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TOM SAYS:

I am confused when the Bible talks about God creating the world in seven days but there is no evidence of humans living with dinosaurs.

THE RELIGION GUY ANSWERS:

This problem arises if “creationism” controls Bible interpretation. That term has come to identify those Protestants whose strictly literal reading of the Bible’s Book of Genesis requires a “young earth.” That is, if God created the cosmos and all species 10,000 years ago at most, then humanity and dinosaurs must have lived at the same time.

“Creationism” is a common but simplistic, misleading label because multitudes who worship God as the creator of all nature also accept standard geology’s vastly longer time frame, based on radiometric and other dating techniques of the past two centuries. By this reckoning, dinosaurs first inhabited Earth some 230 million years ago and became extinct 65.5 million years ago, eons before humanity appeared. The most recent report last November said a dinosaur find in southwestern Alberta, Canada, may be 80 million years old.

“Old earth creationists” believe scientists’ long chronology readily fits with faithfulness to the Bible’s account of origins, but criticize Darwin’s theory of evolution. A third camp of self-identified Bible believers embraces both an old earth and “theistic evolution,” seeing Darwin’s scenario as God’s method of forming species while opposing contentions that evolution was random and without purpose or a Creator. This three-sided debate mostly occurs among conservative, evangelical, and fundamentalist Protestants.

Modern-day Jews, Catholics, and most Protestants accept the planet’s long chronology. In fact, during the century after Darwin so did most evangelicals, fundamentalists, and biblical “inerrantists,” even William Jennings Bryan of “Monkey Trial” fame. There’s more detail in The Religion Guy’s July 28 “Religion Q and A” item on young earthism.

Young earthers long argued there was proof of human footprints alongside the dinosaur tracks at Dinosaur Valley State Park along the Paluxy River in Texas. Though some bitter-enders still say that, the claim is widely viewed as equivalent to the celebrated Piltdown Man hoax. An analyst with the hardline Answers in Genesis, known for its Creation Museum in Kentucky, considers the evidence “ambiguous” so creationists shouldn’t rely on it.

Well, then, how do young earthers explain why there’s no fossil evidence of human remains alongside dinosaur remains?

Continue reading "Why doesn’t the Bible mention dinosaurs?" by Richard Ostling.