creationism gone wild

Three fun ways to fit dinosaurs into the biblical account of creation:

1. The dinosaurs were destroyed in the events described in Genesis 1:1: "Now the earth became formless and empty, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters." In this reading, we have no idea how many years passed and what got fossilized.
   
   
2. Dinosaurs were created on Day Six with the rest of the animals in the Hebrew cosmogony, co-existed with man in the Antedeluvian world and went extinct some time after the Flood. The tremendous pressures brought on by a worldwide Deluge, particularly with the seismic activity mentioned in Genesis 7 are more than enough according to hydrogeologists to fossilize organic matter and to convert other organic matter into fossil fuels. I've heard some people link Leviathan in the book of Job with a dinosaur.
   
   
3. Dinosaurs are still not extinct. People who hold to this view usually tie dinosaurs into critters like the Loch Ness monster or other big creatures in heavily forested parts of the world. Scott Adams, to my knowledge, is the only person to suggest they live in the basements of houses and give wedgies to people.

And of course there are the really silly views that dinosaurs never existed in the first place and God either created their fossilized remains to test our faith, or that the whole thing is made up by paleontologists eager to bolster their standing in the scientific community. (Probably some truth to that second part, actually; they'll proclaim a whole new species based on one or two bones and fail to account for the variation within a single species today. Heck, humans range from under four feet tall to over eight feet. And dogs? Don't even get me started.)

There is a view that holds that there was a pre-Adamic race of humanity, or perhaps reptilian beings, who were destroyed between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2, where the Hebrew can be rendered "Now the earth became formless and void." There is much basis in Scripture for this belief as saying the "unclean spirits" in the New Testament are angels who rebelled against God and were cast down. It's just that the latter doctrine is more widely accepted than the first.

On that tangent, I've heard it said that the "unclean spirits" Jesus was casting out of people were nonaligned spirits; i.e., they had taken no sides in the war between heaven and hell and are being forced to decide as the gospel advances. And I've also heard that they were -- are you ready for this? -- the eternal spirits of members of a pre-Adamic race!