This book is the Ark Encounter with an emphasis on Dinosaurs. The author presents many interesting opinions about dinosaurs as fact. It suggests Biblical answers that go far, far, far beyond anything the Bible remotely says. I think this is the worry to consider with the mainstream popularity of Answers in Genesis and the Ark Encounter. Now, before anyone stand up and proclaim that I’m not a biblical literalist, I am not talking about claims regarding a seven day creation. Instead, I find fault when the author goes beyond this and makes very specific claims about dinosaurs and dragons with great confidence.
This work does a lot of elementary, foundational groundwork before it gets off to the topic at hand. However, this is because it is using the framework of “the 7 C’s” as presented by its organization, Answers in Genesis. However, once the framework is established, it uses this to trace dinosaurs through creation, corruption, catastrophe, and other stages.
While many of the work’s conclusions are interesting and answer a wide variety of questions about dinosaurs from a biblical worldview, it seems that most of its answers are opinions that fit the biblical claims of creation but have no other grounding in scripture or science. It’s almost as if they are “doubling-down” on any objections by positing a story about things like dinosaurs that have little evidence to back them. Certainly, I understand that this approach honors a literal approach to scripture and sees these ideas to a conclusion, but I would feel much better if their opinions were expressed as ways that scripture MAY have played out in these specific instances (i.e. - dinosaurs) rather than the very emphatic claims of the author that this is almost certainly how it happened. Scripture does not tell us the specifics in these instances. Yet, In trying to refute pseudo-science and Darwinians, they too slip into a stance that is all too confident at times. However, I do appreciate the commitment of the author to attempt to answer such specific questions and to contemplate how the natural world might reflect scripture.
My biggest fault with the work is that it’s not really about dinosaurs or dragons. At many junctions in the work it departs from the topic to talk about the Ark Encounter and other topics in Answers in Genesis and Young Earth Creationism. There are whole chapters that stretch on and you find yourself wondering, “what does this have to do with dinosaurs or dragons?” I agree that some of these things are important for establishing their view, yet the degree to which they delve into these adjacent topics becomes off topic and irrelevant.