Since God created the universe and everything in it during a 7 day span, where do the dinosaurs fit in?

Question

Hello Gramps!

I am having an issue with my parents about the religious upbringing of my 7 year old son. My parents have stated that Mormons serve Satan? I know through research that this is false, and have decided to investigate many religions to compare their ideals. I am asking them all one question, and it has to do with the creation story. God created the universe and everything in it during a 7 day span. My question, as silly as it sounds is this……Where do the dinosaurs fit in?  I know it’s a goofy question but also a loaded one as well. Please respond! Thanks very much.

Chris

Answer

Dear Chris,

I’m glad that you have determined that your parents’ opinion about the Mormon Church is not the truth. However, it may be interesting to note that their belief is a demonstration that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is indeed the true Church, and in fact is the veritable kingdom of God on the earth. Here’s the point–there are over 800 different Christian denominations in the United States. Which of these denominations is maligned more than any other? It is without any doubt the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly called the Mormon Church. Why would that be so, especially when the Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, is the very foundation of the Church and the center of its teachings? And the Mormon view of the Savior is the most Godly, elevated view of the mortal life of the Savior, of the nature of His divine mission and of the extent of His saving grace of any of the other Christian churches, without exception! And what is the hue and cry raised by the sectarian clergy? They preach to their congregations that the Mormons are not Christians!!! What would be the source of such a devilish teaching? You’re right, the devil, himself!!

Satan is certainly aligned against all that is good, but he inspires all who he can influence to align themselves against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, specifically because it is the only religious organization in existence that has the power to elevate man unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ, as Paul tells us in Ephesians 4:13 is the very purpose of the Church.

Now to address your question about dinosaurs– In the first place you state that “God created the universe and everything in it during a 7 day span.” That again is a completely and obviously false old sectarian notion, which comes from a very superficial and inaccurate interpretation of the creation account in Genesis. The word, “day”, that describes the six creative periods in Genesis 1, is translated into English from the Hebrew word, yowm, which is used not only for day, but also for time. The passage in the Bible could more correctly have been translated as “And the evening and the morning were the first time”. So the true translation of the term, yowm, in the biblical creation account is time, not day. Thus the earth was created in six periods of time, the length of which was not revealed.

The record of the creation account as given in the Book of Abraham, in the Pearl of Great Price, which was translated from Egyptian hieroglyphs into English, is as follows:

And the Gods said among themselves: On the seventh time we will end our work, which we have counseled; and we will rest on the seventh time from all our work which we have counseled (Abr 5:2).

Even for some period of time after the creation, indeed until well after the advent of Adam and Eve to the earth, the day as we know it had not been defined, as we learn in Abraham 5:13—

But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the time that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die. Now I, Abraham, saw that it was after the Lord’s time, which was after the time of Kolob; for as yet the Gods had not appointed unto Adam his reckoning.

So, since we do not know the lengths of the perios, or times, of the creation, and that time as we know it was not measured until somewhere about the time of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, it is pointless to try to assign a given period to the advent or to the demise of the dinosaurs.

However, we learn from paleontology that dinosaurs flourished from about 230 to about 65 million years ago. Again, there are very serious problems with the dating technique used by paleontologists. Potassium-Argon dating is the only viable technique for dating paleontological artifacts. Geologists have used this method to establish dates for rocks which give results as much as 4 billion years old. It is based on the fact that one of the radioactive isotopes of Potassium–Potassium 40 (K40), decays to the gas Argon as Argon 40 (Ar40). By comparing the proportion of K40 to Ar40 in a sample of volcanic rock, and knowing the decay rate of K40, the date that the rock was formed is determined. However, the method is so unreliable that it is of little practical value as a geological time clock. The testing performed on volcanic rocks in Hawaii should be sufficient to exclude this method from further use. Ar40 tests performed on rocks from lava flows in Hawaii known to have occurred in1800 and 1801 were dated by the radioactive potassium-argon method as having occurred 160 million years ago and 2.96 billion years ago!

So nothing contradictory about the creation process, the advent of Adam and Eve, and the advent and demise of dinosaurs has ever been established!

Gramps