During our recent trip to Galveston we went to an IMAX theater that featured a show about dinosaurs. It’s something to see these monsters on a multi-story screen coming right out into the audience in 3D. I was more scared than the grandkids. The film was very informative. Dinosaurs date back millions of years. The famous Jurassic Period dates back 200 million years but the dinosaurs were around even before then. The greatest finds by the paleontologist have been in the Gobi desert in Mongolia and at Ghost ranch in New Mexico. They think that dinosaurs were at first crawling creatures and then began to walk upright. They finally progressed to developing feathers and flying. It is felt that birds are modern relatives of ancient dinosaurs but much smaller than the multi-ton creatures of the Jurassic Period. In the Gobi desert it was discovered that dinosaurs hatch from eggs just like their cousins the birds. These parts of the earth, containing the remains of the dinosaurs, were once lush forest before global warming started many years before the automobile.

Meanwhile, when we got back to the condo we started talking about the creation. Genesis says that God created day and night, the sky, oceans, land, vegetation, animals and finally man in 6 days. Doing a timeline, it was 1,656 years from Adam to the Flood and 427 years from the flood to Abraham. From Abraham to Jesus and then on to us amounts to about 4000 years. That makes it about 6000 years to the time when man was created, according to the Bible. The other incredible thing is that the ark was 450 feet long compared to over 800 feet for the Titanic. Noah was able to get two of every kind of creature into the ark with enough food for the 1 year and 17 days they remained on the boat. The excrement from this group of animals for that period of time would have been enough to fill the Titanic. The other interesting thing is how long folks lived back them. Adam lived 939 years and Noah 950 years. Methusleah set the record at 969 years. They had multiple sons and daughters who disseminated through the earth after Babel, all with different languages. In those days a woman would have to have at least a hundred pregnancies during her lifetime unless they practiced some unusual method of birth control or phenomenal abstinence. With that number of pregnancies a woman’s uterus would have been hanging down between her knees. I suspect the guys may have had multiple wives and the whole thing would make the polygamy business in San Angelo look like Vacation Bible School.

Anyway, the grandkids didn’t question the Bible version and just discounted the facts of Science. That’s called faith and like the Bible says we have to have the faith of a child to believe. As for me, I’ve tried to have a little faith and also look at scientific facts. I always thought that God has a different clock than us mortals. In a couple of places in the Bible, Psalms 90:4 and Second Peter 3:8, it says that to God a thousand years is like a day. So, maybe the creation took a lot longer than the 24 hour day used by us humans. There is no double that man was around a lot longer than 6000 years ago. Cro-Magnon Man lived over 45,000 years ago and Neanderthal Man over 100,000 years ago. Maybe those guys didn’t have a soul and Adam was the first of the species to develop a soul. Genesis 2: 7 says, “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” Maybe the cavemen were just a warm-up act for Adam and Eve, and hadn’t become a living soul.

Anyway, those are some of my explanations from the porch, but probably the best thing to do is just accept the stories like the kids. Have faith. The only thing I wish is that Noah wouldn’t have included deer on the ark. If Noah had included the dinosaurs on the ark, maybe it wouldn’t be illegal for me to shoot a giant Brontosaurus if they were caught eating my tomatoes.