By Ercill Hunt

In [a previous memo], I wrote about how often while teaching Genesis, the question "what about the dinosaurs?" comes up. I discussed Scriptural facts which saythat dinosaurs and man were contemporary, and alluded to the total lack of scientific evidence to the contrary.

In order to further explain that Scripture indicates a young earth, I took a pause to explain Biblical faith a little. Biblical faith approaches the facts encountered in God's Word as impeccable and unconditional. If God said He made the animals (which includes dinosaurs) on the same day he made man, our faith must accept this as completely true and having no reservations - no matter what the scientists say.

Many of those who ask what about the dinosaurs have little knowledge about the effects of Noah's Flood, or have come to believe the Flood account of Genesis as just a story. That is the issue of this memo.

There are only two world views and everyone holds to one or the other, or in various degrees, both. First, the most prevalent secular view is that everything exists as a result of a cosmic accident—“there was nothing then an explosion occurred.” All too often, Christians in effect default to this position by their laze faire attitude towards understanding what God has said in Genesis and other places concerning His Creation. There are many variants of this cosmic accident worldview called theistic evolution all of which undermine the three great truths which have their origins in the early chapters of Genesis—creation, fall, and redemption—and to some degree or other underlie our original question as to whether dinosaurs and men have coexisted. The second world view is that everything, including us, is the result of a deliberate design by a Designer.

It is amazing to me how men of scholarship, men committed to the inerrant Word of God, men who believe the flood of Noah was global, and yet still accept billions of years of earth history because they think geologists have proven it from the rock record. Then, after several leading, conservative theologians compromise with the “scientist” it is easy for the layperson to become convinced that these “hollow compromises” which come under the guise of theistic evolution or progressive evolution have been derived from a scholarly study of God’s Word. Not so! It is just that these conservative Bible scholars have a superficial understanding of geology and haven’t thought through the implications of Noah’s Flood on their belief in billions of years. Also, these theologians aren’t aware of how little the scientists know about “origins”—else this “millions of years” would not remain “holy ground” for the scientist. As Peter said, “by … the water of the Flood, the old world was destroyed” (2 Peter 3:6).

For the first 1,800 years of church history, virtually all Christians believed that Noah’s Flood was global and catastrophic. It wasn’t until the early 19th century that Christians began to turn to a new hypothesis of earth history being put forth by deistic and atheistic geologists involving millions of years of earth history. Once again, listen to Peter—“… there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts and saying … all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation … For this they willingly are ignorant of … [the fact that] the world that then was … perished …” (2 Peter 3:3-7). The works of these deistic and atheistic geologists grew into what is today called “uniformitarianism” which is by definition “the present is the key to the past”, or as Peter put it “all things continue as they were from the beginning”. One outgrowth is that many people began to believe that Noah’s Flood didn’t happen, or that it wasn’t global, or that it left no surviving evidence.

Think before you react or respond. That there was a global, year-long, catastrophic flood is presented to us as fact in Genesis 6-8. Do you believe it? Or do you say to God, “I believe you, but …?” Those who believe without placing conditions on God’s Word can say with confidence that such a Flood did occur, and it would have left vast amounts of evidence: including all the sedimentary record and billions and billions of fossils. At the end of the Flood the water receding from the still soft continents would have eroded much of the sediment and redeposited it somewhere else. This should be mind boggling in comparison to our experience. All the floods that we have any knowledge of in our lifetime combined would be miniscule in comparison to this world destroying Genesis Flood.

Now you must choose—do you believe the rock is a record of billions of years, or do you believe it is primarily evidence of Noah’s Flood. It can’t be both. Either the geological establishment is correct that the earth is billions of years old and there is no evidence of a worldwide Flood, or the Genesis record is correct and there was a worldwide Flood. If Genesis is God’s inspired Word, then we cannot logically believe in millions of years—let alone billions of years. The debate about the age of the earth ultimately comes down to deciding who are you going to believe: the all-knowing, totally honest Creator who has given His inerrant Word, or finite, sinful creatures who give us their books which contain hundreds of errors and continually need revising.

I really wish there could be some way that you could move everything that you’ve been told over and over again about the earth being millions of years old onto a separate part of your brain—to a spot temporarily inaccessible by your mind. Then in that condition read through the first eleven chapters of Genesis. In that condition you would not likely come up with the earth being millions of years old. And, what is more, without any evolutionary preconditioning you won’t even think that the earth looks old. No longer will you say, “The earth is really young even though it looks old,” but instead will say with confidence, “The earth is young and it looks young.”

Now let’s consider a few scientific facts: [1] if the earth were billions of years old and the present is the key to the past, the continents would have eroded away by wind and water many times over; [2] because there isn’t a large enough accumulation of helium in our atmosphere for the earth to be very old (helium escapes earth’s crust into the atmosphere faster than it can escape earth’s gravity into space); [3] there are too many fossils to have been formed by uniformitarianism; [4] many processes which we have been told take millions of years really don’t: laboratories have produced high grade coal from wood in only four weeks; Creation magazine have shown photos of stalactites and stalagmites, which were formed in abandoned mines in only fifty years; Len Cram received an honorary doctorate by a secular university for developing opals which are indistinguishable from mined opals in his backyard laboratory; petrified fence posts with ax marks have been found in Australia; [5] each year rivers dump more salt into the oceans and only a fraction makes its way back to land—the oceans aren’t near salty enough to be older than a few thousand years old.

We all came to Christ carrying excess baggage. Friend, why not just open your Bible in the presence of God and say that no longer doubt His Word, then trust Him to explain it to your faith. It is so much easier to just believe God without any buts, such as doubts about the Flood, and you will enjoy His fellowship so much more.