It was his 3rd birthday party and he loved dinosaurs! He ate dinosaur cookies, played dinosaur games, wore a dinosaur shirt, slept on dinosaur sheets with his dinosaur stuffed companions. And he had totally nailed a young dinosaur’s roar! The party was dinosaur dynamite!
As we sipped on dinosaur swamp water (lime punch) and munched on dinosaur bones (cookies), his older brother turned to me to ask a question. I could tell he was hoping for a real answer, and was a little worried there might not be one.
“When did God make the dinosaurs?” he ventured.
Others have asked dinosaur questions, too, just in different ways. It was time for some answers. This boy was serious.
Actually, I have a question, too. I wondered to myself, “Where has our culture’s ‘dinomania’ come from? Why the saturation by an extinct life form in every corner of childhood from toddler toys to classroom exposition over almost every other scientific topic?”
Brian Switek, in The Guardian article “Why Do We Love Dinosaurs So Much?”, Sept 5, 2014, said, “Dinomania is so powerful that it has become a cultural institution.” He went on further to say,”…a gigantic Sauropod…excavated in Southernmost regions of Argentina…is an amazing testament to the wonders of evolution.”
He goes on to say that perhaps children’s imaginations are captured by dinosaurs because they are “big, fierce, and extinct” and therefore thrilling, but safe. Kids don’t have to worry about one getting into their house because, after all, there aren’t any scary ones still alive.
Sometimes I wonder if the multitudinous emphasis on dinosaurs serves to highlight the void of information about them in the Bible school classroom, leading to a lethal seed of doubt in the minds of our young. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I still believe in Satan’s ploys…and God’s truths.
This discussion is a vital one. Join me next time for Part Two of “Does God Know About the Dinosaurs?”
