How do people of religion explain dinosaurs?

Answer 1

It depends on what you mean by "people of religion."

If by that term you mean religious fundamentalists, who adhere to a literalist reading of the Bible and insist that the world is a mere 6,000 years old, then you get one set of answers. That set of answers usually includes a belief that dinosaurs were part of the original creation and were destroyed by the world-ending flood in Genesis 7. Others might believe that humans hunted dinosaurs to extinction. Either way, this set of beliefs maintains that humans and dinosaurs co-existed. (If you go to various creation museums, you can see representations of human beings riding around on dinosaurs and so on.) But the issue is still complicated by the fact that the Bible itself never mention dinosaurs. The closest thing might be the references to the leviathan and the great sea monsters, but that is a stretch and incomplete in any event.

If, however, by "people of religion" you mean the vast majority of believers who are not religious fundamentalists or biblical literalists, then then answer is simple: dinosaurs evolved hundreds of millions of years ago from more primitive forms, roamed the earth for tens of millions of years before being wiped out in a planet-wide cataclysm when a comet hit the Yucatan. See, there is nothing in faith that requires religious people to reject the findings of science. The Biblical text itself, by having two separate creation stories in Genesis, clues the reader in to the fact that these stories are not meant to be taken literally. The creation stories of Genesis are poetic narratives that are meant to teach us something about God and God's relationship to the creation and are not meant to be a natural history of the world.

Thus, religious people can respect the findings of science that tell us about the history of the natural world, and can value the sacred scriptures for what they tell us about the God who stands behind all creation.