The other day, the ideas of creationists came up. We were talking about evolution and I told my son how there are some people who don't believe in it. I explained how there are some people that believe the the Bible is absolutely true instead, and they've added up all the generations in the bible and the time since those stories and believe that the 6,000 years or so it tallies to is the age of the earth. They don't believe in evolution and they believe that Man walked with dinosaurs...my son was beside himself.
He knows that Greek myths have been around for thousands of years. His point regarding Creationists and evolution was this,
"If Man walked with dinosaur, wouldn't there be some stories about it? That would be a pretty big deal if that were true. I mean, come on!! Think how those stories would be told in families--if you had a relative that killed a dinosaur you would talk about it, right?!"
Spot on, Son. Spot on.
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I've seen some creationist material that suggests the ancient DID talk about it. That when, for instance, the Chinese claimed their emporers had dragons hitched to their carriages these were in fact dinosaurs...So there's evidence!
What gets me though is that what the creationists are doing is taking other cultures'legends and myths as fact. So where is the line drawn then? If you're going to take stories of Chinese dragons literally then why not Chinese creation stories?
Did the dragons all look the same, or were there different shapes...say like a Tyrannosaurus Rex shape or Velociraptor shape, or a Pterodon shape? Are there any descriptions that sound remotely like what these dinosaurs probably looked like based on their fossil remains?
Here's a Chinese creation story from Wikipedia:
Creation of lives including man was by Jin Mu and Mu Gong after they breathed qi into an incubator ding. A male and female child were born from this breath of life. The excess qi escaped and became other forms of lives on earth. Supra-beings such as Xuanxuan Shangren and the Five Supremes were not themselves Yuanren beings but more primordial concepts of creation.
In a follow up book called Tiantang Yiuji 天堂遊記 the same creation story was narrated and given more details in Chapter Four and Chapter Seven. Xuanxuan Shangren transformed into the Three Pure Ones and again transformed to the Five Elders or Five Supremes(see reference) before the first man and woman were incubated. They were allegorically the same as Pangu from the Chinese mythology and Adam and Eve of Christianity.
In Chinese mythology, a second folkloric version of genesis described the beginning of the universe started out as a black egg in which the Earth, heavens, and Pangu exist together as one. Pangu cracks open the egg, thus creating the universe. Pangu then creates Earth and Sky. Nüwa made the first members of mankind from yellow clay. This is believed to be an allegorical tale of the Division-Genesis in Tao Te Ching, partially in I Ching and re-stated in Tiantang Yiuchi. Out of Tao, the primodial infinite Nothingness or Wuji came Taichi(太極 ), which then split into the binary yin and yang (陰陽) or Two Aspects (兩儀), yin and yang slitting into the Four Realms (四象) and from which begets Bagua or Eight Symbols (八卦) , and from which every beings were created. The following texts were traceable to the legendary emperor Fuxi:
So, there you go...their dragons were really dinosaurs and Pangu cracked open a black egg thus creating the universe.
Why not?
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