Where Do Dinosaurs Fit Into Evolutionary Creationism?

@J.E.S

I wonder if you are missing my point:

We don’t find ANY of these things…not even close. It tells us the world is not young, and that the best explanation for what we find is evolution (guided by God) over millions of years.

@gbrooks9
The Ica stones are only the tip of the ice berg (or ice core, you might prefer) when it comes to dinosaurs and humans coexisting. I was tempted to put together a collage of Ica Stones too, but I figured that you could pretty easily find one on the internet… (:wink:)

I found some Ica stones in my backyard recently too.

But in all honesty, how do we evaluate these claims? How about we establish some basics here like:

Good news is you’re not alone as 41% in one poll agreed that we probably or definitely lived with dinosaurs:

Some nice words of wisdom I’ve learned more about the dragon dinosaur link:

Not that I am endorsing such a Curmudgeon or that you will care what he has to say… but I think that the case for humans and dinosaurs is extremely weak… as in 0% type of weak. Everyone loves dinosaurs but in arguing for your scientific idea, a lot more must go into it than claiming some very questionable stones are absolute proof of your claim.

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@pevaquark

As I explained to @gbrooks9, the Ica stones are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to dinosaurs and humans coexisting…

I would love to see the rest of the iceberg. I would like to see at least the same level of evidence that we have for the co-existence of humans and the woolly mammoth.

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I think you mean tip of the pyramid –

If you don’t read anything I post at least read the advice for creationists post above. The guy is literally begging people like yourself to read it so you can better debate your scientific ideas. In other words, the irrefutable evidence of the magic stones is highly dubious and ought to be rejected as a legitimate data point to be considered. And as many, including myself have suggested, even if the stones are legitimate there are lots of other explanations that fit with other lines of evidence (like all of geology, straiagraphy, radiometric dating that’s based on the weak nuclear force- https://ageofrocks.org/2014/09/15/andrew-snelling-proves-the-accuracy-of-radiometric-dating-in-one-graphic/, etc.)

Also, this is not a very good pyramid if the top is questionable to non-existent

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What do you mean “little to do with science”? The “accepted paradigm of history” is based on mathematics and measurement. It’s as simple as that. This is something that YECs seem to fail to grasp over and over and over again. Seriously, all this talk about “not fitting well enough into the accepted paradigm of history” is just cluelessness as to how science actually works.

And it is a matter of quality control. You need to have quality control in science, otherwise you could come up with any old nonsense, such as the Four Blood Moons being evidence for a young earth, because treknobabble.

@J.E.S, can you please tell me exactly what kind of quality control the “evidence” from Ica stones is being subjected to?

The most accurate figure available today is 66,038,000 ± 11,000 years ago. This is called “increasing accuracy from improved measurements.” Again, calling it “the ever-changing views of science” is just cluelessness.

Sorry if I’m starting to sound snarky here, but these are the very basics that you should know before you even start to discuss anything to do with creation and evolution. You need to realise that clueless and demonstrably wrong arguments do not honour God and they do not uphold the Bible. On the contrary, they undermine it and do nothing but sow confusion among Christians while putting non-Christians off entirely. Basically, they are anti-witnessing.

@J.E.S

If there is a dinosaur drawn in a stone…it is a fake.

You wrote: “However, some scientists continue to dispute the role of the Chicxulub impact in driving the extinction, and to suggest that other events may have contributed to the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. In particular, volcanic eruptions, climate change, sea level change, and other impact events have been suggested to play a role in driving the K–Pg extinction…”

Of course, volcanic eruptions, rising sea levels, climate change, could all be the result of a massive meteor impact. It does not necessarily supplant the meteor theory. A 65-million year impact is pretty well established. Fr example, cf. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/147978-finally-confirmed-an-asteroid-wiped-out-the-dinosaurs

Why are you ascribing the contents of the Wikipedia article to me? I only linked to it, I didn’t write it.

I didn’t say that it did. I said, “there are some scientists who believe that it wasn’t solely responsible.” There’s a difference betweeen “not solely responsible” and “not responsible at all.”

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Yes, it would be an interesting test.

No, it wouldn’t be useful in terms of determining the merits of Ica stones as historical evidence of human-dinosaur interaction. The fact that some people are “un-invested” in some topic doesn’t make them expert or in any way make their determinations insightful. What if we chose some “random un-invested” people to examine a group of sick people to determine the appropriate medical treatment? Wouldn’t it be wiser to choose some non-random, trained people known as physicians to evaluate the medical needs of sick people?

I’m curious what you think of my posts concerning burden of proof. Do we start from a position of assuming the Ica stones ancient and legitimate historical records of past events? In science and studies of history, what do we expect in terms of standards of evidence before a new hypothesis is accepted, especially a radical, very bold claim?

I hope all readers appreciate the tongue-in-cheek nature of that one while also noticing its serious side. (I certainly enjoyed it and loved the imaginative “photo”!) Interesting tangent: Only a tiny tiny percentage of all animal species are suited for domestication. (And all of those are either mammalian or avian species.) Indeed, access to species suited for domestication has been a huge factor in determining which societies were able to develop the kinds of communications and transportation “infrastructures” which enable the development of important technologies and strong economies. This also has huge implications for legal systems, beneficial governmental structures, property ownership, and much of what we would generally call “progress”. I hope the scholarship of Jared Diamond is being taught in high schools. And Christ-followers should see within that scholarship important reasons for abandoning racist notions about some people groups being “superior” to others. European societies had tremendous advantages due to access to lots of domesticated animal species. The evolution of lactase-persistence provided lots of protein and bringing livestock into the homes overnight brought zoonoses which led to advantageous immune systems which helped prepare Europeans for world exploration. Contrast all of this with most African societies which had far fewer animals well suited for domestication. (For example, zebras don’t make great alternatives to horses.)

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A more accurate statement is, “as opposed to theology, which is based upon [interpretations of] the unchanging word of God…”

  1. The reason theology exists is to interpret Scripture. Thus, all of theology is an interpretation of Scripture. Theology is almost never merely a repetition of Scripture but is always an interpretation thereof.

  2. The purpose of an Apparatus, ie. a redactic instrument, is precisely to find the most accurate rendering of the original text. An Apparatus offers textual variants of the available NT documents. These variants were observed by Origen in the 3rd century already. These textual variants covers several million pages of manuscripts, and the most recent estimate puts the number of non-spelling variants among New Testament manuscripts around 500,000.

So the actual text of the New Testament is not as clear cut (fixed) as may seem to a modern English reader. The implication is that the text itself is an interpretation that takes place in the process of compilation. So a visual scrutiny of a Greek-language New Testament, like a Nestle-Aland-Aland text, will reveal these variations. There’s no way one can make a claim, in view of 500,000 variants, that the text is “unchanging” - since even if an apostrophe changes, it ceases to be unchanging, irrespective of the impact of the change.

  1. Theology, like any human endeavour is constantly changing. There is no theological doctrine that has not evolved over time, be it, Jesus, soteriology, eschatology, etc. In fact, the NT exists to interpret the Gospel, and most certainly many if not most Pauline canonical letters precede the composing of the canonical gospels. The point is that the NT itself is an interpretation of Jesus. The first seven Ecumenical Councils of the Church, from the Acts Council of Jerusalem to the 9th Century, dealt with changing interpretations of the doctrine. Evolving doctrine is so fundamental to the Faith that it is absurd to claim that any of it is “unchanging”. Even a cursory knowledge of theology reveals that the placement or insertion of a single apostrophe in homoousios led to an epic debate about its implications for the doctrine of the Person of Christ.

  2. Most theologians are satisfied that John 1:1 holds that Jesus is the Word of God ie. the Logos, is a Person rather than a book. Thus it is the Person of Christ that takes the Capitalisation, “Word”. Internally, in both OT and NT, the book or voice is referred to simply as “word”. It is ONLY in John 1:1 that the Capitalisation “Word” is used, and it is used specifically of the Person of Christ.

I think one can see that the single sentence you proffered is extremely problematic for the reasons set out above.
a. All theology is evolving - and has been for 2000 years.
b. “Unchanging” is not a term one can impute to either theology or the bible.
c. Capitalisation is only used internally in the Bible to refer to Christ; never to the Bible.

I thank you.

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I consider it an important topic because that “just another example of the ever-changing views of science (as opposed to theology, which is based on the unchanging Word Of God” popular mantra is one of the weakest, illogical arguments any Christ-follower can make. It makes no sense.

(1) The “ever-changing” nature of science is among its greatest strengths! Good science is always ready to revise conclusions based upon new evidence. That’s why we can trust it.

(2) While the scriptures are unchanging, our interpretations of the Bible most certainly change over time. The best Biblical scholars are willing to change their interpretations of scripture as new evidence emerges, such as the publication of exegetical insights and the kinds of new linguistic evidence brought with discoveries like the Oxyrhynchus Papyri and the Qumran material (e.g. the Dead Sea Scrolls.)

Therefore, I’m always disappointed when someone tries to represent science as somehow inferior to theology, Indeed, Science is based upon a study of God’s very good creation, and that creation is a valuable revelation from God just as the Bible is a valuable revelation from God. Both revelations tell us what God has done in the past. Truly, God’s Book of Nature (aka Science) is a way in which God teaches us just as God’s Book of Scripture is a way in which God teaches us. Jonathan, can we all agree on that?

I was especially surprised that you seemed to imply that a 66 million years ago dinosaur extinction versus the prior 65 million years ago figure represented some sort of inferiority of science scholarship versus theological scholarship. Do you agree that Biblical theology has seen enormous changes/revisions—as well as enormous disagreements between theologians—since the Reformation? God is certainly unchanging. Theology is not!

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If the word of the hoaxers is not enough, then nothing else will be.

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Interesting about the Ica stones. I was not really aware of them before. It seems that there really are burial stones, but from what I can see, none of the documented stones have the controversial images, but then it seems thousands of fakes have been made to sell to the gullible. Happens all the time if you watch Antiques Road Show.

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@Socratic.Fanatic,

Indeed!!!

Frankly, I thought my humorous intent was pretty obvious… but it may have flown right over the heads of some enthusiasts!

While some folks point to illustrations of “dragons” and wonder if they might be dinosaurs, I would have to say that I look at all the ancient monsters … and wonder how anyone could conclude living Dinosaurs are the inspiration when we know so well how dinosaurs looked, and how plentiful they would have been if we condensed the hundreds of millions of years of findings down into a 2000 or 3000 year time horizon!!!

Imagine if all those dinosaurs really were wiped out by a flood (or series of floods)… making all those fossils between the creation of the Earth and the cataclysm of floods!

The imaginations of the YECs for this seem just as bewilderingly impossible as those Victorian Era flat-earthers … with their very elaborate arrangements of continents and celestial objects … all to prove something that was, frankly, an impossibility!

@pevaquark @Jonathan_Burke

I meant the tip of the iceberg in that it is the only one of the many evidences we have discussed in-depth. Remember, it isn’t the tip of the iceberg that sinks the ship :wink:.

@Jonathan_Burke
Dinosaurs and humans coexisting is a fascinating topic, well worth your time to study. www.genesispark.org is a good rescource for that.

@gbrooks9
Your close-mindedness is astonishing.

@jammycakes
In a lot of areas, “science” travels over into the realm of philosophy (often without even knowing it). Even if the Ica stones are not enough for you, the linked website above has lots of even better evidence (assuming you won’t immediately discard it or write it off as fake because it conflicts with your accepted paradigm of history). I came to the BioLogos forum thinking that I would be given a fair hearing, but all of you (well, maybe most) seem so convinced of your correctness that you hardly listen when I tell you something otherwise. You immediately write off or explain away any evidence for dinosaurs and humans coexisting because you are blinded by your own worldview of evolution, and primeval dinosaur extinction. Don’t be the ostrich sticking your head in the sand! Actually seek out evidence against your worldview, try to find what’s true (why do you think I came here in the first place?) I would strongly encourage you to do some in-depth research into dinosaurs and man. Not stopping with relief when you see the evidence seemingly refuted by a Wikipedia article.

@T_aquaticus
There is more to the “word of the hoaxers” than meets the eye. I would encourage you to investigate this further. Regarding the Ica Stones, I would still encourage you to read Dr. Swift’s book…assuming you are open minded enough to give it a shot.

@jpm
I am glad you find the stones interesting. The fact that you had not heard of them is once again proof for the point that the academy sometimes “covers up” things that are still too controversial (National Geographic wouldn’t touch a topic that makes a strong case for the coexistence of dinosaurs and humans with a 29 1/2 ft. long pole). Someday I hope that science will actually take a serious look at these many artifacts, but sadly, I only see this happening in the distant future…

P.S: I could give some scriptural evidence for dinosaurs and humans coexisting, but I doubt it would change much, considering your very low esteem for the Bible.

Yes, it truly is.

In contrast, you seem fairly unwilling to apply scientific analysis and deduction to these objects … and anything related with a T-Rex co-existing for 2000 years (Between Day 6 of Creation and the Supposed Flood or Floods)…

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This is what I mean by “explaining away contradictory evidence”.

@gbrooks9

Just so you know, I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense…

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