A. I. (The Atheist Illusion) Chapter Two

Seven Questions

Question #1: Do you really believe dinosaurs were alive at the same time man was walking this planet, according to the Bible, less than 10,000 years ago?

Yes, even though the current scientific observation places them some 200 million years ago. According to {Worldatlas.com} it is difficult to determine when modern man became aware of these giant creatures. Some large bones were discovered as early as the 16th Century and it took some time afterward to determine what these large bones were. Some thought they might have been from a race of giants that once lived on the earth such as the one mentioned in the Biblical story of David and Goliath. As the scientific community developed their understanding of what they were discovering, the name Dinosaur was invented and given to the extinct creatures in 1842. 

The Bible challenges many of the conclusions the scientific community has arrived at in their understanding of the data being analyzed over the past few centuries. I admit my apologetics are driven by a presuppositional Biblical worldview, therefore I approach these scientific assertions with skepticism. 

It has long been suggested that dinosaurs and humans never existed together because we have never found the two fossilized together in the same layer. However, this is not proof they did not exist together, it's just proof they have never been found together. Considering 95% of all fossils are shallow marine organisms, such as corals and shellfish and 95% of the remaining 5% are algae and plants. The 95% of the remaining 0.25% are invertebrates, including insects. The remaining 0.0125% are vertebrates, mostly fish. Then we must understand that 95% of land vertebrates consist of less than one bone. The number of dinosaur fossils is actually relatively small, compared to other types of creatures. Not finding human and dinosaur fossils together is not that surprising. 

A new study demonstrates that contrary to previous opinions, human ancestors did indeed live along with the dinosaurs. (Human and Dinosaur)  This new study does not depart from the popular evolutionary design but suggests that Human evolution occurred much earlier than they previously thought. This new discovery does not fit their current model, so they simply move the human evolution back 66 million years. 

According to Wikipedia, Mary Higby Schweitzer is an American paleontologist at North Carolina State University, who led the groups that discovered the remains of blood cells in dinosaur fossils and later discovered soft tissue remains in the Tyrannosaurus rex specimen MOR 1125, as well as evidence that the specimen was a pregnant female when she died. This is interesting because the Tyrannosaurus is said to have been extinct for 65 million years. That's a problem because soft tissue and blood cells under perfect conditions only survive for thousands of years, not millions. How to explain these new discoveries without abandoning the millions of years scheme is difficult. Some scientists are suggesting that there must have been some previous means of preservation we are not aware of enabling this tissue to survive so long. This would however fit within the Biblical timeline of 6 to 10 thousand years. 

Of course, this subject rarely comes up without that dreaded carbon 14 formula, doesn't that prove the dinosaurs lived millions of years ago? For some reason that is the common assumption, but carbon-14 dating, is a scientific method that can accurately determine the age of organic materials as old as approximately 60,000 years. Carbon 14 shouldn't even be in dinosaur bones, the fact it exists is another reason to place them within the Biblical timeframe. Scientists who accept a young earth creation are considered by the mainstream scientific community as non-credible resources. However, they acquired their credentials and achieved their degree of study from the same sources as other scientists. If they would fall in line with the popular narrative they would be cited as credible sources. In conclusion, from the data presented by the scientific community, I find no difficulty with the Biblical view. The problem arises when you approach the issue committed to millions of years, the data is then viewed to fit that narrative.  

Question #2: Do you believe dinosaurs, lions, tigers and other carnivores (with teeth designed to tear and cut up meat) were originally vegetarians as asserted in one documentary film? 

A recent discovery of the first perfectly preserved stomach context reveals the dietary habits of the Tyrannosaurus. This specimen was a 5 to 7-year-old classified among the Tyrannosaurus. The stomach contents revealed two hindlegs of a bird-like dinosaur. Apparently, he liked prehistoric chicken legs! The scientific journal reports, "Skeletal remains preserved in the abdominal cavity of the juvenile Gorgosaurus consist exclusively of articulated and associated postcranial elements, primarily from the hindlimbs, of two separate individuals of the small caenagnathid theropod Citipes elegant" (science.org) So no doubt they were meat eaters! Probably didn't make good pets. This is a fascinating discovery, one which could be cited in the first question, if this dinosaur is 64 million years old, how are its stomach contents still preserved? 

However, staying with question #2, there is no doubt these creatures along with lions, tigers, and the like were and are meat eaters. The assertion is that they were not originally violent before the Biblical event of the fall. The period referred to would most likely have been very short. After the fall, creation was subsequently dramatically changed, and man as well as animal life took on a violent nature. 

Genesis 6:11 ESV

(11)  Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight, and the earth was filled with violence.

Question #3: Do you believe that ALL the humans now on earth, including those on remote islands in the remote South Pacific, are descendants of Noah and his family?

If we assume that the population doubles every 150 years which is a conservative number, we can find our results. Starting with only Noah and his family in 2500 BC, 4,500 years is more than enough time for the present population to reach over 8 billion. Using the current rule of 70 methods, if Noah's family of 8 only had a 2% growth rate, their population would have doubled in 35 years, not 150. This is not to assert that we have had a constant population growth throughout human history, but simply to demonstrate that achieving the current population from the time of Noah with 8 people is easily provable. The question should not be, could it be achieved, but why there are only 8 billion if we have been here for hundreds of thousands of years, not 4,500? 

Question #4: Would you agree that if you answer yes to Question #3 above you automatically imply we are all the result of incest within Noah's family? 

This indeed does seem strange to us, for most of us in today's culture this is a grotesque thought and should be. Remember, Noah's sons and their family lived hundreds of years, so marrying nephews and nieces would not have been like it is today. Noah's son Shem lived 600 years. The human Geno would not have been broken down as it is today, so health concerns for close-relation marriages had not yet developed. That would begin to be addressed during the time of Moses. The practice of men taking multiple wives also would have increased the population growth.

Question #5: According to one documentary, Noah, his family, and approximately 6500 animals survived on stored food, without decay or spoilage, for 370 days. Is that possible? 

It is, there are several methods of preserving or supplying meat. Meat can be preserved through drying, smoking, salting, or pickling. Certain fish can pack themselves in mud and survive for years without water, these could have been stored on the ark. Fish eggs, live eels, or fish stored in barrels or sealed wooden crates, earthworms, and snails are just some of the many more protein food items Noah could have brought as food for the animals. In addition, earthworms, eels, snails, and Noah may have also brought mealworms and other insects onto the ark as food, and these can be bred for both carnivores and insectivores, providing food for supposedly meat-only creatures. Cricket or grasshopper flour could have been baked into the equivalent of protein bars or sprinkled on other food, as could the ground seeds of gourds. 

We are not told, but many of the animals could have temporarily entered a state of hibernation and required less food. But even without this providing for the animal and human food consumption would be doable. The Ark dimensions could accommodate 650 large animal pens and over 1,000 small ones. Over 4,000 birds could have been housed, and over 650 reptiles. It could have carried over 450 tons of food storage leaving 1,800 sq ft of living space for Noah and his family. So yes, it is possible.  

Question #6: Noah did not need to save the sea creatures because they didn't need to be saved from a flood. How did the freshwater fish survive the worldwide flood that would have created an environment they could not survive? 

Well, most fish didn't survive. In fact, if you'd been a diver in the oceans before the flood, and then you'd been saved on the Ark and had started diving again after the flood, you would've said something like, "What happened? Where's everything gone?" You see, most marine species were killed during the flood. Now certainly some fish did survive, and we see their descendants in the oceans today. How did freshwater fish survive in the saltwater oceans? There are two possibilities. First, there are many areas in the world today where we see freshwater and saltwater together, and the two waters don't mix. So it's possible that certain organisms survived in pockets of fresh or salt water. Second, because of natural selection, which creationists accept, organisms today have become very specialized. Organisms at the time of the flood, however, would've been much stronger and able to tolerate many more changes than they can today. There's really no problem at all in answering this question.

Question #7: Do you truly believe the world and all the different races of humans and remote locations, were populated by one family, Noah's family, in less than 4500 years, according to the Bible?

Yes, perhaps the most obvious is explained by Babel, the origin of the various languages present in our world. While an evolutionary worldview might expect all languages to trace back to a single parent language (much like it claims all life traces back to one organism), that isn’t what researchers have found. Instead, language families of today trace back to multiple unrelated parent languages, which is what one would predict from the Babel account. 

But why, then, do people from various parts of the world look so different from each other? The explanation for differences in physical appearance is simple. As the groups spread out and separated from each other after Babel, their gene pools were largely isolated, generally more so, the farther apart they were and physical features such as certain skin shades or eye shapes gradually became dominant within each group. Originally there would have been one skin tone and minor physical differences. As they were isolated, the distinctive features would have begun to develop. These distinctive features are still reflected in the diversity among people groups today. But far from evidence of evolution, these minor genetic differences are the natural result of the loss of genetic variability that occurs when people groups are isolated from one another.

Hope this has been helpful,

David