The Bible Talks About Dinosaurs
The first problem with this objection is that the Bible clearly talks about dinosaurs. When you tell the average person that the Bible specifically talks about dinosaurs, they will look at you like you have three heads. They might even say that the word "dinosaur" doesn't appear in the Bible, so the Bible can't possibly be talking about dinosaurs. The first problem with that is that the word dinosaur didn't exist until the mid 1800s; before that they were called dragons. Secondly, God describes two different dinosaurs at the end of the book of Job. Let's start with a creature called Behemoth:
Job 40:15-24: "Look at Behemoth, which I made along with you and which feeds on grass like an ox. What strength it has in its loins, what power in the muscles of its belly! Its tail sways like a cedar; the sinews of its thighs are close-knit. Its bones are tubes of bronze, its limbs like rods of iron. It ranks first among the works of God, yet its Maker can approach it with his sword. The hills bring it their produce, and all the wild animals play nearby. Under the lotus plants it lies, hidden among the reeds in the marsh. The lotuses conceal it in their shadow; the poplars by the stream surround it. A raging river does not alarm it; it is secure, though the Jordan should surge against its mouth. Can anyone capture it by the eyes, or trap it and pierce its nose?"
The belly is the biggest part? It has a tail like a cedar? It has big bones? It's the biggest creature that God made? That sure sounds like the Brachiosaurus to me.
God describes another dinosaur-like creature in Job 41:
Job 41: "Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook or tie down its tongue with a rope? Can you put a cord through its nose or pierce its jaw with a hook? Will it keep begging you for mercy? Will it speak to you with gentle words? Will it make an agreement with you for you to take it as your slave for life? Can you make a pet of it like a bird or put it on a leash for the young women in your house? Will traders barter for it? Will they divide it up among the merchants? Can you fill its hide with harpoons or its head with fishing spears? If you lay a hand on it, you will remember the struggle and never do it again! Any hope of subduing it is false; the mere sight of it is overpowering. No one is fierce enough to rouse it. Who then is able to stand against me? Who has a claim against me that I must pay? Everything under heaven belongs to me.
I will not fail to speak of Leviathan’s limbs, its strength and its graceful form. Who can strip off its outer coat? Who can penetrate its double coat of armor? Who dares open the doors of its mouth, ringed about with fearsome teeth? Its back has rows of shields tightly sealed together; each is so close to the next that no air can pass between. They are joined fast to one another; they cling together and cannot be parted. Its snorting throws out flashes of light; its eyes are like the rays of dawn. Flames stream from its mouth; sparks of fire shoot out. Smoke pours from its nostrils as from a boiling pot over burning reeds. Its breath sets coals ablaze, and flames dart from its mouth. Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. The folds of its flesh are tightly joined; they are firm and immovable. Its chest is hard as rock, hard as a lower millstone. When it rises up, the mighty are terrified; they retreat before its thrashing. The sword that reaches it has no effect, nor does the spear or the dart or the javelin. Iron it treats like straw and bronze like rotten wood. Arrows do not make it flee; slingstones are like chaff to it. A club seems to it but a piece of straw; it laughs at the rattling of the lance. Its undersides are jagged potsherds, leaving a trail in the mud like a threshing sledge. It makes the depths churn like a boiling caldron and stirs up the sea like a pot of ointment. It leaves a glistening wake behind it; one would think the deep had white hair. Nothing on earth is its equal—a creature without fear. It looks down on all that are haughty; it is king over all that are proud.”
It lives in the water? It has armor-like skin? It has big teeth? It has tightly-sealed scales on its back? It leaves a trail in the mud? Just the sight of it terrifies people? According to AIG, that could either be Sarcosuchus imperator or Liopleurodon.
On top of that, this creature could breathe fire. That's right; fire-breathing dragons are not fictitious. While Kent Hovind thinks that Leviathan was a T-rex (a position I disagree with), his seminar on Leviathan shows that fire-breathing dragons are not the products of science fiction.
The most important thing to remember is that the same Bible that teaches that the Earth and universe are roughly 6,000 years old (read Just How Old Is The Earth & Universe? and watch the video at the end of this post to see why the YEC position is true.) is the same Bible that I'm pulling these descriptions of dinosaurs from. This logically leads to the conclusion that dinosaurs and man lived together at the same time in the "recent" past. Is there any evidence suggesting that this is true?
Soft tissue in dinosaur bones shows that dinosaurs and man lived together in the recent past
Just
over 10 years ago, the scientific community and academic world received
a big shock when they found living tissue inside some dinosaur bones.
National Geographic wrote a story about it when it happened, and this is
how they opened the article:
"A Tyrannosaurus rex fossil has yielded what
appear to be the only preserved soft tissues ever recovered from a
dinosaur. Taken from a 70-million-year-old thighbone, the structures
look like the blood vessels, cells, and proteins involved in bone
formation.
Most fossils preserve an organism's hard tissues, such as shell or bone.
Finding preserved soft tissue is unheard of in a dinosaur-age specimen.
The findings may provide new insights into dinosaur evolution, physiology, and biochemistry. They could also increase our understanding of extinct life and change how scientists think about the fossilization process.
'Finding these tissues in dinosaurs changes the way we think about fossilization, because our theories of how fossils are preserved don't allow for this [soft-tissue preservation],' Schweitzer said."
Although the article would go on to talk about how this discovery would give new insights into evolution, their admission that there is no natural explanation for how the soft-tissue could survive for millions of years serves as strong evidence that dinosaurs and man lived together just a few thousand years ago. What happens if you try to say that in the academic world? This scientist and former teacher for California State University, Northridge found out the hard way a couple years ago:
"Attorneys for a California State University, Northridge scientist who was terminated from his job after discovering soft tissue on a triceratops fossil have filed a lawsuit against the university.
While at the Hell Creek Formation excavation site in Montana, researcher Mark Armitage discovered what he believed to be the largest triceratops horn ever unearthed at the site, according to attorney Brad Dacus of Pacific Justice Institute.
Upon examination of the horn under a high-powered microscope back at CSUN, Dacus says Armitage was 'fascinated' to find soft tissue on the sample – a discovery Bacus said stunned members of the school’s biology department and even some students 'because it indicates that dinosaurs roamed the earth only thousands of years in the past rather than going extinct 60 million years ago.'
'Since some creationists, like [Armitage], believe that the triceratops bones are only 4,000 years old at most, [Armitage’s] work vindicated his view that these dinosaurs roamed the planet relatively recently,' according to the complaint filed July 22 in Los Angeles Superior Court.
The lawsuit against the CSUN board of trustees cites discrimination for perceived religious views.
Armitage’s findings were eventually published in July 2013 in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
According to court documents, shortly after the original soft tissue discovery, a CSUN official told Armitage, 'We are not going to tolerate your religion in this department!'”
Since there was no natural explanation for how soft tissue could survive for millions of years, did that mean that the evolutionists wouldn't try to find some way to make it fit into the evolutionary paradigm? Fat chance.
The new evolutionist fairy tale
The very same Mary Schweitzer who found the original soft tissue in the T-rex fossil in 2005 has given us the new evolutionary fairy tale to explain this away. In a North Carolina State press release from the fall of 2013, we read the following:
"Mary Schweitzer, an NC State paleontologist with a joint appointment at the N. C. Museum of Natural Sciences, first announced the surprising preservation of soft tissues in a T. rex fossil in 2005. Her subsequent work identified proteins in the soft tissue that seemed to confirm that the tissue was indeed T. rex tissue that had been preserved for millions of years. But the findings remained controversial in part because no one understood the chemical processes behind such preservation.
Schweitzer’s latest research shows that the presence of hemoglobin – the iron-containing molecule that transports oxygen in red blood cells – may be the key to both preserving and concealing original ancient proteins within fossils. Her results appear in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
'Iron is necessary for survival, but it’s also highly reactive and destructive in living tissues, which is why our bodies have proteins that transport iron molecules to where they are needed but protect us from unwanted reactions at the same time,' Schweitzer says. 'When we die, that protective mechanism breaks down and the iron is turned loose on our tissues – and that destructive process can act in much the same way formaldehyde does to preserve the tissues and proteins.'”
The new evolutionary fairy tale, according to Schweitzer, is that iron provides the mechanism for soft tissues to be preserved for millions of years. That seems kind of odd considering the destructive nature of iron, but in the right situation, iron acts as a preservative.
What is the observational evidence that iron can preserve soft tissue for millions of years? The NC State press releases tells us the following:
"Schweitzer and her team noticed that iron particles are intimately associated with the soft tissues preserved in dinosaurs. But when they chelated – or removed the iron from – soft tissues taken from a T. rex and a Brachyolophosaurus, the chelated tissues reacted much more strongly to antibodies that detect the presence of protein, suggesting that the iron may be masking their presence in these preserved tissues. They then tested the preservation hypothesis by using blood vessels and cells taken from modern ostrich bone. They soaked some of these vessels in hemoglobin taken from red blood cells, while placing other vessels in water. Two years later, the hemoglobin-treated soft vessels remained intact, while those soaked in water degraded in less than a week.
'We know that iron is always present in large quantities when we find well-preserved fossils, and we have found original vascular tissues within the bones of these animals, which would be a very hemoglobin-rich environment after they died,' Schweitzer says. 'We also know that iron hinders just about every technique we have to detect proteins. So iron looks like it may be both the mechanism for preservation and the reason why we’ve had problems finding and analyzing proteins that are preserved.'”
So what we have here is a seemingly valid experiment where Schweitzer showed us that iron works as a preservation mechanism for up to two years. That's all well and good, but there is absolutely nothing in this experiment that proves that this mechanism of preservation can last for millions of years. It's one thing to see something be preserved for two years; it's a completely different matter to extrapolate that into saying that it could last for millions of years.
You see, the first step of the scientific method is that you have to observe the natural phenomenon in question happening in action. Once you've seen it happen in action, then you make your hypothesis, set up experiments to test your hypothesis, analyze the results, and come to a conclusion. The problem with the idea that iron can preserve soft tissue over millions of years is that NOBODY has ever witnessed it happen first-hand. There isn't one person who can say, "I was here millions of years ago when this was first buried, I can see that the soft tissue is still there after millions of years, and I know that iron is a preservative in a hemoglobin-rich environment, so therefore iron has preserved this soft tissue for millions of years." Such a person doesn't exist.
This isn't just true with dinosaur fossils; it applies to the entire theory of evolution. Nobody has ever seen one family of animals evolve into another; nobody has ever seen life come from non-life; nobody has ever seen a planet or star form; nobody has ever seen the origin of elements higher than hydrogen, and no human being has ever seen the origin of time, space, and matter.
In fact, as I have stated in Another Inconvenient Truth and in other places, evolution violates the Law of Entropy. The way evolution is taught today is that the entire physical universe and everything in it, when left to itself over time, will become more complex and ordered. According to the Law of Entropy, the physical universe and everything in it, when left to itself over time, will wear down, break down, and fall into disorder. Since the Law of Entropy is the most established law in all of science (the need for food, water, and sleep are the effect of the Law of Entropy on human beings), evolution simply cannot be true.
Conclusion
The sad thing about this whole ordeal is that when Schweitzer's NC State press release came out in 2013, all the major media outlets picked it up and tried to convince everyone that Schweitzer had proven how soft tissue could be preserved for millions of years. This was their sad attempt to convince people to keep believing in the lies of evolution and billions of years.
However, as I have shown by looking at Schweitzer's 2013 press release, she actually did not prove that soft tissues could be preserved for millions (and billions) of years, so the problem that was outlined in her original 2005 discovery still stands.
As Kent Hovind once said, one way to prove that the biblical worldview is true is to prove the impossibility of the alternative. Since there is no evidence that evolution is true or that iron can preserve soft tissue for millions/billions of years, the existence of dinosaurs fits nicely into the Biblical worldview and doesn't present any problems for followers of Jesus.
