I Was Taught That Saint George Fought a Dinosaur

Hemant Mehta of the Friendly Atheist recounts this exchange:

Charles Wolford, a reporter for Louisville Magazine, visited Ark Encounter on its opening day this past July, and his article about the experience is now available online. While most of it is about his day at the attraction and some background on Answers in Genesis — not news to anyone who’s been following this site — there’s one conversation Wolford had with AiG’s director of research Andrew Snelling that is just unbelievable, even for Creationists.

Wolford brings up how Creationists say dinosaurs were on the Ark with Noah. But they’re not around now, so what happened to them? Snelling says dinosaurs went extinct because they couldn’t adapt to a rapidly changing world. But there was a period of time when humans and dinosaurs were together on the planet.

That goes against everything we know about the timelines of both dinosaurs and humans — dinosaurs died off about 65 million years ago while modern humans didn’t exist until about 2.5 million years ago — but Creationists need to compress the timeline so they have to make the lie work for them.

Wolford wanted to know: Was there any proof that humans and dinosaurs overlapped in any way?

I grew up in an evangelical home, attending a young earth creationist church. I could have answered this question without any trouble as an evangelical teen.

“Dinosaurs went extinct after they left the Ark. After the Flood, we had the Ice Age. We had a radically different world. Some creatures weren’t able to adapt. But most cultures in the world have some legend about dragons, and these dragons are actually a good description of dinosaurs. The Chinese, for example — their dragons are depicted on scrolls pulling the chariots of emperors. And there was a story called Beowulf in which the king slays a dragon, and this happened in Norway.”

“So you take Beowulf to be evidence of dinosaurs existing?”

“Yes,” Snelling said. “It was an eyewitness account.”

This does not surprise me. As a child, I was taught that the story of Saint George and the Dragon, among others, was a real-life account.

I was taught that Noah took dinosaurs on the ark, and that dinosaurs lived for thousands of years beyond this. They ultimately become extinct due to a changing climate; the hunting of dinosaurs by humans played a role in this extinction.

There was actually some question about whether dinosaurs were extinct—I grew up hearing stories of dinosaur spottings in the Amazon rainforest and the Congo. It was also suggested that the Loch Ness Monster might be one of a few remaining dinosaurs who had escaped extinction. We quickly took to the idea that a carcass pulled up by a Japanese fishing boat might be that of a deceased plesiosaur, though that was quickly debunked. (Answers in Genesis now advises its followers not to use the Japanese plesiosaur as an argument for young earth creationism.)

As a child, I was intrigued by stories of dinosaurs’ survival to the modern day. Could they be true? I hoped they were. I hoped that solid evidence of the existence of dinosaurs in the Amazon rainforest or elsewhere might come to light, proving evolution wrong and confirming young earth creationism.

And I wasn’t alone. From the Institute for Creation Research:

Perhaps the most exciting prospect for the world of creation science is the possibility that dinosaurs may still be living in the remote jungles of the world. Evolution and its accompanying necessity of long ages of evolutionary development would be hard pressed to accommodate a living dinosaur. Such is the story of Mokele-mbembe, a creature that some scientists believe could be a surviving sauropod dinosaur.

The article goes on to detail eye-witness accounts stretching back for hundreds of years and continuing to the present. I remember hearing these stories as a teen.

At root, perhaps, is this—many young earth creationists are so eager to believe that evolution is false and dinosaurs might still be alive that they are willing to give credence to any rumor or myth that might seem to back up their beliefs.

This is one belief deeply entrenched in faith—and that alone.

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