INTERVIEW

Did Dinosaurs Really Exist? A Christian Response

By Chris Carpenter
CBN.com Program Director

CBN.com - And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water: in the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes. – Isaiah 35:7 (KJV)

For centuries scholars have debated whether dinosaurs ever roamed the earth. Did they co-exist with humans? If they were real why is there no mention of it in the Bible? Did God really create all living things during the six days of creation?

Author Darek Isaacs contends that the great mysteries of our human existence can only be answered through the knowledge of Jesus Christ.

In his new book, Dinosaurs or Dragons? (Bridge-Logos), Isaacs presents many unique theories including the notion that the term “dragon”, mentioned in several translations throughout scripture are actually the creature that we know today as dinosaurs.

CBN.com Program Director Chris Carpenter recently sat down with Isaacs to discuss why he believes the dragons of the Bible are indeed dinosaurs, the powerful impact this theory could have on refuting evolution, and why the book of Revelation may hold the key to his theories.

Let’s talk about this book, Dragons and Dinosaurs. Obvious question to start, and that is what was your inspiration for writing this?

Well, I did a dinosaur dig a little over a year ago where I was up in Montana, and we excavated a large Ceratopsian dinosaur, which is kind of like a Triceratops. They’re the same family. Triceratops has the big horns coming out the front. Well, this Ceratops actually didn’t have the horns coming out of the front. It was coming out of the side, kind of like a Texas longhorn a little bit. It was 34 feet long, and it was just remarkable. And so I was there for eight days excavating that, and the question is, okay, when did this thing live? According to evolution, they try to say that dinosaurs died out 65 million years before man came on the scene. Well, according to the Bible, if you just read it literally, which I do, you have a six-day creation. The land, the creatures, were created on day six with Adam and Eve; and therefore, that is when the dinosaurs would have also been created. So from our biblical worldview, we would expect to see evidence of man and dinosaur co-existing.

Your book brings forth some new theories, perhaps some things that haven’t really been thought about or discussed much before that lends evidence on dinosaurs and dragons. Take a moment to outline this if you could.

A few years ago, there was a Tyrannosaurus Rex bone found in Montana by an evolutionary team. The leader was Mary Schweitzer. And the bone actually had red blood cells still in it. It has soft stretchable tissue. It had collagen, protein fragments, things like that. And one of the things that she says is that red blood cells don’t preserve, and I would agree with that 100 percent. You cannot have red blood cells and those other soft, stretchable things inside of a bone last for 68 million years. And I would actually even say that fossils can’t even last 68 million years, because when we were excavating the dinosaur—we called him Big John—one of the things you always find inside of all the rock is something we call slip and slides, where we can see evidence of just the earth slightly moving and creating skid marks, if you will, on rocks. And so our earth constantly has some gyration to it. And the whole idea that a fossil can remain undisturbed for 68 million years without really being ground to dust, I reject that on it’s core assumption.

Is there a difference between a dragon and a dinosaur?

We’re told that dragons were mythological. Dinosaurs were supposed to be 68 million years separate from us. But the thing about dragons is that the phenomenon of dragon legends across the globe. If you’re in China, if you’re in Australia, Africa, Europe, North America, South America, there is this one consistent image, and it’s a large scale reptilian creature. A lot of them have three toes, and with heads like alligators. And they just go into these great descriptive elements that sound just like scale for scale what we would think a dinosaur is. And even the three toes is amazing, because so many of the dinosaurs have three toes, three claws. So the details are shocking. And so that is my position, that dragon mythology actually arose out of mankind actually encountering real dinosaurs a few thousand years ago.

Is there anywhere in scripture that even references dragons or dinosaurs?

Absolutely. A lot of people come up and say, “Well, dinosaurs aren’t in the Bible.” That is because the word dinosaur was not created. It wasn’t coined until 1841. The King James Bible was first printed in 1611. So, of course, in the 1611 King James, dinosaur is not going to be in there, because the word wasn’t part of the English language. But 35 times, “dragon” is used in the King James, 13 times in Revelation talking about Satan. But in the Old Testament, it is replete with descriptions of actual real living, breathing creatures. And I spent four chapters in my book diving into dinosaurs in the Bible and showing how really there is Hebrew word “tannin” that is used to translate into dragon. And our modern theologians, even the conservative ones, they’ve been influenced by evolutionary thought, and they changed what the King James did. And they’ve actually inserted in many places “jackal,” which is a small fox-like creature, for dragon. They’ve swapped it out, and the reason why is they’ve been influenced, whether they know it or not, they’ve been influenced by evolutionary thought. And dinosaurs are something that we don’t touch in the Bible. And dragons are mythological. They don’t make that connection between the two. And it’s really just—hopefully we’ll bring some light to this with this book and this work.

In practically every culture you hear stories about mythological creatures called dragons. Some would like to believe they were real. It just seems there are too many of these theories out there to really refute that perhaps these were real. Would you agree with that?

I would agree with that 100 percent. And that was one of my starting points. That is, your Chinese dragon is so similar to your European dragon. And one of the pieces of evidence that I saw that was just so convincing is there was a vase from South America that’s 2,000 years and it has this image of this dragon, this huge reptile with a curved neck and dermal spines down the back. And then there was such a similar image that’s also 2,000 years old. It was the bronze sculpture from China. They’re both 2,000 years old. They were separated from each other by the Pacific Ocean. These cultures were not e-mailing each other their ideas back then. And it’s a similar creature. Now, if they are completely mythological, how in the world did that happen? And then on top of that is that they match, they match kind of a theropod. They have a bi-pedaled stance. They have short forearms, elongated neck, with dermal spines. It looks like the theropod. And so not only do they match each other, they match with fossils of dinosaurs.

In your book, what’s your biggest argument that supports creation? I’m sure you have many different angles you’re coming at on this topic. Is there any one that you think more compelling than the others?

Yes. And it’s a spiritual one. In Revelation, 13 times it refers to Satan or anti-Christ, beast, to dragon. All right. To me, that’s very profound, because the analogy only works if it’s a real analogy. If dragons are mythological with no bearing on reality, then God just compared the deceiver of the world, the murderer from the beginning, Satan, to a mythological, make believe creature. And that, to me, is not consistent with the character of God to go, “This creature, Satan, who wants to kill you, is kind of a like a make-believe dragon.” And that is the most powerful argument for me personally, because it shows that dragons were in fact real, or else the analogy that God used on Satan failed. And God wanted very clearly to point the lethality of Satan. Satan is a creation who is carnivorous. He wants to kill you. If dragons were in fact real, then that analogy of Satan just doesn’t work. And that points to dinosaurs existing with man. And when dinosaurs do exist with man, the theory of evolution is demolished.

If you walk through the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History you will see a dinosaur exhibit that dates dinosaurs to about three million years ago. Yet, if you believe the Bible, the book of Genesis came to be about 7,000 years ago. That is quite a disparity. What’s going on?

It goes back to Charles Lyell who was a geologist in the early 19th century. He actually stated that he wanted to free the scientists from Moses. He’s the one that came up with the idea of uniformitarianism, or he popularized it, I should say. He popularized uniformitarianism. And that is what gave the earth long, long ages. And as soon as that happened, that undercut Genesis. And that’s where the rub came. And so at that point, when they started adding all those vast ages, they needed something that lived back then for them to actually say, “Well, the earth is three billion years old.” Whatever changes all the time. They have to tell us, well, what was going on back then? Dinosaurs became that poster child for that, and they put them back there. And what’s so hard, unless we have compelling evidence to show man and dinosaur walking together, they’re always going to stay there. But now as I think Daniel 12:4 says that in the end times, we’ll have an increase in knowledge. I think God is pouring that out right now, because He has given us a mercy of evidence. We have cave paintings. We have vases.

As an author, after people read this book what do you want them to get out of this? What’s the big takeaway here?

I want Christians to be encouraged so that they know the strength that their Bible stands on, the steel and its spine, and know that the natural evidence does support the faith that they’ve been given by Christ. I want the secular mind to be challenged. I want them to read it and have their core beliefs shaken up. And I never want to get away from the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I reject some of the intelligent design arguments, I don’t like, because I think they don’t go far enough. I don’t believe in just winning an argument. What’s the point of that? I want to show them Jesus Christ, because He saved me, and He can and will save them if they would repent.

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More Perspectives on Spiritual Life

INTERVIEW

Did Dinosaurs Really Exist? A Christian Response

By Chris Carpenter CBN.com Program Director

By Chris Carpenter
CBN.com Program Director