I recently watched the latest movie in the Jurassic Park franchise: Jurassic World Dominion. I enjoy these movies for the great cinematic experience, suspending reality therein to vicariously walk with, run away from and occasionally fight off dinosaurs, and to see them battle it out with each other.
In these movies, we learn a few catchphrases and beliefs, such as, “Life finds a way,” and “65 million years in the making.” In Jurassic Park, the lead character Ian Malcolm says, “God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs.”
Jurassic Park belongs to the category of fiction, of course. But many who watch them probably have prior conditioning or otherwise are conditioned by the movies to believe there was a prehistoric world, a time before man, when dinosaurs and other extinct creatures roamed and ruled the earth.
Did a prehistoric world exist? When did life begin? Are human beings a species of apes that evolved from other species? These are fascinating questions to which we might want clearcut answers. Popular science provides some answers: The universe started with a Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, life on earth began 3.7 billion years ago, and homo sapiens (human beings) began about 300 thousand years ago.
These answers might satisfy some, but they don’t everybody. The question to these answers is: How true are they? It is probably fair to say that they represent intelligent deduction or induction by thinkers who take an interest in the subjects.
Deductive reasoning begins with an idea and ends with a conclusion formed by observations that support the idea. Inductive reasoning begins with observations and ends with theory based on analyses of the observations. Both are ways to try to figure things out.
Do the popular science beliefs allow room for a belief in God? Dr Malcolm seems to have been able to square them off in Jurassic Park by saying that God create(d) dinosaurs. (I loved the reply by Dr Ellie Satler to that: “Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth.”)
Can deduction and induction be applied to belief in God? That is, can we start with an idea that God exists and then form conclusions based on observations that support (or don’t) the idea? Or begin with observations and be informed by such observations?
In the Bible, it is said: “[W]hat may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” (Romans 1:19–20)
The Bible tells us that we are God’s creation — along with the rest of all there is in the cosmos, in the universe, and beyond. It tells us what is “beyond” — there is a world which for lack of a better expression we can call ‘spiritual’, inhabited by creatures which are totally other-worldly to us: they include cherubim, seraphim, angels, powers, principalities and princes of the air. Some are good, some are bad. The bad ones are opposed to God and his creation , including humankind.
The Bible tells us that there is Creator who had no beginning and has no end. He is omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient. He has existed from eternity past, and he shall be for all eternity. His power is infinite, restrained only by his own will. All of creation is subject to his infinite power, and he knows all that happens, has happened and will happen. He is called God. And he is good.
The Bible tells us that we can know God, through Jesus Christ: “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.” (John 1:18).
The Bible testifies concerning Jesus and creation: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.” (John 1:1–4).
Did Jesus create dinosaurs? The Bible tells us that through him all things were made, and so if dinosaurs did exist, they would have been made by God through Jesus.
Reflecting on creation, the biblical psalmist writes (in Psalm 104:24–29):
24How many are your works, Lord! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.
25There is the sea, vast and spacious, teeming with creatures beyond number — living things both large and small.
26There the ships go to and fro, and Leviathan, which you formed to frolic there.
27All creatures look to you to give them their food at the proper time.
28When you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things.
29When you hide your face, they are terrified; when you take away their breath, they die and return to the dust.
The Bible tells us that God made man in his image: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:27).
The Bible tells us a little about how God made the first man: “Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” (Genesis 2:7). The Bible then tells us about how God made the first woman: “Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.” (Genesis 2:22).
The first human persons were not born of apes, but they, both male and female, were delicately fashioned by their Creator in the image of God.
There is no record in the Bible that humankind ever faced dinosaurs. Popular science tells us that dinosaurs roamed the earth millions of years before humans appeared. Did God create dinosaurs, destroy them, and later create man? The Bible does not tell us that.
One important observation from the Bible is that when God made the earth, he made it seemingly mature. The living creatures and the vegetation that God originally created did not begin life as babies or seedlings, but were grown and ready to reproduce after their own kind. This was true of Adam and Eve too, who did not begin life as infants.
The inanimate things found on earth had the appearance of age too. Earth had sand, rocks, minerals and metals from creation. The Bible says there was gold from the beginning: “A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold.” (Genesis 2:10–11)
Could the young earth have had fossils too? If the fossils discovered today are not ‘new’, then it is only plausible that fossils would have been present at the beginning of recorded history. What would Adam and Eve have thought about fossils if they came across them, one wonders.
It is unlikely that any chancing upon fossils would have perplexed them. They were after all living on an earth that had been prepared in advance for them, populated with seed-bearing plants and fruit-bearing trees for their enjoyment and nourishment, and teaming with wildlife of every variety. They also saw ‘other-worldly’ creatures, amongst them Satan (who appeared to them as a talking serpent) and cherubim. And they saw God.
It is an assumption that dinosaur fossils evidence that dinosaurs lived on the earth once upon a time. That is not an unreasonable assumption. Humanity however has no eyewitness account for the existence of these supposed prehistoric creatures.
Dinosaurs are recreated today in print and media, according to guesses of how they must have looked like. We fill in the blanks of what incomplete fossil records do not provide us information on: e.g. their skin texture and colour, their level of intelligence, whether they had gender and many more. Our depictions of these beasts include a lot of creative imagination.
So then, did dinosaurs exist? The logical answer to this surely must be that if God had created them, they did. There is no account of dinosaurs in scripture, but the all-encompassing testimony of scripture concerning creation tells us that all that have existed were created by Jesus Christ: “For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (Colossians 1:16–17).
Why is there no account of dinosaurs in the Bible, one might ask. My answer to this is that the Bible was given to us primarily as an account of God’s redemptive history for humankind. The scriptures were written to show us the way of salvation — by believing in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of our sins, accepting his death on the cross as God’s substitutionary atonement for our sins.
One thing we can be quite sure of concerning dinosaurs: They did not interact with humankind. For this reason, there is little reason if any for the biblical account to mention dinosaurs. (The Bible makes no reference to cockroaches too. The non-mention of cockroaches in the Bible, although we know these pests exist, does not make us question why they are not in scripture.)
If the Bible is God’s scriptures for our instruction, then it needs to be taken seriously. If one would believe in a past presence of dinosaurs based on fossils, it would be logical for one to also believe in the existence of God based on the testimony of scripture. We would say the latter is of much greater importance, as it comes with promise. The promise is this: “And this is what he promised us — eternal life.” (1 John 2:25)
In Jurassic World Dominion, the villain is an organisation named Biosyn, a genetics company that wishes to experiment with dinosaurs for nefarious ends. Biosyn bears uncanny resemblance to the name of a real-world organisation, BioLogos.
BioLogos was founded by Dr Francis Collins, leader of the Human Genome Project that had mapped out the sequences of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA. As of the time of this article’s writing, Dr Collins serves the Joe Biden administration as acting Science Advisor to the President. Dr Collins believes the Bible, and the Biologos organisation states its mission thus: “BioLogos explores God’s Word and God’s World to inspire authentic faith for today. Our vision is faith and science working hand in hand.”
So, dear reader, it is submitted to you that one can absolutely believe in God and in science at the same time. There may be some popular science theories today that might in time be shown to be science fiction (it is said that science is tentative, and for science to be science, it has to remain open to learning and self-correction).
The Bible however is sure, and speaks of a faith delivered once and for all and entrusted to God’s people (Jude 1:3). It tells us that God does not change like shifting shadows (James 1:17), and that all Scripture (referring to itself) is God-breathed and useful for doctrine (2 Timothy 3:16). The Bible is authoritative and certain, serving as the rule of faith and conduct.
Back to Jurassic Park lore and its most famous quote, “Life finds a way,” the truth is that life on earth is not permanent, and that humanity needs to lay hold of the promise of eternal life. This promise is held out to us by Jesus, who says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).
Now, how’s that for an assurance that we shall not become extinct? But we must choose between the available options of perishing and eternal life. My preference is for eternal life. How about you?