A traveling dinosaur museum hosted by the Creation Truth Foundation, based out of Oklahoma, came to Sheridan Christian Church during Defiance Day weekend, starting on Friday and finishing on Sunday. There were fossils of various dinosaurs on display as well as other fossils.
Matt Miles, the President of Creation Truth Foundation (CTF), gave various talks at Sheridan Christian Church, including one Saturday evening. He said that everything we were taught in school was wrong, that the Biblical view of creation was true, that scientific evidence points to a 6,000 year old earth and a catastrophic flood that permanently altered the planet, and that humans and dinosaurs co-existed at one point.
Mr. Miles spent most of his life as a Christian and became a youth minister. But one time, he said that he could not satisfactorily give an answer to a young person about the origins of creation, which he said haunted him for years. “I wonder what happened to that person,” he said. “I hope someone else was able to reach them.”
In 2009, Mr. Miles went to a youth leader conference, where he heard the late Dr. G. Thomas Sharp, founder of GTF, give a talk on dinosaurs and the Bible. “I trusted the Bible as the Word of God, but I could not reconcile it with the fossil record,” he said. When he heard Dr. Sharp speak, Mr. Miles asked, “Why have we never been taught about dinosaurs and the Bible? My wife knew some of this stuff, but I had never heard any of this. And here I am 20 years later.”
According to CTF’s biography, in the late 1960’s, the late Dr. Sharp, who was an experienced science teacher and a pastor of a church in Alabama, came face to face with staggering domestic problems with the lives of his church members. Divorces were rising exponentially. 60-70% of kids in Bible-believing families decided to leave the faith by the time they were 15. Christian fathers were abdicating their roles as leaders of the family. Over 12 years of research, Dr. Sharp came to learn that the root cause was that Darwinian evolutionism came to overthrow the Biblical worldview of creation, leading to the Supreme Court ruling in 1962 ending school-led prayers, the separation of God from public life and practice, and the consequent moral and educational decline throughout the country.
In 1989, Dr. Sharp came to found Creation Truth Foundation, whose mission is to return America to a Biblical Creationist worldview as found in Genesis 1-12.
Mr. Miles said that it started with trusting what the Bible says when it speaks of a six-day creation. Instead of “prehistory,” as taught by secular science, Mr. Miles said that history in fact began when God created the Heavens and the Earth. He said that humanity knew deep down inside of its connection with dinosaurs, as evidenced by popular cartoons like Alley Oop and the Flintstones, movies like the Jurassic Park series, the Year of the Dragon that comes up in the Chinese calendar every 12 years, an ancient Stegosaurus found on a Cambodian temple, depictions of dinosaurs in Native American art in 1000 AD, and other examples.
He said that dinosaurs were even depicted in the Bible, such as Job 40, when God presented the leviathan to Job as an example of his creation.
Mr. Miles had a negative view of Jurassic Park and talked about what he saw as disturbing scenes from the series, including one where a gigantic dinosaur turned out to be just a bird, and one where a raptor had feathers on it to depict transitional forms. “I’ve had students who thought it was real when it wasn’t,” he said. “Whatever you think is true, it guides you. It’s a movie, not a documentary.”
Turning to the scientific theories for dinosaurs, Mr. Miles said that they were always changing; for instance, when he recently went to a natural history museum in Kansas, they had changed the 65 million date for the asteroidal impact that caused the extinction of dinosaurs to 66 million. And he asked how did all the other animals survive if an asteroid struck the Earth. “That’s an awfully selective asteroid,” he said.
Other aspects Mr. Miles questioned included the 252 million to 66 million year timeline for dinosaurs. However, he says that dinosaur remains have been found both above and below the layers where they would be expected to be, suggesting a catastrophic flood instead. “And we have full-sized mammals coexisting with dinosaurs,” he said. “The older I get, the more I get tired of being told that science cannot support the Word of God.”
Turning to the 5th day of creation, Mr. Miles focused on the Hebrew words “Tanniyn” and “Behemah.” He noted that on over 21 occasions, “Tanniyn” was translated to “Dragon,” suggesting that the Biblical writers were familiar with dinosaurs.
Turning to a specimen named “Sue,” Mr. Miles noted that her head was crushed and she was folded in half, meaning that only a catastrophic event like a flood could have caused it.
Mr. Miles said there was a basic philosophical problem with evolutionary science. He said that if death was in the world before the Fall of Adam, then that would make the crucifixion of Jesus of no account. In fact, pointing to Genesis 1:29, he noted that God gave the animals, including Tyrannosaurus Rex, plants to eat while Adam and Eve were given seed-bearing and fruit-bearing plants and trees to eat, while they were forbidden to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. He noted that the kind of teeth that creatures have do not necessarily prove that they are carnivores; for instance, he noted that Panda Bears are not.
Mr. Miles said that he believed dinosaurs went on the Ark with Noah when the Flood occurred. One of the most common questions he got was how the animals on the Ark avoided eating each other or taking up too much space. He believed that baby dinosaurs would have been taken on the Ark; for instance, one specimen on display at Sheridan was 30 feet long, but was only 11 inches at birth. “Think of animals who were young,” he said.
Following the flood, Mr. Miles gave this timeline for the various events in history:
—An ice age following the flood;
—Drastic climate changes following the flood;
—Continental divisions;
—Drastic changes in habitat, leading to extinction events;
—A human population explosion.
He pointed to First Corinthians 15:21, which says that since death came through man, the redemption of creation must come through man. “It doesn’t matter who the President is; Jesus is our only hope,” said Mr. Miles. “Don’t take my word for everything, check out what you hear in the Bible.”
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