I want to apologize for my lack of blogging these last few days. I try to write something every night even if it is just my boring azz food journal, but I have not been able to manage that. Reason being my classes have been getting pretty intense and I have had no extra time to write about anything. I have ideas floating around in my brain and I have some stories to tell, but no time to sit down and really write them down.
Tonight I am going to leave you with a question E has asked me, and I am not really sure how to answer it. I know the answer that I want to give him, but when I sit down and really think about it there is not way to really prove it. He is from the "show me" state just like his mom and can't really believe ish unless he can see it or you can show him some kind of proof.
The question he asked me was "What came first the dinosaurs or God?"
Can you help me answer this question for him?
Edited to add:
My first instinct was to say God came first because that is what I believe, but as E pointed out there is no mention of dinosaurs in his Bible or the Torah, so he was very confused. I am a spiritual person, but I am in no shape, way or form a Bible scholar. I have however read the entire Bible and the Torah from cover to cover and I don't remember any mention of dinosaurs. I guess they must have been included in with the "beasts".
I love how inquisitive he is, but dang!!!
10 comments:
God came first. He made the Earth and everything on it. And he likes his creation - in the book of Genesis it says that after he made each thing he said it was good.
My daughter, at 7, asked me where the first cat came from: not lions and tigers, but kittycats like ours. Where did the first one come from, huh, Mommy?
And she didn't want to hear "God made it", she wanted the mechanism.
I told her no one knew, because no one was there to see it; gave her a quick rundown of evolution and natural selection, telling her that's the current best guess; and then told her that when she gets to heaven she can ask God. I myself have a long list of questions.
She's now a sophomore biology major. I wonder if she remembers that conversation.
Your comment about the dinosaurs not being mentioned points out something fairly useful to remember.
No matter to what extent we believe the scriptures were inspired by God, they still had to be written down by people who were living at the time. The writer of Genesis had no reason to know about the existence of dinosaurs. Yes, theoretically God could have told him about them, and about evolution, and a whole lot of other stuff, but that would have taken a lot of time and changed the focus from the main points (that God made everything, all of Creation belongs to him, he likes us and thinks we're cool) and destroyed the process of us finding these things out for ourselves.
If God revealed the creation story to people today it would have been written entirely differently, I'm sure. And people 3000 years from now would be puzzling over the things the writer chose to put down.
I had a coworker who was (and no doubt still is) a devout Muslim. We were comparing creation stories at work one day when he suddenly blurted out, "What about South America?" Same thing. The writers of all those scriptures had to write things that made some kind of sense to them. Lift them out of the context of their day, and you can get really confused.
Thanks again Laura, your answers are always on point and well thought out and I agree with you totally. For years when I was looking for my spiritual path I would ask tons of questions, because I am a very logical and analytical person. I finally gave up on my quest for rock solid answers and like you am waiting for the day when I can ask the Big Man myself. Having said all of that, E is still very confused, but I hope in time he will come to understand that some questions are just beyond our realm of understanding. I love the fact the he makes me think with his simple and innocent questions.
Hmmm. I dont have a comment to make...but wow! YOu just made me fast forward a bit...I am going to actually get questions that I dont know the answers to...??? Im Scurred.
@Keelah, Girl you don't know the half of it. Kids are little sponges and they really do ask the darndest things.
I got kicked outta bible school for asking this question so I'm no help. :)
Well, In the tradition of my Ethiopian peoples, there is a book that is canon (Enoch) which is not canon in the Protestant or Catholic Traditions that gives a good explaination for the dino's (but I wouldn't think a child was ready for that level of theology)
In all actuality, like Laura said, Moses wrote Genesis to covney a basis for understanding to the Hebrews of who God was, how people got here and who created all of existance, it was not Moses' purpose to catalog all life that ever existed on our planet.
God came first, as the Bible does make clear he created all things.
Shabbat Shalom by the way :-)
I've too have always thought that the beginning mentioned in Genesis was not the "first" beginning, but the beginning of mankind as WE know it. Just as God started over after Noah and the Ark, I always thought Genesis was something of a new start. Otherwise, I can't explain away the skeletal remains of prehistoric man and all the creatures that I'm sure would have reaked HAVOC on the emerging civilization parented by Adam and Eve. God came first. Then the dinosaurs.
@Creole...Bwhahahaha you were that kid too huh??
@DJ Black Adam... I will have to check out book you mentioned I love to study theology and it sounds right up my alley.
@Les...Funny that you mentioned two beginings.In the Torah there are actually two creation stories. One with Adam with his first wife, who some people call Lilth and then the other with Adam and Eve.
God came first. The guys who wrote the Bible didn't know about the dinosaurs because they were extinct after the third or fourth day!
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