Dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark

Have you heard about the Creation Museum which is just about to open in Petersburg, Kentuck? According to their website

The Creation Museum will proclaim to the world that the Bible is the supreme authority in all matters of faith and practice and in every area it touches on. This ‘walk through history’ museum will be a wonderful alternative to the evolutionary natural history museums that are turning countless minds against the gospel of Christ and the authority of the Scripture.

This point of view is not new or rare. What is new, at least to me, is their contention that dinosaurs coexisted with man, human children played with baby dinosaurs and dinosaurs were taken onto Noah’s Ark during the flood.

The only information we have about dinosaurs come from fossils. These fossils appear to be much more than 6,000 years old because all the biological material has long since disappeared, leaving voids in the rock with the exact shape of the bones (or in rare cases softer body parts) which had become encased in the mud or clay which has now become rock. The voids in the rock where the biological material had been were gradually filled in with minerals from seep water until it is now all solid rock, but because the filled-in portion of the rock was formed later and by a different process than the surrounding rock the filled-in rock looks different from the surrounding rock and is the size and shape of the original animal remains – as if the originally entombed biological material had turned into rock. Obviously this whole process, the entombing of the bones in mud or clay, the mud or clay becoming rock, the biological material breaking down, the filling in of the void with minerals gradually leaching out of seep water, takes a long time -- much longer than 6,000 years.

Traditionally people who believed that the Genesis story was literally true and the earth was created 6,000 years ago contended that fossils which appear to be more than 6,000 years old were not the remains of creatures who once lived but were created as rocks by God when all the other rocks were created 6,000 years ago. From this point of view a belief that dinosaurs had ever existed would be just as false as the idea that the world is millions or billions of years old. (When asked why God would create fossils which appeared to be the remains of animals and plants, the existence of which would be a refutation of the Biblical account, the usual explanation was that fossils were created by God as a “test of faith.”)

So how can these people believe that the world is only 6,000 years old and also believe that dinosaurs once existed? Apparently when people go to museums they like to look at dinosaurs. A natural history museum without dinosaurs would be at a disadvantage. I have to suspect that the people behind this museum do not really believe the nonsense they are pretending to advocate.