Why did God make the dinosaurs go extinct? Is it true they just didn’t evolve to their (new) environment?
I appreciate this question. It shows that some are thinking and trying to struggle with the facts that surround our world. We talked a little about the dinosaurs in the last question and answer session. These animals did exist. There is abundant evidence that man walked around on the earth with these creatures. The Bible even contains some information about them and we looked at this evidence in the book of Job last time. However, we did not deal with the question of what happened to the dinosaurs.
The truth is that we really don’t know what happened to the dinosaurs. We know they lived on the earth at one time, but that they stopped living on the earth at a certain period of time. We really do not have to answer this question as Christians because it does not affect our Christianity. However it happened, it happened within the context of the history of the Bible and there have been some people who have advanced some theories as to how they died out.
One of those theories is that the global flood produced a climate change on the earth in which the dinosaurs could no longer survive. However, the book of Job was written after the flood and some dinosaurs still existed at that time. So, it could not have been something that happened in a short period of time.
Another theory is that dinosaurs are just reptiles that lived several hundred years just as man lived hundreds of years. This theory states that unlike people, reptiles never stop growing. That is, they continue to grow as long as they are alive. Living several hundred years would produce very large reptiles. However, when man’s life span was shortened, the life span of animals was shortened as well and so reptiles just do not grow as big as they used to grow.
A third theory is that they existed after the flood and that men just hunted them to extinction. We know of species of animals that have been hunted to extinction in recent centuries. One such example is the Dodo bird. There have been other species that have been hunted to near extinction such as the Humpback whale. It is very possible that men hunted these animals for various by-products and in such a way they became extinct.
The bottom line is that the Bible does not specifically tell us how these creatures died out. We know that God created them and that they lived upon the earth, but that they eventually died out. How they died out, the Bible does not say and we will just have to be happy with that answer.
Bert Thompson in a paper he wrote regarding Dinosaurs had this to say, “We feel it the safer course to simply say that we do not know specifically why the dinosaurs died out, or when. It is best to leave the matter an ‘unknown’ since certainty is impossible.” We read in Deuteronomy 29:29, “The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.”