Discipleship, Dinosaurs, Deception, and Disconnect

Because when the biblical narratives are brought to their logical conclusions, the accounts contained within naturally lead to obvious questions for young minds—questions that are almost never addressed by Sunday school teachers and youth leaders/pastors, even if they teach the Bible as plainly written. And these questions typically relate to the “real world” topics children deal with on a daily basis. An example?

How Does It All Fit Together?

Let’s say a child (Johnny) goes to a Sunday school class where the teacher that week is discussing how awesome God is, that he is the Lord of heaven and earth, and so we should be good stewards of the world because he created everything (including animals and man) in six days! [OK—Check]

Then another week, the teacher discusses the account of the great flood and how all of the land animals were sent to Noah by God and lived together for a year in this big floating zoo, etc. [Check]

Then another week, the teacher discusses how in the beginning there was a very good world where no bad things happened and that bad things are the result of the fall—where Adam disobeyed God—and the “wages of sin is death” and that someday God is going to remake the world, and there will be no bad things just like in the beginning! [Check]

Now, as all of this teaching continues and the related concepts keep piling up along the way, Johnny will attempt to harmonize all of this information into a cohesive framework in which to understand the world.

What About Dinosaurs?

However, Johnny has lots of other information rolling around in his noggin as well. Ideas he’s collected along the way (usually from outside of church life: from the school he goes to, the books he’s reading, the TV shows he’s watching, etc.) that he’ll need to incorporate and figure out. Ideas to do with topics like dinosaurs!

You see, like most kids, Johnny really likes dinosaurs (has toys and dinosaur books, watches cartoons about them, and plays games with them featured), and he wants to know how dinosaurs would logically integrate with all of these Bible stories (and related concepts and ideas) he’s been taught.

A young mind might naturally ask: If God created man and land animals on day six of creation, did man and dinosaurs live together? Why doesn’t the Bible mention dinosaurs? Many dinosaurs were huge, so how did dinosaurs fit into Noah’s ark? Why are there no dinosaurs alive now? All good questions.

Conflict with the World

However, not only are there natural questions regarding dinosaurs that might arise while listening and learning the Bible, but Johnny’s store of knowledge often includes information that he’s accepted as truth that is in direct opposition to what the Bible teaches.

Mom and Dad told him that he needed to listen to his teachers so he could get good grades, and he did. He accepted what they said was true—just like he accepted what his Sunday school teachers told him was true. The problem is they disagree. The information from the two authority figures he was told to listen to doesn’t line up at all!

Why? Well, according to the information typically taught in school textbooks, TV shows, and museums, dinosaurs lived and died out 65 million years ago. [Check] Dinosaurs evolved into birds. [Check] And human beings and dinosaurs did not coexist. [Check]

However, if dinosaurs evolved into birds, then the story of evolution is true, so the Bible can’t be taken as plainly written where it says God created everything from nothing. If Adam’s disobedience was what brought sin, death, and corruption into the world, how could dinosaurs have been dying millions of years before Adam ever existed? And if science has proven evolution, why should we believe in God as Creator when it’s been proven everything creates itself? [Tilt]

And now what Johnny is dealing with at a very young age is a major cognitive dissonance. There is an obvious conflict between what he believes the world of science is teaching about dinosaurs and what the Bible states.

A Clash of Worldviews

The question becomes: Which authority is correct? What many young people feel is this: On one hand there’s a bunch of “nice people” telling somewhat disconnected Bible stories, and on the other is a cohesive, consistent, and supposedly scientific explanation presented alongside “facts” like fossils and rocks regarding dinosaurs that contradicts those stories. Which should be believed?

This is just one example of why research has shown that 7 out of 10 young people from Christian homes that attend state-run school systems believe by age 13 that there are major conflicts between science and the Bible—with the majority ending up rejecting the faith of their parents because of it.1

Never Too Young

Many Christians underestimate the amount of information their children are absorbing at very young ages. And because logic is hardwired into every one of us, it is dangerous to believe that we can simply ignore worldview conflicts until later ages.

A perfect example comes from the atheist historian Tom Holland who revealed how he recognized the logical disconnect of what he’d been taught about dinosaurs from what he learned in Sunday school even as a young child.

When I was a boy, my upbringing as a Christian was forever being weathered by the gale force of my enthusiasms. First, there were dinosaurs. I vividly remember my shock when, at Sunday school one day, I opened a children’s Bible and found an illustration on its first page of Adam and Eve with a brachiosaur. Six years old I may have been, but of one thing—to my regret—I was rock-solid certain: no human being had ever seen a sauropod. That the teacher seemed not to care about this error only compounded my sense of outrage and bewilderment. A faint shadow of doubt, for the first time, had been brought to darken my Christian faith.2

Do you see how clearly he was able to articulate it? By age six, he was “rock-solid certain” no human being had ever seen a dinosaur. Most kids of that age aren’t “rock solid certain” of whether they want Rice Krispies or Cocoa Puffs for breakfast, and yet he knew with certainty that people and dinosaurs “had never coexisted!” One has to ask: Where could that certainty have come from at such an early age?

One would have to assume that whatever information he had absorbed regarding dinosaurs was so fascinating and authoritative sounding in his mind that he was able to quite easily reject the biblical teaching that God created land animals and people at the same time as just a simple story, and the seed of doubt against biblical authority was firmly implanted from very early on.

Christians Aren’t the Only “Fishers of Men”

Parents need to understand that we are in a very real spiritual battle with an enemy bent on capturing the minds of the next generation. When we profess the Lordship of Christ to our children, we must do so in every area of life—whether discussing philosophy, science, or Sunday school—and show them how what we see in God’s world (like fossils, rocks, and animals) can be explained logically by what we see in God’s Word.

We need to understand that Christians aren’t the only “fishers of men,” and that topics like dinosaurs are often used by secularists to sway young minds toward an evolutionary, atheistic understanding of the world. Atheists understand how powerful, engaging topics like dinosaurs can be used to promote their worldview and often use it to their advantage.

As an example, a blogger writing for The Meaning Without God Project confessed,

Dinosaurs were my gateway drug to Atheism. And while I was still six or seven years away from reaching the conclusion that God either didn’t care about us or didn’t exist, the Dinosaurs had shared an important secret with me - that the Bible can be wrong.3

Use It or Lose It

However, parents can also use topics like dinosaurs and fossils to build up the faith of their children by showing that the evolutionary explanations for those topics simply don’t hold up.

For example, children’s books about fossils almost always refer to fossils having been formed slowly over thousands of years, and yet leading evolutionists such as dinosaur expert Dr. Phil Currie has stated,

Fossilization is a process that can take anything from a few hours to millions of years. . . .  The amount of time that it takes for a bone to become completely permineralized is highly variable. If the groundwater is heavily laden with minerals in solution, the process can happen rapidly.4

It is an easy thing to use such admissions from evolutionists to teach young people critical thinking skills.

For example, if fossilization has been observed to happen quickly (within hours) why would someone believe it sometimes takes millions of (unobserved) years? Biblical creationists have a far better explanation for the majority of the fossil record. Namely, the worldwide deluge recorded in Genesis 6–9.

What better explanation could one have for the billions of mixed-up dead creatures buried within sedimentary (water-borne) layers we observe worldwide? A worldwide flood that would have stirred up massive amounts of minerals in sediments and buried creatures rapidly makes sense of the physical evidence.

And the fact that many dinosaur bones not only contain un-fossilized soft tissue, but that some aren’t actually fossilized is clear evidence these remains have not lasted for millions of years. As Dr. Currie went on to say,

A more spectacular example was found on the North Slope of Alaska, where many thousands of bones lack any significant degree of permineralization. The bones look and feel like old cow bones, and the discoverers of the site did not report it for twenty years because they assumed they were bison, not dinosaur, bones.5

Just Don’t Look!

Some parents, knowing that topics like dinosaurs can be used to sway young minds toward an evolutionary worldview, think that the best approach is to simply avoid the topic or teaching about them whatsoever.

But a far better approach is to get equipped and expose children to the fallacies of the story of evolution by facing them head-on and analyzing the obvious discrepancies in their materialistic explanations. Teach your children to recognize the presuppositions often contained within the evolutionary explanation, such as this comment by Dr. Ralph Molnar, a paleontologist for the Queensland Museum discussing a creature called Megalania which supposedly died millions of years ago.

Now this specimen actually looks like it had come from an animal that looks like it died two or three hundred years ago. All dry, chalky, this sort of thing. Doesn’t actually mean it died two or three hundred years ago. In Montana, I’ve seen dinosaur bones that look like they’ve come from animals that died two or three hundred years ago, I know very well that they died much longer than that. It gives the suggestion that Megalania may have been alive fairly recently.6

So, again, one could use this to help young people think through the subject by asking: Is Dr. Molnar’s belief that the creature died millions of years ago based simply on “the facts” right in front of his eyes? No. Such admissions reveal he has a pre-belief, an ideological commitment to the evolutionary interpretation of facts despite what the specimen looks like, not because of it!

So belief in evolution is not simply because of “science” the way most people think of it.

Dragons of Old

Another great proof for the historicity of the Bible (its young earth timeframe and the logical conclusion that dinosaurs and people did in fact coexist in history) that you might discuss with young people is the sheer number of dragon legends that people groups from around the world have.

These are, in fact, so common that evolutionists cannot dismiss them easily and also so problematic that no other than the renowned atheistic evolutionist Carl Sagan actually attempted to explain them away in a book titled Dragons of Eden.

Sagan recognized that the descriptions of the creatures in dragon legends are remarkably similar to dinosaurs, and he admitted that the similarities were probably no accident, saying,

The pervasiveness of dragon myths in the folk legends of many cultures is probably no accident. . . .  It is a worldwide phenomenon.7

What’s so interesting in his quote is that Sagan connects dragons to dinosaurs in the same sentence and uses the terms interchangeably, intimating that whatever these creatures were, they were the same thing. And what was his explanation of why humans from all over the world claimed to have seen these huge reptilian beasts in the past?

The R-complex is functioning in the dreams of humans; the dragons can be heard, hissing and rasping, and the dinosaurs thunder still.8

Sagan’s explanation (what he referred to as the “R-complex”) was, to be honest, absolutely absurd. He basically concluded that humans inherited the memories of seeing dinosaurs in the past from our far earlier, more primitive evolutionary ancestors.

Apparently (according to Sagan’s theory), these non-human ancestors of ours were so impressed with the image of those creatures that the memory of them was somehow imprinted into our DNA and passed on, and those inherited memories are where the dragon legends come from.

Try convincing your local biology professor that the idea of inheriting memories of events seen by supposed millions of years old creatures is scientifically viable. You are likely to be taken about as seriously as a local fortune teller.

Dragons = Dinosaurs

Evolutionists still don’t have a good answer as to why people groups all over the world have stories regarding creatures that have descriptions like dinosaurs. Even the 1973 World Book Encyclopedia contained this entry under “dragons.”

The Dragons of legend are strangely like actual creatures that have lived in the past. They are much like the great reptiles [dinosaurs], which inhabited the Earth long before man is supposed to have appeared on Earth.9

However, they have a very specific reason to mock it when creationists bring it up, which is a good way to teach young people about interpretive bias.

For someone wondering why the association between dinosaurs and dragon legends is often played down by the evolutionary community, I don’t think anyone could have explained why or made the point better than Bible-skeptic Louis Jacobs, author and former president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, did when discussing the matter in his book Quest for the African Dinosaurs.

Such an association would dispel an Earth with vast antiquity. The entire history of creation, including the day of rest, could be accommodated in the seven biblical days of the Genesis myth. Evolution would be vanquished.10

Eye-Opening Artifacts

Indeed, Jacob’s comment is the perfect summation—if humans saw dinosaurs (and they did), evolution is dead in the scummy water it was supposed to have spawned from. And the plethora of dinosaur depictions (demonstrating people did observe these creatures) found on tapestries, carvings, and engravings around the world is the kill shot for their naturalistic worldview.

Indeed, just three such unique finds depicting sauropods clearly demonstrate humans witnessed live dinosaurs. How so?

Well, (1) one of the oldest Mesopotamian cylinder seals (cylinder-shaped seals rolled on clay to embed images),11 (2) an engraving on Richard Bell’s tomb (Bishop of Carlisle, buried in Carlisle Cathedral, U.K.), and (3) the Narmer Palette (a vase from the 1st Dynasty Egypt and estimated to be from 3100–2890 BC) all have creatures that the average child would readily recognize as looking similar to sauropod (all having long necks and tails) dinosaurs.

However, and most fascinatingly, they also all show them with their long necks entwined.

Each of these artifacts are separated in time by hundreds of years and geographically by hundreds of miles from where each was created by three separate and distinct people groups living at different times in history. And yet, all three groups depicted these long-necked, long-tailed creatures (unlike any living animal today) in the same pose, as if performing the same activity (like giraffes “necking”)!

This is indeed strong evidence that people observed these creatures through time! And there have been many more depictions of dinosaurs of all kinds12 found that support the idea that what people used to generically call dragons were in fact the same as what are referred to today as dinosaurs.

Flood Fossils

And of course, the fossil record continues to show more and more support for the idea there was a global flood and that dinosaurs coexisted and were buried with all types of animals including beavers13, ducks14, and platypuses15 (all of which was unheard of when I was growing up and reading books on dinosaurs and fossils).

Many people believe dinosaur and mammal (representative of those living today) remains are separated by millions of years of time in the fossil record. And yet as modern evolutionist Dr. Donald Burge admitted in an interview (recorded in Dr. Carl Werner’s book Living Fossils),

We find mammals in almost all of our [dinosaur dig] sites. These were not noticed years ago. . . .  We have about 20,000 pounds of bentonite clay that has mammal fossils that we are trying to give away to some researcher. It’s not that they are not important, it’s just that you only live once and I specialized in something other than mammals. I specialize in reptiles and dinosaurs.16

As I mentioned, I can remember reading books about dinosaurs as a child that considered the idea of dinosaurs and mammals coexisting a ridiculous notion, and yet as time went on the evidence continued to pile up to the point where today evolutionists are admitting the following.

In a sense, ‘The Age of Dinosaurs’ . . .  is a misnomer. . . .  Mammals are just one such important group that lived with the dinosaurs, coexisted with the dinosaurs, and survived the dinosaurs.17

Why Aren’t We Equipping Them?

With all of this information (and so much more) that supports biblical creation, why is the church not able to equip our young people to understand topics like dinosaurs from a wholly biblical point of view? And it’s not just the topic of dinosaurs. Why hasn’t the church been able to help our young people defend the Bible from the very first verse in all areas?

In my experience, it is because parents and church workers themselves are unaware of the evidence/arguments and so are unequipped to teach it. And even worse, others have adopted evolutionary ideas into their thinking and don’t understand how damaging that is to the biblical worldview and so add to the confusion these young minds are already dealing with.

Indeed, telling young people to trust in the historical account of Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection while at the same time communicating to them that Genesis 1–11 (which Jesus quoted many times as real history) is just analogous to the story of evolution (theistic evolution—the idea that God used evolution to “create”) is not at all helpful to a mind looking for cognitive consistency. As Bible defender William Jennings Bryan once said,

Theistic evolution may be described as an anesthetic administered to young Christians to deaden the pain while their religion is being removed by the materialists.18

Bible Stories? Or Biblical History?

It is time for those responsible for teaching the next generation (the church of the future)—whether parents, Sunday school teachers, youth pastors, or church leaders—to realize you can either teach children simple stories or teach the Bible as the true history of the world with accompanying apologetics to support it as such. (A great way to implement that in your church is with AiG’s comprehensive Answers Bible Curriculum!)

“We have to remember not only to teach the history contained within the Bible but also, in a world of disbelief and rejection, how to defend it.”19 Whether at Sunday school, youth group, or during devotions at home, the question is really: “Did we tell them a nice story, or did we teach it [Scripture] as history and attempt to answer relevant questions at the same time” that the world may be asking?20

Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. (John 17:17)