Before you instantaneously cry out “No!” or “Yes!”, let me add the qualifier, “sort of.” Are they sort of real? Were they ever sort of real, even if they aren’t anymore?
https://leeduigon.com/2015/01/04/are-unicorns-real/
God’s creation is too vast for any human mind to grasp. Every day we find something in it that we’d never seen before.
I mean, we can’t even be 100% sure of what’s in the New Jersey Pine Barrens–let alone the taiga forests and sprawling tundra of Siberia, thousands of times bigger.
Save some room in your mind for wonder.
Interesting. This is my kind of stuff.
The fact is, we don’t know. I’m not so impressed by the settled sciences of taxonomy and zoology as I used to be. They’ve purportedly found soft tissues in dinosaur remains which cannot be was old as the paleontologists would have us believe. We live in a fallen world and the Flood was not all that long ago, so we are in its after effects.
I exchanged some emails with the scientist who first discovered soft tissue in a dinosaur bone. She is a Christian, and was very gracious. But she couldn’t stretch herself far enough to reach Young Earth. And of course, until lots of people began to find soft tissue in all kinds of impossibly ancient fossils, the science establishment portrayed Dr. Mary Schweitzer as an incompetent who couldn’t distinguish red blood cells from ordinary bathtub ring bacteria. She didn’t have to argue with them, though. Now that everybody knew what to look for and where to find it, the cat-o-saurus was out of the bag.
Two possibilities: Either our understanding of fossilization was all wrong, riotously wrong; or the fossils are much younger than we thought.
I have insufficient data to decide which is the case.
I truly have no opinion regarding the age of the earth. I’ve heard compelling arguments from believers on both sides of the debate and, much like yourself, I have insufficient data to come out with a declarative opinion that I’d be willing to defend to the end.
To me, it doesn’t matter to me whether the earth is 6,000 years old or 4,000,000,000 years old. Either way, the LORD God made it and His works are good. I was raised in the “day-age” school of thought and believed it for much of my life. However, I have to concede that the “young earth” point of view is not without merit.
Given that there was a global, cataclysmic flood somewhere in the vicinity of 4,200 years ago, it strikes me that the record of everything that came before is in question. As best I understand it, the Flood was more than rain, it was a seismic event which released the “vast watery deeps” and quite possibly changed the surface of the entire earth in drastic ways. Assuming that to be accurate, how can we possibly know about the world which existed before that time?
The “science guy” inside me was happy to believe that the dinosaurs lived 65 million years ago. But “science” has diverted far from the Creator, which is telling, given that men like Newton, Galileo and Faraday were famed for their devoutness. So does “science” place denying the Creator as a higher priority than the search for truth? I suspect that many modern scientists would suppress anything that proves the existence of God.
Finding soft tissue in fossils is a game changer. By definition, it is not a fossil if there is soft tissue involved and I doubt that even the most imaginative scientist would be able to explain the preservation of elastic tissue for 65,000,000 years. For the purposes of my convictions, the deep-time historical timeline, with regard to dinosaurs, is losing credibility in the light of new discoveries.