Dinosaurs or really big chickens

  • Thread starter Thread starter Swamp_Yankee
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
S

Swamp_Yankee

Guest
Quick question (yeah right). How can I, a wanna-be strict creationist square the existence of dinosaur fossils with Genesis? How do we explain dino’s in the light of creation?
 
Well…there are schools of thought which say that dinosaurs were part of creation like everything else, but they died out after the Flood due to changes in atmospheric conditions. You can find information about it if you poke around here: icr.org/

Don’t expect that it’ll cut any ice with die-hard evolutionists, though. They don’t cotton to any kind of mythology that challenges their own mythology. 🙂
 
Wolseley said:
Well…there are schools of thought which say that dinosaurs were part of creation like everything else, but they died out after the Flood due to changes in atmospheric conditions. You can find information about it if you poke around here: icr.org/

Don’t expect that it’ll cut any ice with die-hard evolutionists, though. They don’t cotton to any kind of mythology that challenges their own mythology. 🙂
Click to expand...
Wait a minute. This has nothing to do with evolution. The problem is, the best science we have says that dinosaur fossils date back from 65 million years to a couple of hundred million years ago. So that is the issue that must be addressed, not anything about evolution. Did the Flood happen 65 million years ago, or a few thousand years ago? Were humans around 65 million years ago?
 
Ok, the Church says I don’t have to believe creation. Thats bothersome. John 1:3 is great, but, not helpfull in this. Mike, good point. Dino’s do not equal evolution. Where does this leave us? Is there a definative answer to this or are we left to hang in the wind?
 
VociMike said:
Wait a minute. This has nothing to do with evolution. The problem is, the best science we have says that dinosaur fossils date back from 65 million years to a couple of hundred million years ago. So that is the issue that must be addressed, not anything about evolution. Did the Flood happen 65 million years ago, or a few thousand years ago? Were humans around 65 million years ago?
Click to expand...
Well, I wasn’t there 😉 but I know that “dating” systems that scientists use aren’t always accurate. I heard an example once of a scientist that dated some bones as being millions of years old, but then as he dug deeper he found a Coca-cola bottle. :hmmm:
 
VociMike said:
Wait a minute. This has nothing to do with evolution. The problem is, the best science we have says that dinosaur fossils date back from 65 million years to a couple of hundred million years ago. So that is the issue that must be addressed, not anything about evolution. Did the Flood happen 65 million years ago, or a few thousand years ago? Were humans around 65 million years ago?
Click to expand...
Assuming time is constant. If it proves to be non-linear our dating may be called into question.
 
VociMike said:
Wait a minute. This has nothing to do with evolution. The problem is, the best science we have says that dinosaur fossils date back from 65 million years to a couple of hundred million years ago. So that is the issue that must be addressed, not anything about evolution. Did the Flood happen 65 million years ago, or a few thousand years ago? Were humans around 65 million years ago?
Click to expand...
I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Were you? 🙂

All I’m saying is that if he looks at differing schools of thought, he’s going to encounter differing dating structures, some of which will be vehemently opposed by evolutionists, because they throw the whole Darwinian house of cards totally out of whack. For example, the idea that humans and dinos might have been—just might have been—contemporaries.

Laugh if you wish, it doesn’t matter much to me. I will freely admit that I tend to look at evolution (and in a much broader sense, the whole origins debate) with a bit of a jaundiced eye, because there are myriad problems with it, and the various evidence which has been uncovered that doesn’t fit The Standard Darwinian Template ™ either gets ridiculed, swept under the carpet, or airily dismissed. It’s become a case where rather than the evidence producing the hypothesis, the evidence is instead selected or ignored to fit the preconceived notions currently in vogue.

That’s okay, I guess, but it isn’t science. It’s faith. 🙂

What it all boils down to is that nobody was there, and nobody can say for sure what exactly happened. You will run into people who will swear that life began in some “primordial sea”, where “just the right combination” of chemicals in a “soup” just somehow happened to “produce life”.

Well, maybe. But do we have any samples of this “soup” to test this theory? No. Can it be reproduced in a lab? No. Has anybody ever witnessed this transformation take place? No.

So basically what you have is educated speculation. The amusing part is, it takes just as much blind faith to believe that some random mixture of chemicals in a slimy bog 5 billion years ago “just happened” to somehow produce life as it does to believe that a Supreme Being stuck out His finger and said “Let there be light”. In a lot of these origins debates, it isn’t a case of religion vs. science, it’s a case of religion vs. religion.

Now, don’t get me wrong—for all I know, maybe it did happen that way. Or maybe it didn’t. We don’t know, and we never will know, because nobody was there at the time. Personally, I don’t care if God created the world by means of instantaneous creation, or by millions of years of evolution, or whether He followed the directions on the box and baked in a 350-degree oven for two hours. It doesn’t interest me, and I don’t care. But until the gaps and discrepancies in Darwinan evolution are addressed to my satisfaction, I will continue to regard it as basically a fairy tale for adults. It’s a nice story, but it certainly isn’t the hard and fast fact that guys like Steve Gould would have us believe.

And as Forrest Gump once so eloquently stated, “That’s all I have t’say about…that.” 🙂 We now return to our regularly scheduled thread, and I apologize for the hijack. Please, by all means continue.
 
Pixie_Dust said:
Well, I wasn’t there 😉 but I know that “dating” systems that scientists use aren’t always accurate. I heard an example once of a scientist that dated some bones as being millions of years old, but then as he dug deeper he found a Coca-cola bottle. :hmmm:
Click to expand...
Absolute poppycock.

Everybody knows that Australopithecus afarensis drank Pepsi. 😉
 
Thank you for your references to the creation museum. They have some very interisting ideas
 
buffalo said:
Assuming time is constant. If it proves to be non-linear our dating may be called into question.
Click to expand...
But either way, have human artifacts been found that date as old or older than dinosaur artifacts? I don’t believe they have, by a long shot.
 
If they ever are, I volunteer to eat my shoe and post the video. I vow it and insist upon it! 😛
 
VociMike said:
But either way, have human artifacts been found that date as old or older than dinosaur artifacts? I don’t believe they have, by a long shot.
Click to expand...
It would depend where on this curve the dinosaurs were, compared to man. If they appeared when the slope was great they may not be as far back as we think. Perhaps man appeared when the sol was more constant.

The best comparison I can make is like when we look at a globe and then we make a map. The upper regions are distorted, if you know what I mean.
 
Pixie_Dust said:
Well, I wasn’t there 😉 but I know that “dating” systems that scientists use aren’t always accurate. I heard an example once of a scientist that dated some bones as being millions of years old, but then as he dug deeper he found a Coca-cola bottle. :hmmm:
Click to expand...
Well I hate to see Catholics rejecting our best, objective science (not, I emphasize, science-with-an-agenda, but objective science) so casually. The Catholic faith is not the faith of Fundamentalist Protestants.

Anyway, as I pointed out in other posts, this is not about evolution, and the issue of inaccurate dating doesn’t solve the problem that human artifacts are not found that date as old (whatever the actual age may be) as dinosaur artifacts.
 
VociMike said:
Well I hate to see Catholics rejecting our best, objective science (not, I emphasize, science-with-an-agenda, but objective science) so casually. The Catholic faith is not the faith of Fundamentalist Protestants.

Anyway, as I pointed out in other posts, this is not about evolution, and the issue of inaccurate dating doesn’t solve the problem that human artifacts are not found that date as old (whatever the actual age may be) as dinosaur artifacts.
Click to expand...
I was under the impression that as a Catholic I was perfectly free to believe in a 7-day (well, 6-day actually) Creation, which would have man and animals (including dinos) being created on the same day. :confused:
 
Pixie_Dust said:
I was under the impression that as a Catholic I was perfectly free to believe in a 7-day (well, 6-day actually) Creation, which would have man and animals (including dinos) being created on the same day. :confused:
Click to expand...
That’s true. However, there is still the matter of the scientific data that says that dinosaurs existed tens of millions of years before the first humans, and the universe existed billions of years before the first humans. I can only see three ways to deal with that data:
  1. Say that the whole enterprise of applying reason to understanding the world around us is one that cannot succeed. Admit that we cannot actually know anything about the material world.
  2. Say that God has created a vast and elaborate deception regarding the distant past, for reasons unknown.
  3. Find a true understanding of scripture that does not conflict with our true understanding of the material world.
 
VociMike said:
That’s true. However, there is still the matter of the scientific data that says that dinosaurs existed tens of millions of years before the first humans, and the universe existed billions of years before the first humans. I can only see three ways to deal with that data:
  1. Say that the whole enterprise of applying reason to understanding the world around us is one that cannot succeed. Admit that we cannot actually know anything about the material world.
  2. Say that God has created a vast and elaborate deception regarding the distant past, for reasons unknown.
  3. Find a true understanding of scripture that does not conflict with our true understanding of the material world.
Click to expand...
As far as I’m concerned, the origin of the world and creation are in the realm of history, not science. How long were Adam and Eve in the Garden before the Fall? It could have been billions of years. 🤷 I believe Job mentions some very dino-like creature roaming around at the same time as humans. I just don’t buy the “humans and dinos NEVER walked the earth at the same time” bunk.

I wouldn’t say that God has created any deception - He’s not the Father of Lies.
 
I have no trouble accepting dinosaurs and other creatures existed millions of years before the evolution of humans. I’ve seen creationists bring their case forwards, but it has always been thoroughly demolished by scientists in books and science forums I’ve been in.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top