Digging Up the Truth About Dinosaurs

[AllenWitmerMiller (Semi-Expired Professor & Minister.)]

J.E.S., give me a little time (perhaps even not until after church today) and I’m going to reply to your series of questions here but I will post my answers in the “Was the Behemoth a dinosaur or an elephant?” thread. (As it is now, the discussion has gotten bifurcated between the two threads and I think the conversation may be easier to follow over on that thread.)

POSTSCRIPT: I posted my reply on the other thread at:

Was the Behemoth a Dinosaur or an Elephant?

As I’ve already stated—and even though your question is facetious in a tongue-in-cheek way—I think I may recognize what you are really asking. Whether or not an elephant is foreign to an omniscient creator’s experience is irrelevant. (Now I’m being flippant in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way.) Consider this question: Does God communicate with humans through “his language” or in human language and ways of observing the world? A lot of the linguistic concepts bearing upon this topic (many of which I’ve already raised) are foreign to those who haven’t had a lot of linguistics coursework or even multi-lingual experience. Indeed, even though many of these ideas are familiar in actual practice to monolingual speakers of English, they are so taken for granted and so unconsciously applied when speaking and writing that few pause to consider them. Let’s look at some examples which may help introduce these concepts. I once talked with a student in a Sunday School class (where I was the gues…