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Writer's pictureBible Brian

Jurassic Park: The good, the bad, and the asinine


Although movies are fun to watch, there is an awful lot in them that isn't realistic. Realism is often sacrificed for entertainment, and indeed, sometimes the whole premise of the movie is unrealistic. At that point, part of the fun of the movie comes from discussing it afterwards.


Being a major dinosaur fan, as I have been from my youth, by far my favorite movie franchise to discuss is Jurassic Park. I not only enjoy watching them on screen, but discussing them off screen. It's interesting how many changes were made to the dinosaurs just to make them appear scarier.


The most obvious example is the dilophosaurus. In the movie, dilophosaurus is a smallish kind of dinosaur that spits a paralyzing venom at its prey, usually while displaying a rattling frill around its neck. In reality, however, there is no evidence for the frill, nor the venom, and dilophosaurus was significantly taller than its movie counterparts.


But what's particularly interesting about these conversations is not only how often the movies get things wrong, only to have these things corrected by commentators, but also how often commentators get things more wrong than the movies. For example, a common talking point is how although the movie is called Jurassic Park, most of the dinosaurs shown are actually from the Cretaceous period. The aforementioned dilophosaurus was supposedly from the early Jurassic, but the t-rex, the "velociraptor" (i.e. deinonychus), the triceratops, all supposedly existed during the Cretaceous.


But none of that ever happened!


The truth is, there never actually was a time when dinosaurs ruled the Earth. The Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous eras are all as much products of human imagination as the Indominous Rex. It is ironic, the most realistic thing about Jurassic Park is the co-existence of man and dinosaurs!


As humans, we have a long history of exaggerating our history. In an attempt to establish their primacy, many nations would suggest they were significantly older than they actually were, even using this as an excuse to take over land they wanted, since, according to their narrative, they had it first. We even see examples of this in the Bible. We see, for example, Jephthah arguing with the king of the Ammonites over who rightly owned the land in the book of Judges.


In more recent history, and indeed more relevant to our topic today, there have been attempts to exaggerate Earth's history in order to, in the words of one such charlatan, "free the science from Moses". These are the words of Charles Lyell, inventor of the snake oil philosophy known as Uniformitarianism. One of his attempts to push this philosophy involved underestimating the rate at which Niagara Falls was receding, giving the appearance that it was 70,000 years old. All this with the specific intention of contradicting, and eventually overthrowing the Christian faith.


In truth, the Earth itself is not old enough for dinosaurs to be millions of years old, much less millions of years dead. Furthermore, large quantities of evidence militate against this idea. But as much Carbon 14 as we find in dinosaur fossils, as much soft tissue as we find preserved, and as many ancient (and sometimes, surprisingly accurate) depictions of dinosaurs as we find in ancient art, no evidence will ever be stronger than the very word of the God who created them.


Of course, this is where Evolutionists tend to roll their eyes. You can't appeal to the Bible, they claim. It's circular reasoning. But we're actually not in a circle here. We're not arguing "the Bible is true because it says it is". We're not even arguing for a particular point of the Bible, since unless you count Behemoth, dinosaurs aren't even directly mentioned in the Bible. Instead, what we're doing is taking the historical aspect of the Bible and applying it to the origins of dinosaurs.


Of course, personally, I do count Behemoth. I cannot be dogmatic about it, but lacking the assumption that dinosaurs died out millions of years ago, I can afford to say that since the description of Behemoth fits a dinosaur better than any other animal that has ever existed, Behemoth is very likely a dinosaur. So, already, Job's account tells us that man coexisted with dinosaurs.


But even if we do not accept this particular identity of this particular creature, we do have a very clear genealogy from Jesus, all the way back to Adam, who was created a mere 6 days after the Earth itself. Mathematically, this gives us a rough age of about 6,000 years. Of course, the Bible does say man was the last creation. That means there was a time when dinosaurs lived on the Earth, but man did not. However, this was, at most, a few hours, not a few million years.


Now, I absolutely do not expect this case will convince atheistic Evolutionists. If you think the Bible is just a book of fairy stories, "the Bible says..." will mean nothing to you. It should be enough to convince Christians who, for whatever reason, have rejected God's word on the origins issue. But if you're an atheist, it won't mean much. Here's my question though: If the Bible really is a book of fairy tales, why does the evidence fit our story more than your story? The evidence that surprises you does not surprise us. When soft tissue started showing up in dinosaur fossils, we were intrigued; one more piece of evidence for our book. But you were shocked. You tested it multiple times, and still did not believe your own eyes. When you finally acknowledged what you'd found, you decided to question science itself, rather than the narrative you have constructed.


Both the Bible, and the corresponding evidence from other historical sources, make it quite clear that the Jurassic period is as fictional as Jurassic Park. No one who claims dinosaurs lived so long ago will ever be able to prove it. But the reason they try is the same reason people have always tried to exaggerate history: Pride. The same pride that said "we're better than the other nations because we're older" says "we're better than God Himself, since we've evolved so much since we invented Him".


Ultimately, no matter where the dinosaurs came from, we know where they are now. They're in the ground. They're in the museums. When the first man sinned, death entered our world, and if there are any dinosaurs who have yet to meet that fate, we have not yet documented this. But it comes for us all. Over 300,000 of us die every day. And one day, you will be a part of that statistic.


After death, we all stand before our Creator, and He judges us according to what we have done. By default, since we all sin and fall short of His glory, we receive what the Bible calls "the second death". But God loves us more than He loves dinosaurs. Therefore, He made a plan to redeem us, giving His own Son to die for us. All who confess Jesus as Lord and believe He rose from the dead will be forgiven for everything we have ever thought, said, or done wrong. Now, which is better? To believe in the one man who actually walked out of His own grave, or to believe the least realistic parts of Jurassic Park?

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