Space For Doubt

One of my favorite topics. Dinosaurs. I loved them as a kid. Heck I still love them. They fascinate me! Creatures so wildly different than what we have today, it’s hard to even imagine.

To start with, I want to poke a little fun at all the world religions for a moment.

You see, the funny thing with the dinosaurs is that up until the early 1800’s, no one knew they were a thing. Sure the occasional random fossil was discovered here or there, but no one put two and two together. “That’s a dragon thigh bone!”….”That’s a giant warrior’s arm bone!”

At this point though, people started really scratching their heads. “By golly we sure are looking at something weird here but this just doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen!”

Finally, in the mid 1800’s, the paleontologist Sir Richard Owen coined the term “dinosaur” (terrible lizard) to describe the Saurian Reptiles being discovered around the world. Discoveries came fast and fierce after this.

Imagine now, you are any one of the major world religions. You have your world origin story all “figured out”. All has been well for hundreds of years now.

Ok…..not well in every sense, what with the whole crusades and the like…but you get my drift. You are just so certain you know your history.

Then BOOM. Heeeeyyyyyyyy look at me! I’m a dinosaur! Where do I fit into that well established and cemented world history lesson you got there?

Protestantism faced the same hurdle. We had this view of how the world began. Explaining dinosaurs all of the sudden? Um….gulp. Well….you see….

For the SDAs, the view is that humans created them and also that God created them. (It’s complicated. Thanks EGW) To be honest I’m really not sure how other denominations explain them. I don’t think many do. I know SOME say that dinosaur fossils were planted by God as a test of faith. (I am so excited to dig into this concept in another post. Literally jittery in my seat! Hold tight, it’s coming!)

That all aside, let’s get into a little science now.

Dating methods:
Radiometric dating is what we use primarily to date the dinosaurs. It is based off of half lives of certain isotopes of certain elements. Carbon-14 dating is talked about a lot and is frequently used for relatively recent events. However it is not used for dinosaurs.

To understand why, here’s an analogy. (This will also explain how radiometric dating works in general)

Let’s say you take a medicine with a half life of 1 day. Meaning that tomorrow at this time, there will be half left in your body. The other half has metabolized away into various different compounds and excreted in one way or another.

The day after that you have half of that half. Or 1/4 remaining. The day after that, an 1/8th. Then a 1/16th.

At a certain point, the amount left in your body is so small, that there is just too little left to measure accurately.

Carbon 14 has a half life of 5,370 years. That sounds like a lot, but it’s not when we consider dinosaurs lived 66+ million years ago. Carbon 14 isn’t used beyond about 60,000 years into the past. We need something else.

Cue Potassium-Argon dating! With a half life of 1.25 billion years, and measurement feasibility much easier than that of other radiometric dating methods, dates between 200,000 and 4+ billion years can be reliably dated.

Dinosaurs lived in three main periods of time. Each bookended by an extinction event. Each period spans tens of millions of years. Fossils in each period reliably date to other similar fossils in that period. I.E. All T-rex fossils date within a very narrow range of each other.

Fossils of dinosaurs are also localized. Evidence supports continental separation, thus keeping dinosaur species mostly segregated in their respective areas of the world.

You can doubt radiometric dating. That’s fine. But I want you to be clear on what you are saying by doing so.

1.) All the scientists/geologists/paleontologists are wrong. All of them.
2.) The dating “error” must be wrong but to different degrees for each species of dinosaur. The T-rex has to date wrong by 65ish million years (it lived more recently), but the Stegosaurus has to date wrong by 200 million years.

A dating method, even if skewed in error one way or another, is usually consistent unto itself. Calling this into question begs an examination of the motive behind that.

There’s so much I could say about the dinosaurs. I haven’t even talked about the Carboniferous period that came before the dinosaurs. Giant bugs with stingers the size of a screwdriver? A bird sized dragon fly that can tear flesh? Did humans supposedly create those too?

Clearly dinosaurs weren’t made by people. That’s not logical or even biblical. So what do we do with accepting that earth really is that old? That dinosaurs really walked the earth well before us? How does that square with traditional SDA beliefs?

With respect to the last question, it doesn’t. Not at all. But to everything else? I’ll get there in another post.

Peace.