What do you suppose was God's purpose for creating the dinosaurs?

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I think this is the rethoric that makes it confusing.

Theologians often like to exalt the uniqueness of the human being, because he goes contranatura with his morality and helps the “weak” by serving them. That certainly comes from God.

However, that puts us in a very terrible theological problem: why the rest of nature is different, if it was created by God? Why a poor, handicapped animal has to suffer a horrible death, if he doesn’t even have an everlasting soul according to tradition? It’s that what you call “unfold”?

You may say, because of Original Sin, but if we accept evolution we accept that Original sin came after natural selection… so… is it retroactive? Does it work from Eternity? Then why Christ’ Resurrection (or His Second Coming) didn’t put nature in order retroactively?

The only way I can see natural selection working with Divine Justice is if there is an animal’s Heaven, and animals also participate in some form into redemptive suffering.
 
I think the Catechism helps explain some of this where it addresses physical evil, as differentiated from moral evil, which is sin:

“But why did God not create a world so perfect that no evil could exist in it? With infinite power God could always create something better. But with infinite wisdom and goodness God freely willed to create a world ‘in a state of journeying’ toward its ultimate perfection. In God’s plan this process of becoming involves the appearance of certain beings and the disappearance of others, the existence of the more perfect alongside the less perfect, both constructive and destructive forces of nature. With physical good there exists also physical evil as long as creation has not reached perfection.”

“Angels and men, as intelligent and free creatures, have to journey toward their ultimate destinies by their free choice and preferential love. They can therefore go astray. Indeed, they have sinned. Thus, moral evil, incommensurably more harmful than physical evil, entered the world. God is in no way, directly or indirectly, the cause of moral evil. He permits it, however, because he respects the freedom of his creatures and, mysteriously, knows how to derive good from it.”

"The world began when God’s word drew it out of nothingness; all existent beings, all of nature, and all human history are rooted in this primordial event, the very genesis by which the world was constituted and time begun.

“Each creature possesses its own particular goodness and perfection. For each one of the works of the ‘six days’ it is said: ‘by the very nature of creation, material being is endowed with its own stability, truth, and excellence, its own order and laws.’ Each of the various creatures, willed in its own being, reflects in its own way a ray of God’s infinite wisdom and goodness.”

The hierarchy of creatures is expressed by the order of the ‘six days,’ from the less perfect to the more perfect."

“There is solidarity among all creatures arising from the fact that all have the same Creator and are all ordered to his glory.”

These passages clearly explain and confirm both creation and evolution as being integral components of God’s plan. Within the evolutionary processes there exists the process of natural selection – part of the “physical evil” as the result of creation being good but imperfect, i.e., incomplete. Still, through these natural evolutionary processes, creation continues to journey toward its ultimate perfection.
 
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whatistrue said:
He (it seems to me) did the equivalent of striking one cue ball and clearing every pool table that ever was or will be built of balls in a single shot. And then some, as they say.
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Yes, that’s how I think of it too.

He was there when the initial conditions were set, and He ran the table with with a single shot.
 
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Dinosaurs are cool. Any child could tell you that. Do they even need a purpose beyond that?
 
Why on earth are people saying God did it for oil, oil and our oil fuelled world is a blink in time. Why will people be saying God created Dinosaurs in 2000 years time.
 
They were probably more beautiful and varied than we think of them. Here’s a wolf skeleton–if we shrink-wrapped it with scales or feathers it would probably also look like a terrible lizard:
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Here’s a velociraptor skeleton:
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Here’s what an admittedly photogenic wolf looks like in reality:
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And yet here’s how we picture velociraptors lol.
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vz71 said:
If creation is for our benefit, at present I see a big benefit to the oil.
This source of energy brought us economic prosperity.
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My point is it is a blink in time, A finite resource that was not around for thousands of years, and wont be around in the future. Oil and gas are not sourced from dead dinosaurs typically, either.
 
OurLadyofSorrows said:
My point is it is a blink in time, A finite resource that was not around for thousands of years, and wont be around in the future.
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Right.
It is a resource that we needed and had for a critical period of history and will be gone when we no longer need it.
 
vz71 said:
Right.
It is a resource that we needed and had for a critical period of history and will be gone when we no longer need it.
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It is not made from dinosaur bones, first point, second is , and you raise an interesting question,
how do we define this as a critical period in history? What makes it so? It would have to be on a global scale.
 
It’s so we’d have technology before we were able to harness electricity:

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Maybe he just wants to see our reaction when we found those fossils. 😂
 
Reason 3 big bones for dogs
Reason 4 skeletons become opalised or enriched with precious minerals.
 
Maybe God is an avid birdwatcher and he invented dinosaurs so that they would evolve into birds?
 
Dinosaurs were the only creatures large enough to feed on the killer bees (remember them?) and would now be eating murder hornets, but they went extinct when they picked up a bad habit.

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