What About the Dinosaurs?

One of the things I have been asked to explain, as a person who believes that God created the heavens and the earth, is dinosaurs, the fossil record, all that time, etc. I believe that the Bible is true, the inspired Word of God - but it is not a legal document, nor a technical one. It isn't even literature, exactly - the universe is His literature - but I think the rules of literary criticism can apply to it. God is an artist and this is his artist's statement about himself and his work. I hadn't thought much about what the creation story says for a long time, but looking at it now, I find there is more room for dinosaurs than I ever thought.

I am not a Creationist, in that I have not made a religion out of believing in creation vs evolution. I do believe that verse one of Genesis is unequivocal, that God created the heavens and the earth. He did it, that's what counts for me, and the rest of the account is just details. Very interesting and poetic details. The more carefully you look at this passage, the more difficult it is to be dogmatic about how to interpret it. So I have always been vague about it in my own mind, accepting the vagueness of the language as being that way on purpose. On the other hand, I have never been able to accept the mechanism of evolution, even before I became a Christian. It has never seemed capable of producing the progression of changes evolution talks about, and the more time you give it, the less likely it is to produce any change at all. I could be wrong, but instead of progressive change, what I see in this world is an artistic repetition of idea, and a brilliant symphonic complexity. It is a work of artistic composition, but it has a performance aspect too.


At first glance, there is some confusion as to just what happened when, as the story seems to begin over at least once. Bear with me and I will try to sort this out in a way that fits at least somewhat with current scientific theory and makes better literary sense too.

One other issue right at the start is the matter of how long these "days" are. I always said to myself that in the absence of any reason to suppose otherwise, a day is a day. Evening and morning just like a day we have now. The problem with that is, how can a day have any meaning when He didn't create the sun and moon until the end of the fourth day? God must have had these things in his mind, but days and evenings and mornings as we know them simply did not exist until later. I think it's fair to allow that at least the first three "days" could have been time periods in which a varying amount of time could have passed, and while we're at it, I would like to suggest that time may have been passing more quickly in the beginning than it does now. This is not much of a stretch when you consider that the rate of the passage of time is more fluid than it appears, being related to local mass and the velocity of the observer; and if you equate the Big Bang with the moment that God said, "Let there be light", there is plenty of room for varying rates of the passage of time.

Okay, so let's go through the days of creation and see what is said about them:

• Day Zero: "In the Beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form and void..." I take this to mean He designed the heavens and the earth, but the earth at least had no substance, no context in which to exist. There seems to be, however, a "deep", an abyss, upon the surface of which was darkness, and there were "waters" of some kind, upon whose surface was the Spirit of God. This could describe the pre-Big-Bang emptiness. I think it could also be the start of eternity, the spirit-world outside of time now described as the throne of God.
• Day One: "Let there be light" v3. The universe kicks off, filled with unified energy. God sees that it's good, and then goes right on to distinguish the light from the darkness, v4, which fits with the idea that shortly after the Big Bang, like VERY shortly, the temperature goes down, entropy goes up, and photons become distinct from other energy. The first day was very short, as we would measure it now.
• Day Two: God makes a "firmament" in the midst of waters, and calls that place Heaven. This word could refer to a solid surface, hence the firmness in the translation, but it could also refer to the space it encloses. Both the New International and English Standard versions use the word "expanse" and I prefer that idea. There are those mysterious waters above it and below it. The waters above this space seem to be outside the physical universe, again a hint at what we call Eternity, the place where God has his throne, the spirit-world. Forgive me if I just move along; I admit that there is much about this day that I do not understand, and nothing much to indicate how long it lasted, if that has any meaning.
• Day Three: God gets the mysterious "waters" under Heaven collected and dry land simply "appears". Now, it isn't clear at all how long Day Two took, but it seems that a long time has passed in the physical universe because we go from photons to solid matter, dry land and seas. Not to be missed is the idea that the waters had to be collected into seas before the dry land "appeared". The Earth had been created but was without form and void, and now it springs forth into being. As an artist and an engineer, I know how important the design phase is. Sometimes it feels as if the thing is done when the design is worked out. Mozart used to work a piece out completely in his mind before ever taking pen to paper, and God's creation is very like music: it was composed and is now being performed. It has performance aspect to it. Anyway, God immediately goes on to create plants yielding seed after their kind. I think it's fair to say he created plant life and started the pattern of genetic reproduction. And that was enough for a day's work.

One important point to make here: the scripture says, not that God "made" the grass and herbs and fruit trees, but he did it by saying "Let the earth [or land] bring forth grass, herbs..." Now, I'm fond of saying "what God says, goes," meaning He has that power to make something simply by saying "Let this or that " and it is so; but in all fairness, the Genesis account sometimes uses the expression that He "made" something, and other times that He simply declared, let it be. In the case of this first life on earth, he specifically said let the earth bring them forth. And it did. Skipping the fourth day for a moment, I want to point out the same kind of expression is used on the fifth day when God commands the waters to bring forth abundantly "the moving creature" and birds to fly above the earth. The word refers to teeming, swarming, moving things. So the waters brought forth animals. Then in the next verse, we go back to the first verb used about this activity. He "created" great "whales" in the King James, but in fact the word in Hebrew refers to serpents. So I think it's fair to say that God specifically and deliberately created great serpent animals, along with the many sea animals and birds that the waters "brought forth abundantly". This, I think is a verse that allows not only the beginning of dinosaurs, but even allows for evolution, the earth and seas bring them forth. I still don't like evolution as a conceptual framework, but at this point I assert that the verses of Genesis have made room for it.


Now we have to go back to Day Four. Here the scripture is in great conflict with current scientific theory. God says "Let there be lights in the expanse of heaven...", which looks like that's when the stars appeared. I could suggest that they were there before and only now does their light reach the earth, but that is  twisting the scripture beyond what seems fair. After all, the Sun and Moon are also mentioned as "lights". So I'm stuck with conflict. I have to admit that the story has the stars called into being after the earth was made and even plants and sea animals were begun. This is completely impossible under current scientific theory, really a much bigger problem than dinosaurs, but that's where I end up. Who knows? Maybe as we learn more about Dark Matter and Energy, what Science says about the timing of things will change. Maybe there's another way to understand the scripture, but I sure don't see it right now.

Okay, well we're in enough trouble already, so I will close in saying that the second chapter of Genesis is not a re-telling of the whole thing, but starts with the creation of Adam. I will take this up in another post. The thing I have to say at this point is that there is room for some kind of evolution to have taken place, but that current understanding of how it played out is in great conflict with the account of creation in Genesis, no matter how much I try to make it fit. So I persist in not believing in Evolution. This gives me conflicts because I am a believer in the Scientific Method, and I also believe that the fossil record is being examined for the most part by people practicing good science; yet they continue to support the Evolutionary Mythos. I will be a fool for Christ's sake and await further developments.