Evolution, Dragons, and the Bible

          The major tenet of the scientific method is that one cannot presume the outcome while doing the experiment or research. No matter what your opinion of the subject is, you must begin all research projects or experiments from an objective point of view – set your prejudices aside, verify all your assumptions, and start completely from scratch.

            This subject, this research, re-taught me that principle, to my chagrin.
            I warn you now: this conversation will undoubtedly cause disagreement. Please proceed with an open mind and the Spirit of God to guide you.

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            After graduation from high school, I was a student at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, perhaps the most difficult entry for American math and science majors. Caltech is home to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where all of NASA’s satellites are managed, as well as Palomar Observatory, one of the finest deep space telescopes in the world. It also has an entering undergraduate class of only 210 freshmen each year from around the world, over half of whom had a perfect SAT score in math the year I was accepted. I say all of this not to boast, but to point out that for the formative years of my life, I was richly steeped in (A) the scientific method, from one of its foremost practitioners, and (B) treating the Bible and all other non-scientific treatises with skepticism, although I considered myself a Methodist Christian at the time. But years later, having left Caltech during my sophomore year to care for my dying mother, and then following in her footsteps teaching for thirty years, I was born again as a true Believer in Christ, and have since become as vehement for the Lord as a few of my Caltech classmates were against Him.

            So today, when I approach the subject of evolution within the Biblical framework, I do so with full comprehension of the volatility of the subject, and of my rare position situated as I am as both a trained research scientist and a fiercely devout Christian determined not to undermine God’s Word. I approached it the same way an earlier Vignette about Genesis 1 and the Big Bang (and in fact every such topic) was addressed: by starting and ending with the Scripture itself. I use the ESV, KJV, NASB, and NIV versions, utilizing BibleHub.com, the MacArthur and several other study bibles to help with as much reference to the original Hebrew (and Greek and Aramaic, when appropriate) as a non-linguist can get; and while I read and consider the input of as many learned commentators as possible, the actual Bible verses in question are always the Alpha and Omega of my research. (As Charles Spurgeon said in his book on commentary, “Sometimes, I find that the Bible can shed a lot of light on the commentaries…”)

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            Born-again Christians have the reputation of blindly treating “evolution” as a nine-letter swear word, and a large percentage on non-believers see creationists, frankly, as myopic fools who simply parrot what their pastors tell them. Needless to say, the range of opinions held by reasonable men and women spans from “evolution doesn’t even exist”, to “Darwinian mutation is the power behind all change in all forms of life”, and a host of more reasonable points in between. In order to prove a particular viewpoint, one of the most common and effective methods is to assume the opposing perspective and prove a contradiction exists. That’s not exactly my methodology here, but it’s close: what I started with in this research is to assume the hardline Creationist viewpoint and then examine the Bible to see where verses might contradict it, particularly in conjunction with proven facts of nature. But I also found that I started looking for evidence in either direction: something that demanded one viewpoint or the other. 

While in a previous essay I went to some trouble to demonstrate that multiple possibilities exist regarding God’s creation of Adam and his bride in the Garden of Eden, let’s assume (for the sake of the investigation) the traditional “dust and rib” origin of our ancestors, full-grown adults not born of woman (hence the classic brain-teaser, Did Adam and Eve have navels?). Dive into Genesis 1 with me, won’t you?

            “Then God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees on the earth bearing fruit after their kind with seed in them”; and it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit with seed in them, after their kind; and God saw that it was good.” (Genesis 1:11-12, NASB)

            Key in this pair of verses is the phrase “yielding seed/bearing fruit after their kind”. The implication by many strict creationists is that these phrases, along with “And God saw that it was good”, demand that God created the plant life as it was and it never changed. Rubbish. All that demands is that apples made some kind of apples, oranges made some kind of oranges, and so on. “After their kind” doesn’t even imply “identical to” – in fact, it really sounds more like God expected variations in what grew from His creations. Certainly, the humans that came from Adam and Eve were not all identical to Adam and Eve, and if someone is going to insist that all humans came from these two (and in fact, from Noah and his wife, a few generations later post-Flood), they’re going to be hard-pressed to look at a deep-skinned African and a near-translucent Scandinavian and argue that “after their kind” includes no significant variation at all! In the lifetime of most European cultures, the evolutionary changes in plant life have been well documented – even apart from what geneticists and other scientists have done separate from God in their greenhouses and university labs.

            Notice in Genesis 1, the author (although Moses was probably the one who put pen to scroll, the actual information had to have come from God, the only sentient Being present at the time) carefully uses the phrase “after their kind” in verses 21, 24, and 25, specifically for His creation of the animals in their herds and flocks, and does NOT use that phrase when He tells the creatures to procreate in verse 22 (or to “be fruitful and multiply”, to be precise). Nothing in here implies that every one of the creatures in Genesis 1 are the same creatures on earth today. Certainly, the “evidence” in verse 25 that I’ve heard Mace Baker and a few others fall back on as their rejection of evolution is at best inferential and at worst ludicrous: “And God saw that it was good.” In a Bible filled with florid descriptions of God’s perfection in so many other instances, “good” seems if anything to be an argument for evolution: God saw that it was a good start, and He would continue to guide their improvement over time. (And don’t try to prop the argument up by pointing to verse 31 where He calls it “very good”. That’s just sad.) 

As I went to great length to say in that previous essay, we are absolutely required to read what the Bible actually says, and NOT read into it what it does NOT say. What the first book of Genesis does NOT say, is that God created every creature exactly as it would stay for the rest of eternity. While it also does NOT say that He didn’t, there is another, decisive factor when Biblical evidence is at a stalemate. 

            Scientific evidence. 

            God gave us brains for a reason. He gave us the ability to read and write and communicate and deduce and derive and observe our universe. In Genesis 1:28, He specifically said to the first man, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” He gave us the scientific method for a reason, and I am firmly convinced that reason is to give man a way to discover the beauty of what He created. I’m all for siding with the Word of God over the scientific evidence of man, since the first is infallible and the second is not. But where the Word is silent, I side with the scientific community, which laughs at the segment of creationists who never get it through their heads that when science uses the word “theory” (as in “the theory of gravity” or “the theory of evolution”), it does not mean what they think it means. In science, “theory” means it’s derived from real evidence. (As opposed to a “postulate”, which is an assumed trait of a system. Believe me, if it were the “postulate of evolution”, we’d be right in shoving THAT word down the scientists’ throats!) A theory is just about the strongest term science has. In fact, theories are often stronger than laws, in the sense that the “laws of nature” have been overturned more often as we discover more about the case we’re studying – cf, quantum physics, for example.

            But I digress. Failing to find a definitive answer in God’s Word (and “it was very good” hardly qualifies as proof that evolution doesn’t exist), I believe the tons of evidence which shows the progress of evolution over the course of time from the Garden of Eden until the present day. Failing to find a Biblical answer virtually demands that we include the scientific evidence, rather than making up our own preferences and inserting them into God’s Word.

            Consider the number of species that have gone extinct. Were they “very good”? Is it a mistake of God’s that the dodo bird no longer roams the earth? If you respond that it’s man’s doing, that the animal is extinct simply because of man, are you saying that God failed to take that into account ahead of time? Or, if that was indeed part of God’s master plan – for some animals to go extinct – why then would you deny the possibility that God’s plan might also include the post-Genesis creation of some animals? 

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          Now, here’s where I got in trouble as a scientist. I had held certain beliefs about evolution before I was born again, and as a Christian I studied this topic incessantly to see if I was wrong or right; the Holy Spirit led me to see that I needed to change some of my stances, but that the traditional conservative creationist position was also in error, and that the Biblical truth was in between.

            But in the process of that study, I ran across some animals whose evolutionary background “helped my position” immensely…at the cost of my long-held beliefs about those animals. Those beliefs were more tightly ingrained than my thoughts about evolution, and I struggled to eliminate them from my prejudices entering into this examination, mostly because it wasn’t the original focus of my study. But the Biblical evidence is solid (even though, ironically, much of it was mistranslated originally, as we’ll see soon), and although it rocked my own opinion on one subject, it proved it on another.

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            So, one of my initial questions was this: Was there evidence of evolution within the text of the Bible itself? Were there animals that either changed or died out and were replaced that wouldn’t be explained away through Scripture? The first step was to establish what it was that God created in Genesis 1, and follow those animals as best as I could.

          From that point, I started tracing the animal life in the Bible, to see if I could find evidence one way or the other about animals that changed – either died out (perhaps, animals that are talked about which no longer exist) or were different than described Biblically (for example, if the Bible described a plant or animal or something that was not the same as we know it today). If so, that would be a start to my Biblical proof of the existence of evolution. As is true of almost everyone, I had my own opinion on this and a number of connected topics coming into my research, but as a firm proponent of the scientific method, I was judicious in not allowing those opinions to distort my study. 

But another point that hides beneath the surface of Genesis 1:20-25 shows up when we consider the original Hebrew terms for the animals being created by God. Consider Genesis 1:24…

“And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds – livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.” And it was so.”

So, here we see three categories of animal. In the original Hebrew, the English word “livestock” comes from “be-he-mah” (Strong’s #929) often translated into the words “cattle” or “beasts” or “beasts of the field”, and is generally inferred to mean not just bovine but goat, sheep, and other such semi-domesticated beasts of the farm and ranch variety. “Creeping things” comes from the Hebrew “wa-re-mes” (Strong’s #7431), and is understood to encompass all the insect and spider and other critters that make your skin crawl and sitcom housewives jump onto chairs screaming.

The third phrase is the most problematic: “beasts of the earth”, which reads in the original Hebrew as “we-hay-tow-e-res” (Strong’s #2416 and 776, together), and in more recent phonetic translations as “chayah ertz”, implies the “wild, carnivorous animals” (per Mace Baker) we think of as “jungle” animals: lions, tigers, and bears (“oh, my!”), elephants and giraffes, wolverines and zebras, and so forth. This interpretation is (I’ve been told) fairly straightforward, although I don’t read ancient Hebrew to verify that for you myself, and its definition is essentially unquestioned. You’ll see in a minute how that will complicate matters for us.

Now, back up a bit, to Genesis 1:21…

“So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind.”

“Winged bird” is pretty easy – “o-wp-ka-nap” (Strong’s #5775 and 3671), which is translated very consistently throughout the Old Testament as such. The Hebrew word for “fish” is “bid-gat” (Strong’s #1710), which frankly I don’t see in my Hebrew interpretation of verses 21 or 24, but it does appear in the follow-up phrases in both verses 26 and 28, where God designates them to be under the dominion of Man.

The phrase in question, then, is at the start of verse 21, referring to “the great sea creatures”. The original Hebrew word in this place is “hat-tan-ni-nim” (Strong’s #8577), which appears uniquely in this one verse within the entire Bible, and is alternately translated as “whales”, “sea-monsters”, “magnificent marine creatures”, and (oddly) just “sea” in a couple of more obscure Bible translations. (The “Jubilee 2000” translation has something different, which we’ll get to in a minute.) Now, because we didn’t have a word for “fish” elsewhere in God’s list of creations in verses 21 and 24, it would be natural to assume that “hat-tan-ni-nim” meant all of the swimming creatures in the oceans: fish, sharks, whales, krill, and so forth. 

But that’s not what “hat-tan-ni-nim” means; not in the slightest. God seems to have covered that category in verse 20, with “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures…” , and in verse 21 with “and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm…”. No, “hat-tan-ni-nim” implies size: hence, “whales”, “monsters”, and “magnificent” in the last paragraph. Does it seem likely that the whale would have been singled out, when all forms of livestock were lumped together into one word? Or when all forms of “wild creatures” were jumbled together as “chayah ertz”? Whales, to the ancients, were as described in Jonah 1:17 – “dag ga-do-wl”, or “great fish” (technically, “fish great”, and modern scholarship is now leaning towards the possibility that Jonah was really swallowed by a “great fish”, not a whale). Not “hat-tan-ni-nim”. Matthew refers to the creature in Jonah’s adventure (at 12:40 of his Gospel) with the Greek word “ketos”, which does precisely mean “whale”. 

I teased with the Jubilee 2000 translation earlier. I’ve never read that version of the Bible, but I have seen how it translates Genesis 1:21 – “And God created the great dragons and every living soul that moved, which the waters brought forth abundantly…”

Whales wouldn’t need a separate category. But dragons surely would.

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The word “hat-tan-ni-nim”, it appears, is basically an adjective extension of either “hat-tan-nin” or “hat-tan-nim” (and someone who understands ancient Hebrew, please correct me if I’m mistaken!), which do show up elsewhere in the Bible. Both of those two shorter versions mean dragon, unquestionably, every time they’re used. “Hat-tan-nim” is used in Ezekiel 29:3 (“Behold, I am against you, Pharaoh king of Egypt, the great dragon that lies in the midst of his streams”) and “hat-tan-nin” occurs in Nehemiah 2:13 and Isaiah 27:1; we’re going to look at this last one in a minute.

There are several shorter variations of hat-tan-ni-nim listed under Strong’s word #8577, besides the two listed a moment ago:

Ø  “Kat-tan-nim” is used in Micah 1:8, translated in the KJV as follows: “Therefore I will wail and holler, I will go stripped and naked; I will make a wailing like the dragons, and mourning as the owls.” Oddly, there are several versions which translate this word as “jackals”, others that translate the word for “owls” as “ostriches”, and one as “daughters of an ostrich”, which absolutely fascinates me.

Ø  “Le-tan-nim” is used in Job 30:29 as dragon as well: “I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls”. (KJV) Again, we have some of the same translation conflicts as kat-tan-nim, with some versions using “jackals” instead (and ostriches instead of owls for “lib-owt”…and the same obscure version has “and a companion to daughters of the ostrich”, which would certainly make me reconsider my translation...).

Ø  The most interesting variation, because of where it appears, is “le-tan-ni-nim”, which shows up in Exodus 7 when Moses and Aaron are confronting the Pharaoh and demonstrating the power of their God. Verse 10 (KJV) says, “And Moses and Aaron went in unto Pharaoh, and they did so as the Lord had commanded: and Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh, and before his servants, and it became a serpent.” (It translates universally as either ‘serpent’ or ‘snake’, both here and two verses later when it ate up the Pharaoh’s sorcerers’ creatures.) Imagine how Pharaoh would have reacted if it had been a WHALE that the rod became! No, it seems fairly apparent that the “tannim” family of words has more to do with a family of animals that I had believed belonged more to mythology books than historical texts, which we know by the Word of God the Bible to be.

Ø  (And it’s worth noting that the rod which Moses threw down, in Exodus 4:3, became “le-na-hash”, which is the same creature that tempted Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge in Genesis 3, but NOT the same one Aaron’s rod turned into three chapters later. If Aaron’s rod transformed into something more dragon-like, I don’t doubt that it DID swallow up the Pharaoh’s sages’ creatures!)

So, what’s the point of all of this? OK, the Bible believes in dragons. Great. Why should we care?

Look at the time frame of the examples we showed.

Dragons co-existed with people. And since then, they’ve apparently gone extinct.

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But, was there any evidence outside of the Bible that dragon-like creatures existed in comparatively modern times? Or were they consigned to the times of the dinosaurs, if they existed at all? There is certainly no indication that dragons exist today, outside of the occasional Weekly World News tabloid report and other checkstand fodder. 

So, did dragons indeed live in human times and then go extinct? Modern science doesn’t give us a definitive answer.

Well, how about examining some not-so-modern science? 

In 79 AD, Pliny the Elder wrote what is considered the benchmark for encyclopedias, Naturalis Historiae. His methodology of studying and crediting original citations, along with his vast resources as a confidante of Roman emperors Vespasian and Titus, made this lone surviving work of his seminal in its authority. It included this tantalizing sentence: “Africa produces elephants, but it is India that produces the largest, as well as the dragon.”

Claudius Aelianus’ De Natura Animalium, a seventeen book collection of information about nature and its creatures written in the general neighborhood of 220 AD, includes this sentence: “The Phrygian History also states that dragons are born which reach ten paces (25-30 feet) in length.”

 

The Oakland Museum (CA)’s Discoveries Relating To Prehistoric Man, published in 1924, and Prehistoric Indians, by Barnes and Pendleton around the same year, both refer to cave drawings clearly implying the artists were depicting living brontosaurus-like creatures.

It’s possible. 

Turn back to Job 40, and start reading in verse 15, where the Almighty Lord describes Behemouth (in the present tense), up through verse 24:

“Behold, Behemouth, which I made as I made you;

He eats grass like an ox.

Behold, his strength is in his loins, and his power in the muscles of his belly.

He makes his tail stiff like a cedar, the sinews of his thighs are knit together.

His bones are tubes of bronze, his limbs like bars of iron.

He is the first of the works of God; let him who made him bring near his sword!

For the mountains yield food for him where all the wild beasts play…

Behold, if the river is turbulent he is not frightened;

He is confident though Jordan rushes against his mouth.

Can one take him by his eyes, or pierce his nose with a snare?”

I’ve read several interpretations of that passage which try to make Behemouth into a hippopotamus. Does that description sound like a hippo to you? It’s not a dragon, either – re-read Job 41 to see what a dragon looks like in a Biblical description. This is a perfect description of a brontosaurus-like dinosaur.

So, what’s our conclusion following all of this research?

Species change over time, both in characteristics and in existence. Therefore, just like the cosmos, God did not design a static, stagnant system, but one which evolves over time (yeah, I used that dirty word!). Even more miraculous than having created a stagnant world, He created a world in which the ingredients changed over time, and STILL He is able to micro-control every detail of the world so that it works out exactly as He has described it to us all the way through Revelation. From my perspective, that’s even MORE amazing than the traditional frozen-in-time “creationist” model! 

Secondly, incidentally, I found that creatures which I had thought died out millions of years ago (dinosaurs) or which I’d thought never actually existed (dragons) apparently DID indeed exist, and existed during human time periods. For me, this was the more revolutionary discovery, since I’d already derived the first conclusion independently before beginning this research.

So, to the creationists trying to rewrite Texas’ textbooks…to the science teachers refusing to acknowledge the possibility of divine intervention…Lighten up. Allow for the possibility that the world may be more wondrous than you’re giving it (or Him) credit for.