- Series:Animals, Transcript English
Isaiah 60:2
“For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the LORD shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee.”
You must have heard the evolutionary idea that dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid hitting the Earth about 66 million years ago – probably on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Recently, this idea has come under criticism from evolutionists as well as from creationists. Other models for the extinction of the dinosaurs have been explored.
Recently, researchers from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) have been revisiting the idea of the asteroid strike and have suggested that dust and soot, flying into the air after the impact, would have caused about two years of darkness over the entire world. The researchers suggest that this would have shut down all the photosynthesis across the world, resulting in mass extinctions and reducing the global temperature. This darkness, therefore, would have caused the demise of the dinosaurs.
The word “dinosaur” was originally coined to give a label to types of animals which do not really have much in common, other than the fact that they are extinct. It seems odd to spend so much time wondering how a class of animals became extinct, whose nomenclature was only created to state that they were indeed extinct. Many animals have become extinct. In a biblical worldview, we can see that some animals, following the Flood, might have had difficulty adapting to new climatic conditions. In any case, it seems more logical to attribute the death of dinosaurs to climatic conditions following a known worldwide catastrophe (the Flood) rather than a similar change caused by the speculation about an unknown worldwide catastrophe – the years of Darkness.
Father, we thank You for Your word and for the fact that we can trust it. We pray that Your people will be increasingly dependent on the truth found in the Bible rather than chasing after idle speculations. Amen.
Author: Paul F. Taylor
Ref: National Center for Atmospheric Research/University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. (2017, August 21). Dino-killing asteroid could have thrust Earth into two years of darkness: Light-absorbing soot in the atmosphere had the potential to block photosynthesis. ScienceDaily. Retrieved August 22, 2017 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/08/170821151056.htm. Image: Public Domain.
