Enough with the dinosaurs, already!

A certain type of unbeliever, whose trust is in science and whose faith for the future is in more of the same, loves to make fun of a certain sort of Christian. That Christian is the fellow who insists that the earth is of recent origin, some five to ten thousand years old, mankind was contemporary with the dinosaurs and science's dating of the creation is all wrong.

I do not object personally to Christians who believe that view of the world's origin. But by proclaiming it to the world, as if it were a central or even an important doctrine, they do harm to the cause of the gospel. The whole idea repels the unbeliever whose education has told him everything to the contrary.

All anyone needs to know about origins, for full Christian orthodoxy, is to understand that God is the unmoved first mover in creation, however it happened. Let us not place a stumbling block in the road that leads to Christ, by insisting on a narrow and particular view of an event none of us saw.

Christians, including the young earth creationist (and maybe him especially) need to understand that responsibly held Christian views on creation are various and have been and will doubtless continue to be so, until the day when all questions are answered at last. My own view is that the opening of Genesis is poetical: A poetic and thematic account can convey God's truth quite well, as it does in some other passages found elsewhere in the Bible. It is a question of looking at the passage and deciding what genre of writing you are looking at. It looks to me like poetry not natural history.

The Bible's account may also be in some sense political. It shares some features with the Babylonian Enuma Elish creation epic, but presents them differently. In the Hebrew version, the one true God is the cause of everything, not some gang of heathen deities. That is, the symbolism of the era is in use in Genesis, discussing things in the commonly used and thoroughly unscientific, figurative terms of that era. It says to the Babylonian that his gods are not responsible for creating the world--the Hebrews' one God is. It does so in the commonly used imagery and symbolism of the time. If we wish to read Genesis well we should ask, first of all, how the text would have been understood by readers in the ancient world.

If you instead take the opening of Genesis as natural history or a textbook on biology, you are forcing it to fit a genre it does not match very well. That is what you are doing when you read it and draw conclusions about the age of the earth or the times of the dinosaurs. By taking it as on all fours with scientific literature you are reading it as a style of writing that is not found elsewhere in the Bible, and is not found in Genesis either. In other words, you are bringing modern suppositions to an ancient text. When we do that we are reading things into the text.

But that is simply my best take on the subject. You may, of course, understand the matter in the way that seems best to you. Any discussion of it is the kind of thing that should take place only among believers, where the unbelieving public cannot hear, and then only if the believers will speak respectfully to each other. To the unbelievers we should be talking about nothing but Christ and him crucified. That's the message they need to hear. Even  if unbelievers come, somehow, to accept a young earth view about dinosaurs, that does not save them; if, however, they embrace Christ and his message, they will go to heaven whether or not they ever see it that way about the dinosaurs.