Death before Fall?
Before we navigate the theological paradigm, let us know from science itself why dinosaurs vanished away. Typically, people may have read or heard about attacks of meteors that swiped away these mighty creatures about 65 million years ago.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/dinosaur-extinction
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Alvarez hypothesis: In 1980, two scientists Luis
and Walter Alvarez proposed the notion that a meteor the size of a mountain
slammed into Earth 66 million years ago, filling the atmosphere with gas, dust,
and debris that drastically altered the climate.
Evidence: An oddly high amount of the metal
iridium in what’s known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene, or K-Pg, layer—the
geologic boundary zone that seems to cap any known rock layers containing
dinosaur fossils. Iridium is relatively rare in Earth's crust but is more
abundant in stony meteorites.
In 2019, paleontologists digging in North
Dakota found a treasure trove of fossils extremely close to the K-Pg boundary,
essentially capturing the remains of an entire ecosystem that existed shortly
before the mass extinction.
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Volcanic fury: Ancient lava flows in India known
as the Deccan Traps also seem to match nicely in time with the end of the
Cretaceous, with massive outpourings of lava spewing forth between 60 and 65
million years ago. Such a vast eruptive event would have choked the skies with
carbon dioxide and other gases that would have dramatically changed Earth’s
climate.
Supports: Some studies show that Earth’s
temperature was changing even before the proposed impact event.
Other research has found evidence for mass
die-offs much earlier than 66 million years ago, with some signs that dinosaurs
in particular were already in a slow decline in the late Cretaceous.
It’s possible the dinosaurs were the unlucky recipients of a
geologic one-two punch, with volcanism weakening ecosystems enough to make them
vulnerable to an incoming meteor.
‘Did people and dinosaurs live at the same time?
No! After the dinosaurs died out, nearly 65 million years
passed before people appeared on Earth. However, small mammals (including
shrew-sized primates) were alive at the time of the dinosaurs. Many scientists
who study dinosaurs (vertebrate paleontologists) now think that birds are
direct descendants of one line of carnivorous dinosaurs, and some consider that
they in fact represent modern living dinosaurs. This theory remains under
discussion and shows that there is still much we don't know about dinosaurs.’
“The oldest DNA in the fossil record is only about a
million years old, so it's not possible for us to reconstruct dinosaurs from
their DNA like they did in the Jurassic Park movies,” says Susie Maidment, a
paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, U.K.
However, she says, “there is increasing evidence that
proteins and other soft tissues can preserve over geological timescales, so
I think it would be unwise to say that we will definitely never be able to get
DNA from dinosaur fossils.”
Here’s something more interesting (bold feature depicts
emphasize);
So, assuming we have created and genetically perfected
our modern-day dinosaurs using technologies that don’t yet exist, could they
survive and thrive alongside people?
Based on our modern relationships with large carnivores
such as lions, wolves, and bears, it’s clear that people and predators rarely
get along. And in most cases, people prevail while the animals dwindle.
Arbour says she’d love to live in a world where
Ankylosaurus are roaming around in the wild, but it’s hard even for large
plant-eating animals to coexist with humans, as we use up enormous amounts of
space for growing food and building our homes and settlements.
“We don’t like large animals to encroach on those
spaces,” she says. “I can’t imagine we’d coexist with a colossal predator like
Tyrannosaurus rex. We couldn’t tolerate wolves in most of North America and
did a pretty good job of nearly wiping them out completely—how could we live
with a predator more than 70 times larger than a wolf?”
In addition, dinosaurs lived in ecosystems that have
no modern analogues, Maidment says. Grass and grasslands hadn’t even
evolved in the Cretaceous, and large mammals had yet to make their entrance.
“What would dinosaurs eat, and how would their digestive
systems cope? How would they deal with mammalian predators? Where would we keep
them? And what rights would they have? I think the ethical issues around
cloning a dinosaur would be almost as difficult as the scientific ones,” she
says.
“The dinosaurs would be aliens in our world,” agrees
Brusatte. “They evolved tens or hundreds of millions of years ago, when
Earth was much different. The continents were in different places, the atmosphere
was different, the plants were different. Maybe they couldn't cope at all.”
Let us hear from Dr. Hugh Ross, who doesn’t support
Biological Naturalistic Evolution but miraculous creation by God[i], regarding creation of
dinosaurs:
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Today, the physical conditions of Earth do not
allow a land animal any larger than an elephant to thrive. During the ages of
the dinosaurs, shallow seas and tall trees on the continents permitted land
animals as large as the dinosaurs.
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Dinosaurs were created to increase the global
availability of nutrients and to permit a greater diversity of life to survive.
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Ecologists have presumed for the past century
that large-bodied herbivores play a role in dispersing vital nutrients
throughout Earth’s ecosystems.
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The very important role that large herbivores
play in distributing nutrients in current habitats was affirmed in a study of
the impact of megafauna extinctions on nutrient availability in Amazonia.
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God made a major investment in creating large
herbivores to create large herbivores. He created them to benefit all life, and
humanity in particular.
Dr. Ross says Dinosaurs contributed to Earth's bio deposits,
an essential treasure chest for the launch and maintenance of civilization.[ii] He makes a point that God
creates, let extinction happen, replaces and recreates creatures according to
the changing environment of the earth. God simply manages right creatures to
fit in according to right time and environment all the way to make the planet
fit for humanity.
Its obvious that YEC rejects any death before the fall. They
do not entertain any kind of sorrows, suffering and death existing prior to the
fall. They admit that Genesis 1 clearly teaches the creation was good.
[i]
Point to be noted that Old Earth Creationism doesn’t give any place for
naturalistic biological evolution. Let no one get this position confused with
Theistic Evolution. This same alert has also been included in Systematic
Theology of Norman Geisler.
[ii] https://youtu.be/HJ90rawsW6k,
7/20/2021, 6:32 pm
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