There are some questions that seem to have absolutely nothing to do with faith. For example: What did dinosaurs have to do with the Bible?

It sounds like the beginning of a joke, or maybe the sort of question that sends a perfectly respectable Bible study completely off the rails. But dinosaurs actually raise some fascinating questions about creation, Scripture and how Christians understand the ancient world.

The Bible never uses the word “dinosaur.” The word itself did not enter the English language until the 1800s. That means Christians are left asking whether some of the creatures described in Scripture could possibly have been animals we would recognize today as dinosaurs.

Let’s dig in! One interpretation begins with Genesis. Genesis describes the creation of land animals on the sixth day, immediately before mankind. Young-earth creationists therefore place dinosaurs within that same creation framework rather than millions of years before human beings.

Under that interpretation, dinosaurs would have lived alongside other land animals and, yes, would have been passengers on Noah’s ark…. READ MORE…