Where are the dinosaurs mentioned in the Bible? How would you answer this question and what scriptures convey the truth about the matter? -- Athena Gonzalez

The fact is nowhere in the Bible are dinosaurs mentioned! Nor are quasars black holes, blue-green algae, or DNA. The Bible is a book focused on humans and our relationship with God. It does not focus on a million interesting facts of science and history. God has taught us much through history and through science -- where "natural revelation" speaks to all persons with the ears, instruments, and patience to listen. No, the Bible is given us for a specific purpose. It is not filled with details that might be unintelligible to hundreds of generations of readers!

Some persons mistakenly assume that the end of Job is speaking about some sort of dinosaur. Yet the crocodile -- here described poetically (non-literally) as a fire-breathing monster -- is not a dinosaur. No one I have spoken to takes the passage 100% literally -- in which case the creature must have breathed fire! Others reason that if land creatures and humans were both created on the sixth day -- taking this day literally -- then they must have co-existed (à la Flintstones). Geologically this is highly problematic.

Another still is that no humans in recorded history including biblical history ever described their encounters with dinosaurs! I think it is doubtful they lived at the same time and provisionally I accept the 65-67 million year buffer between dinosaur and human existence as the biologists have been teaching.

It is not essential after all to take the six creation days as literal and there are a number of reasons not to construe it this way. (For more on this see my book Genesis Science & History.) Dino-fever may never abate. It was all the rage in the mid-1800s, especially shortly after Darwin published his Origin. It was rampant when I was a little boy in the 1960s. My own children too succumbed to the mystery and the infatuation. (Sounds like maybe you have too!)

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