Show Us Irrefutable Proof!!!

One of my favorite parts of the creation museum was the part where they (they being the geniuses at answers in genesis) attempted to "prove" dinosaurs in the Bible. First they read the description of Behemoth from Job, and noted that God doesn't tell Job to think about a Behemoth, but to "behold ye now". They noted that many study Bibles suggest that this creature could be a hippo or an elephant... but, do their tails look like cedar trees? I think not. Doesn't this look more like what God describes? (see picture of sauropod) Needless to say, this was plenty of evidence for me. I quickly abandoned my foolish belief in science since, as the creation museum noted at least fifteen times, "fossils don't come with tags telling us how old they are".

Anyway, I was convinced the behemoth must have been a sauropod and not the mythical creature that appears in early Jewish literature saying that there is only one Behemoth who will battle God in the end-times and will be defeated and that his meat will be served at the Messianic banquet. That sounds like human reason.

Next came Leviathan. This was even more convincing. They read the magnificent Biblical description of Leviathan from Job 41, noting that Leviathan apparently breathed fire and lived in the water. They didn't provide any, "here is a possible dinosaur match" or "some dinosaurs apparently breathed fire, here is 'evidence'". They simply said, "Leviathan must have been a magnificent creature."

Even for folks who are a bit lazy when it comes to evidence and reason (read: creationists), this was unconvincing. First of all, if you look at Psalm 74:14, Leviathan is described as having multiple heads ("It was you who crushed the heads of Leviathan"). I know of no non-mythical creature that breathes fire and has multiple heads. And, like Behemoth, there is a lot of mythology surrounding Leviathan. Leviathan actually originates from a Ugaritic myth, a myth that was around long before the formation of the Scriptures (here is an ancient carving of Leviathan). The Leviathan myth was likely brought into Jewish mythology because ancient Jewish mythology emphasized the sea as the origin of evil (which is why Revelation 21:1 pictures the new heaven as a place without seas; see also Dan 7:2-3; Rev. 13:1-2). Personally, I thought that the museum would have been smart to simply leave Leviathan out altogether. Lumping a clearly mythological creature in with a creature who is just probably mythical casts them both in the same mythological light.

All that being said, here is a video Marcus and I made last year about Behemoth. (We heard the song on an HBO special about creationists.)