Dinosaurs and Different Timelines
The dinosaurs are fascinating creatures that dwarf everything alive on land today, and perhaps are rivaled only by creatures like whales for sheer enormity. As such, they are a magnet for children’s fascination.
Look at the size of the largest dinosaur fossil ever found: I couldn’t fit it in one photo from the ground!
Or, consider the most complete T-Rex fossil: one of the largest carnivores to ever walk the earth.
Both of my children are smitten with dinosaurs, even at one year old, they roared with the best of the dinosaur aficionados. Now, they have dino parties, play dino hospital, and pretend they have dino pets.
Not only are kids dino crazy, adults (like yours truly) also seem unable to resist the allure, as evidenced by the Jurassic World movies (and their predecessors: Jurassic Park).
Worlds Enough and Time
Still, there’s a dark side to this whole dinosaur fascination: when dinosaurs lived. We have many cute story books on dinosaurs, and almost all of them reference millions of years ago.
But, on a certain reading of the Bible–one I was raised in, nonetheless–the dinosaurs that scientists have introduced us to could not exist: meaning that a set of organisms that lived tens and hundreds of millions of years before humans does not jive with an understanding of the world as having been created in seven actual days.
To make matters worse, we might acknowledge that a strict reading of the genealogies included in Genesis 5, Matthew (Matthew 1 takes us back to Abraham) and Luke’s Gospel (Luke 3 takes us from Jesus back to Adam) allows only a short time for all of natural and human history to unfold. The most (in)famous estimate places the creation of the world at 4004 BC, based on the notion of a literal seven-day creation, followed by an exhaustive set of genealogies, with no gaps.
On such an interpretation, the 4.5 billion year age of some early life seems untenable. A scientific age of the earth at around 4.6 billion years old, based on the decay of uranium into lead (found in space rocks leftover from solar system formation) cannot be reconciled with a literal, seven day creation–even with the generous ages of people given in Genesis (Adam, for instance, seems to have lived 930 years, according to Genesis 5:5).
Adam and Eve, in one representation.
All of the sudden, the seemingly harmless fascination with dinosaurs falls prey to the complications of children’s inquisitive nature: which origin story, if any, should we tell our kids? What timeline do we give them?
There are myriad other questions, such as what to say to older kids about that layer of high concentrations of the element iridium (common in space and rare on earth) around the world that seems to mark a point in the fossil record after which many species–including dinosaurs–simply don’t show up. And others, including people, do. (A meteorite impact is the common interpretation.)
Issues of timelines and the age of the earth can drop a metaphorical space rock–brightly burning and unavoidable–right into your child’s freewheeling dinosaur imagination, forcing you to face some uncomfortable questions together.
Text and Context
Does the Bible shed any light on this topic?
Before we can answer that, I feel that we must address the idea of textual intent. I often cringe at what people want to make ancient–and not so ancient–texts say. I once had a student approach me who thought he had deciphered Shakespeare’s moral rejection of homosexuality in a play.
I countered that the student would have to demonstrate any number of things from what key words meant in Shakespearean English, to what the social attitude toward openly depicting homosexual affection would have been, and whether or not Shakespeare’s society was openly discussing the morality of homosexuality in the first place.
Similarly, did biblical authors (and God as their inspiration) seek to answer modern scientific disputes in texts written before such an understanding had gripped the ancient worldview?
If the writer’s intent was not to address our concerns, then dare we insert them into the text?
Dinosaur Romanticism
It seems almost irresistible to want any hint of an answer, to cling to any scrap of evidence that might nudge us in one direction or the other.
The notion is so enticing that dinosaurs could have coexisted with people, if we accept certain readings of Judeo-Christian accounts of human origins, that I felt like it was used as a gee-whiz factor to promote faith. To quote a book from my childhood:
“Part of God’s purpose for creating the particular types of dinosaurs that became very large was surely to impress man.”
That doesn’t sound as snappy as it could, so I reimagined it as a dialogue between a younger me and Ken Ham, CEO of Answers in Genesis: an organization behind the Creation Museum in Kentucky. (Ham also recently debated Bill Nye in 2014 about evolution.)
Ham: “Those atheists can’t say that humans got to see real dinosaurs, but golly, little Davey, isn’t it cool that we can?”
Younger I: “Boy howdy, Dr. Ham! I’ll never watch Bill Nye again, cross my heart!”
Sorry, Bill.
But, don’t take my word for it. Ken Ham accuses both secularists and humanists of taking the “wow” factor of dinosaurs and using it as a weapon to indoctrinate youth. And he won’t stand for it:
Well, we want to put the evolutionary secular humanists on notice: we’re taking dinosaurs back!
For example, when you walk into the future Creation Museum, you’ll see animatronic dinosaurs and children together […]
To the humanists: we have invaded your evolutionary temples, and we have gone into your “holy of holies.” We have captured the dinosaurs … and we’re taking them back to give them their rightful place in history! They don’t belong to you!
Adam looks so happy with the dinosaurs!
Ham and others have detected the simple fact that many children are fascinated with dinosaurs, and want to leverage this fascination to tell what they perceive as the truth about them. I humbly submit that luring children into any intellectual position–even the truth–by showing them flashy dinosaurs runs the risk of romanticism: if kids are only there for the feeling, then when that feeling dissipates, they’ll move on from not only dinosaurs, but possibly the intellectual position or faith claim anchored in that childhood fascination.
I can speak to this from personal experience: I became fascinated by space, and then the struggle for my church became reconciling big bang cosmology (first proposed by a theist, oddly enough) with the bible.
But, let’s return to the sense of wonder of dinosaurs, and see how my church handled my dinosaur mania.
Drawing Out Leviathan
To wit, I present the favorite “dinosaur” in the Bible, according to two of my Creation Research kids’ books: Behemoth.
Each of these books mentions a monstrous creature from the book of Job: “Behemoth” from Job 40 as an entity that could only be a dinosaur (Gee whiz!).
Another possibility for a dinosaur in Job was Leviathan. Books my parents gave me by Institute for Creation Research authors also suggested that all the stories of dragons in Asian and European tales may have been inspired by real creatures: dinosaurs(!).
“Can you draw out Leviathan[…]?”
But, back to the Book of Job. In Job 40, Behemoth is described as follows (40:15-18): “[H]e eats grass like an ox. Behold, his strength in his loins, and his power in the muscles of his belly. He makes his tail stiff like a cedar; the sinews of his thighs are knit together. His bones are tubes of bronze, his limbs like bars of iron.”
What sort of creature was this? Many believe it was inspired by a hippopotamus, but the notion of the tail “like a cedar” seems to contradict an actual hippo, but match up with the diplodocus, or apatosaurus. The other heavy-hitter in Job, Leviathan, is described as an armored creature:
“Who can open the doors of his face? Around his teeth is terror.
His back is made of rows of shields, shut up closely as with a seal” (Job 41:14-15).
Which, again reminds a modern reader of an Ankylosaur, perhaps. So, there may well be references in the Bible to such animals as dinosaurs.
But, we still cannot escape the textual questions outlined above. Job was not primarily written to confirm or deny our suspicions about dinosaurs.
I researched Job for a whole semester, studying the rhetoric, imagery, and the theodicy (how the book addresses the problem of suffering in light of an omnipotent, loving God) of the text.
Whatever other conclusions I reached, I quickly decided that whether Behemoth or Leviathan were real creatures (a crocodile, dinosaur, or hippo were floated as possibilities) or a manifestation of demonic chaos–or even simply a poetic device–was tangential to the larger point of that section of the text: Job wasn’t in control and God was.
Is it Ok to Not Know?
So, what do we tell our children about dinosaurs and Christian belief?
Why not: “I don’t know.”
It’s not our job to know everything about everything as parents. It is our job to teach children the tools of critical thinking.
I use the phrase “I don’t know” when talking with my children, at times. I think it models intellectual humility (well, perhaps not while I’m tooting my own horn, here) and honesty.
I haven’t mastered the disciplines of paleontology, archeology, biblical languages, history, and Ancient Near East cultural studies, let alone cosmology, biology, chemistry, and physics to the extent where I’d feel competent to provide a definitive synthesis of those notions and bring it to bear on dinosaurs.
When I am talking about dinosaurs with my kids, I might say, “I don’t know, but I believe that dinosaurs died off long before people, because that’s what our best information tells us.”
Another parent might say, “I don’t know, but I believe people lived alongside dinosaurs.”
And then explain why, as appropriate.
I would refer readers to such conservative scholarship as John Walton’s The Lost World of Genesis One, where Walton clarifies that the text of the creation account is about God establishing a purpose and creating order in the world. Walton discusses in detail what the creation story does and does not require that we believe, and how it is not written to resolve our “Creation vs. Evolution” debate, but is rather devoted to God’s sovereign purposes in creation. Whatever view we personally hold to, we can all acknowledge that the truths communicated about God’s sovereignty and his purposes in creation: bringing order out of chaos and bringing himself glory.
Your Own Understanding
At the heart of the matter, I do think the Bible has something to say to us: “Lean not on your own understanding.” (Proverbs 3:5b.)
In the context of the chapter, it is not advocating for ignorance or a rejection of the capacity of the mind for thought (the whole book praises wisdom and understanding). Rather, there are other virtues that are to come alongside understanding, as a sort of guiding force for it:
“Let not steadfast love and faithfulness forsake you; bind them around your neck; write them on the tablet of your heart. So you will find favor and good success in the sight of God and man.” (Proverbs 3:3-4)
We are, perhaps, not to be characterized by our confidence in our own way of thinking, but rather by our steadfast love and faithfulness as received from God and communicated to others. Indeed, the impetus toward seeking after something other than ourselves is the driving force behind Jesus’ teachings to seek first the kingdom of God, or to love God with heart, soul, and mind and our neighbor as yourself. Our understanding (our “mind”) plays a pivotal role in our life of faith, but it is not the only thing that matters, and is a means to an end.
Our children will remember that love, that faithfulness in dealing with them, even if they come to see the dinosaurs (or the world) in a different light than we ourselves.
What does the Bible have to say about dinosaurs? How do we teach dinosaurs to our kids? And is it ok to just say, "I don't know"? Click To Tweet
