Dinosaurs

[zoegirl]

Check out the website.

OEC stands for Old Earth creationism, or the model that scripture and observation both support the universe being old. If you check out the website, you will get a better idea of the evidence for this

[Typhoon]

Hello

Arrharr! excellent... makes sense! Chears! Which are you... if you dont mine me asking, and how does a YEC support the view of dinosaurs?!? Perhaps I shall read all the posts it bound to be explained there.

Thanks again!

[zoegirl]

I am OEC

[JCSx2]

Also, just on a side note the bible also mentions unicorns! (don't know exact verse, but it's in there somewhere)

KJV
Job 39:9

9Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib?

NKJV

Job 39:9

9 “Will the wild ox be willing to serve you?
Will he bed by your manger?


NIV

Job 39:9

9 "Will the wild ox consent to serve you?
Will he stay by your manger at night?


NASB

Job 39:9


9"Will the (A)wild ox consent to serve you,
Or will he spend the night at your manger?

Wonder what the original text word is and what it literally translates to.

[the sleep of reason]

personally i dont believe any scriptures speak of dinosaurs. they are curiously omitted from the bible altogether.

i think that's important, too.

however, if you read such bibles as dake's commentaries, you find that scripturally the earth was created "in the beginning" only as the adamite world. that is the world as we know it, modern man. there is infinate posibilities for what could have been her before this adamite colonization of the earth.
i can find the scriptures if you want, but "in the beginning" came after a renovation by fire of the ancient earth, which is where the extinction of the dinosaurs came in an ELE. sudden wipe out.

this is backed up by the fundamental problem with 'seven days' as human earth-days as we know them, which is impossible because the sun wasnt created until after the first few 'days.' no one can calcuate the span of these 'days'...could be billions of years.

again, this is scriptural, if you want to know more i can find quotes.

[the sleep of reason]

unicorns are one-horned goats.
genetic mutations.

[7trumpets]

Hello

I would like to know about dinosaurs. Besides the verse that says great creatures roam the earth,are there any other verses that talk about them? I only know about the crocodile thingy described in Job called the Leviathon or something to that extent. If any one knows more verses about dinosaurs (e.g when did they die, was it during the flood? what about the loch ness monster?) and what the Bible says about them, I would gladly like to know and find out more. Thanks

It helps if one draws a picture of this animal.

Job 40:15 Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox.
he is a vegetarian

Job 40:16 Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly.
he has huge loins thighs from his belly down

Job 40:17 He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together.
There is no animal on earth today with a tail like a cedar tree

navel 8270 shor shore from 'sharar' (8324); a string (as twisted (compare 'shariyr' (8306))), i.e. (specifically) the umbilical cord (also figuratively, as the centre of strength):--navel.

Job 40:18 His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron.
bones are a brass, iron
brass 5154 nchuwshah nekh-oo-shaw'
or nchushah {nekh-oo-shaw'}; feminine of 'nachuwsh' (5153); copper:--brass, steel. Compare 'Nachash' (5176).

iron 1270 barzel bar-zel'
perhaps from the root of 'Birzowth' (1269); iron (as cutting); by extension, an iron implement:--(ax) head, iron.

Job 40:19 He is the chief of the ways of God: he that made him can make his sword to approach unto him.

he is the biggest animal GOD ever made.

Job 40:20 Surely the mountains bring him forth food, where all the beasts of the field play.

Job 40:21 He lieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed, and fens.

Job 40:22 The shady trees cover him with their shadow; the willows of the brook compass him about.

Job 40:23 Behold, he drinketh up a river, and hasteth not: he trusteth that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth.
"he drinketh up a river", thats alot of water

Job 40:24 He taketh it with his eyes: his nose pierceth through snares.

There's no trap/snare that can hold him.

I do believe this speaks of the Dinosaur for there is no animal today that fits the discription. Tail like a "cedar tree", thighs
of brass. Huge/chief in the ways of GOD. Drinks up a river, and no traps that can hold him.

[jenna]

Also, just on a side note the bible also mentions unicorns! (don't know exact verse, but it's in there somewhere)

KJV
Job 39:9

9Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib?

NKJV

Job 39:9

9 “Will the wild ox be willing to serve you?
Will he bed by your manger?


NIV

Job 39:9

9 "Will the wild ox consent to serve you?
Will he stay by your manger at night?


NASB

Job 39:9


9"Will the (A)wild ox consent to serve you,
Or will he spend the night at your manger?

Wonder what the original text word is and what it literally translates to.

Shame on me? ? Why? Because of ONE WORD? Please.

[JCSx2]

Also, just on a side note the bible also mentions unicorns! (don't know exact verse, but it's in there somewhere)

KJV
Job 39:9

9Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib?

NKJV

Job 39:9

9 “Will the wild ox be willing to serve you?
Will he bed by your manger?


NIV

Job 39:9

9 "Will the wild ox consent to serve you?
Will he stay by your manger at night?


NASB

Job 39:9


9"Will the (A)wild ox consent to serve you,
Or will he spend the night at your manger?

Wonder what the original text word is and what it literally translates to.

Shame on me? ? Why? Because of ONE WORD? Please.

Why shame on you?

[jenna]

I don't know, you tell me, since you said it. (that means shame on you)

[RationalTheism]

Thanks Zoegirl for your imput.. Yes i believe that the earth is not millions of years old. still trying to find verses on dinosaurs. (:

I don't mean to offend, but how can anyone believe the earth is not millions of years old?

<comment removed by moderator>

[Anita]

xoxo

[zoegirl]

What?!?! If your theory about the dinosaurs is true, care to list why we aren't seeing this today with the reptiles we have currently? although reptiles continue to grow, their growth rate slows down drastically as adults and there are very typical adult sizes sizes for different species.

YOur statement concerning dating are just not true. CArbon dating is trustworthy, as well as the other sources of dating.

Not to mention that radiometric dating is just one of many, many sources of dating the world and the universe.

See here
http://www.godandscience.org/youngearth ... verse.html

[Anita]

xoxo

[zoegirl]

These are all very testable hypothesisa concerning the growth rate of dinosaurs. And all easily disproven. If this were something so easily shown, why hasn't a YEC done the tests? It could very easily be done....shoot, any good reptile breeder could try some of them. (considering the greed out there, there would be plenty of people who would love to create a miniature Jurassic Park with just manipulating the growth rates..."Come see the gigantic lizard!") If you are going to make such grandiose assertions you should be able to back them up.

And for someone who loves to give the standard reply of "do the research yourself", give those of us here a lot more credit. Most of us HAVE done the research. The vast majority of Christians here who are OEC are ones who have struggled with this. Like you, we grew up being fed the YEC interpretation and story. I personally was taught it and struggled with it and the information that is out there. I read Henry Morris and a lot of the books produced by YEC and still struggled, know the information that is out there. What, do you really think all of us simply fall down and give up what was presented to us so easily, especially when the alternative is presented to us as heresy???!?!? I would suggest to you that *you* need to do the research out there. DOn't make such broad sweeping statements. We have done the research.

If you would like to critique the methods out there, try this on for size, by the way, your critique is addressed in point number one. What I have quoted is simply the appendix, what I have linked is the entire article.

http://www.asa3.org/aSA/resources/Wiens.html#page%2021

APPENDIX: Common Misconceptions Regarding Radiometric Dating Methods

There are a number of misconceptions that seem especially prevalent among Christians. Most of these topics are covered in the above discussion, but they are reviewed briefly here for clarity.

1. Radiometric dating is based on index fossils whose dates were assigned long before radioactivity was discovered.

This is not at all true, though it is implied by some young-Earth literature. Radiometric dating is based on the half-lives of the radioactive isotopes. These half-lives have been measured over the last 40-90 years. They are not calibrated by fossils.

2. No one has measured the decay rates directly; we only know them from inference.

Decay rates have been directly measured over the last 40-100 years. In some cases a batch of the pure parent material is weighed and then set aside for a long time and then the resulting daughter material is weighed. In many cases it is easier to detect radioactive decays by the energy burst that each decay gives off. For this a batch of the pure parent material is carefully weighed and then put in front of a Geiger counter or gamma-ray detector. These instruments count the number of decays over a long time.

3. If the half-lives are billions of years, it is impossible to determine them from measuring over just a few years or decades.

The example given in the section titled, "The Radiometric Clocks" shows that an accurate determination of the half-life is easily achieved by direct counting of decays over a decade or shorter. This is because a) all decay curves have exactly the same shape (Fig. 1), differing only in the half-life, and b) trillions of decays can be counted in one year even using only a fraction of a gram of material with a half-life of a billion years. Additionally, lavas of historically known ages have been correctly dated even using methods with long half-lives.

4. The decay rates are poorly known, so the dates are inaccurate.

Most of the decay rates used for dating rocks are known to within two percent. Uncertainties are only slightly higher for rhenium (5%), lutetium (3%), and beryllium (3%), discussed in connection with Table 1. Such small uncertainties are no reason to dismiss radiometric dating. Whether a rock is 100 million years or 102 million years old does not make a great deal of difference.

5. A small error in the half-lives leads to a very large error in the date.

Since exponents are used in the dating equations, it is possible for people to think this might be true, but it is not. If a half-life is off by 2%, it will only lead to a 2% error in the date.

6. Decay rates can be affected by the physical surroundings.

This is not true in the context of dating rocks. Radioactive atoms used for dating have been subjected to extremes of heat, cold, pressure, vacuum, acceleration, and strong chemical reactions far beyond anything experienced by rocks, without any significant change. The only exceptions, which are not relevant to dating rocks, are discussed under the section, "Doubters Still Try", above.

page 24

7. A small change in the nuclear forces probably accelerated nuclear clocks during the first day of creation a few thousand years ago, causing the spuriously old radiometric dates of rocks.

Rocks are dated from the time of their formation. For it to have any bearing on the radiometric dates of rocks, such a change of nuclear forces must have occurred after the Earth (and the rocks) were formed. To make the kind of difference suggested by young-Earth proponents, the half-lives must be shortened from several billion years down to several thousand years--a factor of at least a million. But to shorten half-lives by factors of a million would cause large physical changes. As one small example, recall that the Earth is heated substantially by radioactive decay. If that decay is speeded up by a factor of a million or so, the tremendous heat pulse would easily melt the whole Earth, including the rocks in question! No radiometric ages would appear old if this happened.

8. The decay rates might be slowing down over time, leading to incorrect old dates.

There are two ways we know this didn't happen: a) we have checked them out with "time machines", and b) it doesn't make sense mathematically. Both of these points are explained in the section titled, "Can We Really Believe the Dating Systems?"

9. We should measure the "full-life" (the time at which all of the parent is gone) rather than the half-life (the time when half of it is gone).

Unlike sand in an hourglass, which drops at a constant rate independent of how much remains in the top half of the glass, the number of radioactive decays is proportional to the amount of parent remaining. Figure 1 shows how after 2 half-lives, 1/2 x 1/2 = 1/4 is left, and so on. After 10 half-lives there is 2-10 = 0.098% remaining. A half-life is more easy to define than some point at which almost all of the parent is gone. Scientists sometimes instead use the term "mean life", that is, the average life of a parent atom. The mean life is always 1/ln(2) = 1.44 times the half-life. For most of us half-life is easier to understand.

10. To date a rock one must know the original amount of the parent element. But there is no way to measure how much parent element was originally there.

It is very easy to calculate the original parent abundance, but that information is not needed to date the rock. All of the dating schemes work from knowing the present abundances of the parent and daughter isotopes. The original abundance N0, of the parent is simply N0 = N ekt, where N is the present abundance, t is time, and k is a constant related to the half life.

11. There is little or no way to tell how much of the decay product, that is, the daughter isotope, was originally in the rock, leading to anomalously old ages.

A good part of this article is devoted to explaining how one can tell how much of a given element or isotope was originally present. Usually it involves using more than one sample from a given rock. It is done by comparing the ratios of parent and daughter isotopes relative to a stable isotope for samples with different relative amounts of the parent isotope. For example, in the rubidium-strontium method one compares rubidium-87/strontium-86 to strontium-87/strontium-86 for different minerals. From this one can determine how much of the daughter isotope would be present if there had been no parent isotope. This is the same as the initial amount (it would not change if there were no parent isotope to decay). Figures 4 and 5, and the accompanying explanation, tell how this is done most of the time. While this is not absolutely 100% foolproof, comparison of several dating methods will always show whether the given date is reliable.

page 25

12. There are only a few different dating methods.

This article has listed and discussed a number of different radiometric dating methods and has also briefly described a number of non-radiometric dating methods. There are actually many more methods out there. Well over forty different radiometric dating methods are in use, and a number of non-radiogenic methods not even mentioned here.

13. "Radiation halos" in rocks prove that the Earth was young.

This refers to tiny halos of crystal damage surrounding spots where radioactive elements are concentrated in certain rocks. Halos thought to be from polonium, a short-lived element produced from the decay of uranium, have been found in some rocks. A plausible explanation for a halo from such a short-lived element is that these were not produced by an initial concentration of the radioactive element. Rather, as water seeped through cracks in the minerals, a chemical change caused newly-formed polonium to drop out of solution at a certain place and almost immediately decay there. A halo would build up over a long period of time even though the center of the halo never contained more than a few atoms of polonium at one time. "Hydrothermal" effects can act in ways that at first seem strange, such as the well-known fact that gold--a chemically un-reactive metal with very low solubilities--is concentrated along quartz veins by the action of water over long periods of time. Other researchers have found halos produced by an indirect radioactive decay effect called hole diffusion, which is an electrical effect in a crystal. These results suggest that the halos in question are not from short-lived isotopes after all.

At any rate, halos from uranium inclusions are far more common. Because of uranium's long half-lives, these halos take at least several hundred million years to form. Because of this, most people agree that halos provide compelling evidence for a very old Earth.

14. A young-Earth research group reported that they sent a rock erupted in 1980 from Mount Saint Helens volcano to a dating lab and got back a potassium-argon age of several million years. This shows we should not trust radiometric dating.

There are indeed ways to "trick" radiometric dating if a single dating method is improperly used on a sample. Anyone can move the hands on a clock and get the wrong time. Likewise, people actively looking for incorrect radiometric dates can in fact get them. Geologists have known for over forty years that the potassium-argon method cannot be used on rocks only twenty to thirty years old. Publicizing this incorrect age as a completely new finding was inappropriate. The reasons are discussed in the Potassium-Argon Dating section above. Be assured that multiple dating methods used together on igneous rocks are almost always correct unless the sample is too difficult to date due to factors such as metamorphism or a large fraction of xenoliths.

15. Low abundances of helium in zircon grains show that these minerals are much younger than radiometric dating suggests.

Zircon grains are important for uranium-thorium-lead dating because they contain abundant uranium and thorium parent isotopes. Helium is also produced from the decay of uranium and thorium. However, as a gas of very small atomic size, helium tends to escape rather easily. Researchers have studied the rates of diffusion of helium from zircons, with the prediction from one study by a young-Earth creationist suggesting that it should be quantitatively retained despite its atomic size. The assumptions of the temperature conditions of the rock over time are most likely unrealistic in this case.

16. The fact that radiogenic helium and argon are still degassing from the Earth's interior prove that the Earth must be young.

The radioactive parent isotopes, uranium and potassium, have very long half-lives, as shown in Table 1. These parents still exist in abundance in the Earth's interior, and are still producing helium and argon. There is also a time lag between the production of the daughter products and their degassing. If the Earth were geologically very young, very little helium and argon would have been produced. One can compare the amount of argon in the atmosphere to what would be expected from decay of potassium over 4.6 billion years, and in fact it is consistent.

page 26

17. The waters of Noah's flood could have leached radioactive isotopes out of rocks, disturbing their ages.

This is actually suggested on one website! While water can affect the ability to date rock surfaces or other weathered areas, there is generally no trouble dating interior portions of most rocks from the bottom of lakes, rivers, and oceans. Additionally, if ages were disturbed by leaching, the leaching would affect different isotopes at vastly different rates. Ages determined by different methods would be in violent disagreement. If the flood were global in scope, why then would we have any rocks for which a number of different methods all agree with each other? In fact, close agreement between methods for most samples is a hallmark of radiometric dating.

18. We know the Earth is much younger because of non-radiogenic indicators such as the sedimentation rate of the oceans.

There are a number of parameters which, if extrapolated from the present without taking into account the changes in the Earth over time, would seem to suggest a somewhat younger Earth. These arguments can sound good on a very simple level, but do not hold water when all the factors are considered. Some examples of these categories are the decaying magnetic field (not mentioning the widespread evidence for magnetic reversals), the saltiness of the oceans (not counting sedimentation!), the sedimentation rate of the oceans (not counting Earthquakes and crustal movement, that is, plate tectonics), the relative paucity of meteorites on the Earth's surface (not counting weathering or plate tectonics), the thickness of dust on the moon (without taking into account brecciation over time), the Earth-Moon separation rate (not counting changes in tides and internal forces), etc. While these arguments do not stand up when the complete picture is considered, the case for a very old creation of the Earth fits well in all areas considered.

19. Only atheists and liberals are involved in radiometric dating.

The fact is that there are a number of Bible-believing Christians who are involved in radiometric dating, and who can see its validity firsthand. A great number of other Christians are firmly convinced that radiometric dating shows evidence that God created the Earth billions, not thousands, of years ago.

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20. Different dating techniques usually give conflicting results.

This is not true at all. The fact that dating techniques most often agree with each other is why scientists tend to trust them in the first place. Nearly every college and university library in the country has periodicals such as Science, Nature, and specific geology journals that give the results of dating studies. The public is usually welcome to (and should!) browse in these libraries. So the results are not hidden; people can go look at the results for themselves. Over a thousand research papers are published a year on radiometric dating, essentially all in agreement. Besides the scientific periodicals that carry up-to-date research reports, specific suggestions are given below for further reading, both for textbooks, non-classroom books, and web resources.

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