alan Smithee wrote:

If you're going to take the Bible as literal fact dinosaurs don't fit at all. The Earth is not 6,000 years old.

And if all the earth and its carbon were only 6K years old, how does carbon dating go back so much further?

(I know, I know - god's mysteries)

If God made the earth in 7 days then it was billions of years ago (and I don't mean that sarcastically at all; I believe the endless universe has always been His). I think dinosaurs and earlier forms of man were all in the designs and developments of God's plan. Yes, I'm a believer in God and Evolution going hand-in-hand.

Bluesmama wrote:

If God made the earth in 7 days then it was billions of years ago (and I don't mean that sarcastically at all; I believe the endless universe has always been His). I think dinosaurs and earlier forms of man were all in the designs and developments of God's plan. Yes, I'm a believer in God and Evolution going hand-in-hand.

In addition, I don't believe that the Genesis story is LITERAL (in terms of timeline), so "days" were probably not actually days as we know them but an unspecified period of time that God chose to work in. I think humans have symbolically used "days" to intepret the sequence of events at which God did things, because that's the measure of time all human societies would use at the most basic level (one rotation of the earth). God didn't "write" the bible, PEOPLE did, and the ones who wrote Genesis weren't around when these events took place. So in truth, they couldn't have known how much time passed from one event to the next. They chose "days" because it's the easiest measurement of time for anybody to comprehend.

By the way, the bible says that God created animals BEFORE humans. He created fish and birds on the fifth day, then land animals on the sixth day BEFORE he created man on the sixth day. Man was the last form of life he created, so Dinosaurs would have existed before man even in the bible. Also, Dinosaurs are mentioned in the bible as giant creatures that inhabited the earth. The word Dinosaur didn't exist when the bible was written. Instead, they are called "Dragon", "Leviathan" and "Behemoth" depending on what type of giant creature they were (land/sea; etc).

captainbryce wrote:

In addition, I don't believe that the Genesis story is LITERAL (in terms of timeline), so "days" were probably not actually days as we know them but an unspecified period of time that God chose to work in. I think humans have symbolically used "days" to intepret the sequence of events at which God did things, because that's the measure of time all human societies would use at the most basic level (one rotation of the earth). God didn't "write" the bible, PEOPLE did, and the ones who wrote Genesis weren't around when these events took place. So in truth, they couldn't have known how much time passed from one event to the next. They chose "days" because it's the easiest measurement of time for anybody to comprehend.

By the way, the bible says that God created animals BEFORE humans. He created fish and birds on the fifth day, then land animals on the sixth day BEFORE he created man on the sixth day. Man was the last form of life he created, so Dinosaurs would have existed before man even in the bible. Also, Dinosaurs are mentioned in the bible as giant creatures that inhabited the earth. The word Dinosaur didn't exist when the bible was written. Instead, they are called "Dragon", "Leviathan" and "Behemoth" depending on what type of giant creature they were (land/sea; etc).

Yes. "Days" were likely phases. 7 days of earth's creation: Not 7 days as in a week; rather, in phases over billions of years. Makes perfect sense to me.

But interpretations in the Bible can definitely confuse. And some of it, I think, was for want of a needed word that didn't exist. Much of the cryptic-sounding descriptions of things in the sky (Revelations) are airplanes, and I suspect military-craft in battle. But, of course, no one knew what to call them or what exactly they were, and imagine their frustration in trying to make sense of it or describing it on paper. (Good prophecy, though.)