Dinosaurs, Fossils, and the Bible
Where do the fossils of dinosaurs and other extinct animals fit into the Bible record?
This might be reasonable if we somehow knew (by divine revelation, perhaps) that evolution were really true. But, as a matter of fact, the only real evidence for evolution is this same fossil record! And this is where we came in!
The zeal with which this evolutionary circle of reasoning is guarded is seen clearly in the approach taken with respect to its problems and contradictions. When radioactive mineral age determinations conflict with the paleontology dating (as they frequently do), they are abandoned as having been somehow altered since deposition. When, in a given location, a formation of a certain age rests conformably and naturally on a formation of a much earlier age, with all the intervening ages omitted (and this kind of thing is found almost everywhere), then it is assumed that these missing ages were ages of uplift and erosion rather than deposition, even if no evidence of this exists. When fossils from different “ages” are found together in the same formation (as does happen with some frequency), then it is assumed that earlier deposits have been “re-worked” and mixed together. And when (as very often is the case) formations with “ancient” fossils are found lying conformably on top of formations with “recent” fossils, then great earth movements and “overthrusts” must be invoked to get the column out of its proper evolutionary order, even though in many cases there is no evidence of such movements and even though there is no adequate physical mechanism which could produce them!
There thus appear to be sound reasons for questioning the orthodox evolutionary interpretation of the fossil record and its uniformitarian framework of earth history. Furthermore, there does exist a legitimate alternative explanation. 8-4
It is significant that fossils, especially of large animals such as the dinosaur, must be buried quickly or they will not be preserved at all. Furthermore, the sediments entrapping them must harden into stone fairly quickly, inhibiting the action of air, bacteria, etc., or else they will soon be decomposed and disappear. The very nature of fossilization thus seems to require catastrophism. Most certainly must this be true of the great dinosaur beds, the massive fish-bearing shale’s, the tremendous deposits of elephants and other animals in the arctic regions, and the great numbers of other “fossil graveyards” with which the geologic column abounds.
According to the Bible, death did not even “enter the world” until after Adam’s sin (Romans 5:12). And the fossil record, more than anything else, is a record of death—in fact, of sudden death—and on a worldwide scale!
At the end of the creation period (Genesis 1:31), God pronounced everything in the whole universe “very good.” Thus the struggling, groaning creation (Romans 8:22) everywhere evident in the fossil record must be dated Biblically as occurring after man’s sin and God’s curse on man’s dominion (Genesis 3:15). And this can only mean that most of the sedimentary rocks of the earth’s crust, with their fossils, were laid down during the awful year of the great Flood, when “every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground” (Genesis 7:23).
This must have included the dinosaurs and all other terrestrial , except those preserved in Noah’s ark. Evidence is available (in the form of human and dinosaur footprints in the same formation, of dinosaur pictographs left by primitive tribes in Africa and North America, and of the universally prevalent traditions of dragons among ancient peoples) that dinosaurs lived contemporaneously with early man. The geologic column, rightly interpreted, therefore, does not tell of a long, gradual evolution of life over the geologic ages, but rather its polar opposite—the rapid extinction of life as a result of God’s judgment on the antediluvians when “the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished” (2 Peter 3:6).
The Bible has the Answers
By Henry Morris
