Scientist Jay Wile sees evidence of dinosaurs in Bible

MUNCIE

Toy dinosaurs at the juice and coffee table greeted members of Grace Baptist Church during a seminar on a recent Saturday morning.

The reason for the toys?

“Dinosaurs and the Bible” was a key presentation at the creationist event.

Guest lecturer Jay Wile, a nuclear chemist who taught at Ball State University during the 1990s, presented the group evidence of dinosaurs living alongside humans in recent history.

“I am sure you disagree with most of what was in my presentations ... and I have no problem with that,” Wile told The Star Press after his talk. “Disagreement is one of the many things that makes life interesting. I just ask that you treat me fairly in your disagreement.”

A Gallup poll last summer found that 46 percent of Americans believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years. The prevalence of this creationist view of the origin of humans is essentially unchanged from 30 years ago when Gallup first asked the question.

“The evidence proves you can trust the Bible,” Fredrick W. Boyd, Jr., pastor of Zion Unity Baptist Church of Indianapolis and director of Creation Evidence Expo, told the audience.

Wile quoted from Job 40: 15:23: “Behold now behemoth; which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox. Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly. He moveth his tail like a cedar ... His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron ... Behold, he drinketh up a river ...”

“That sounds like an apatosaurus, which used to be called brontosaurus,” Wile said. “Some think it’s a hippo, but hippos have piggy tails.”

He also quoted from Job 41: 1-34: “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? ...Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish spears? ... None is so fierce that dare stir him up ... His scales are his pride ...In his neck remaineth strength... When he raiseth up himself, the mighty are afraid... He esteemeth iron as straw and brass as rotten wood...”

An alligator? To Wile, it sounds more like plesiosaurus.

Photographic evidence

He next displayed photographs of Native American rock engravings of “incredibly accurate” depictions of dinosaurs at Natural Bridges Monument in Utah and at Havasupai Canyon in Arizona. He also showed photographs of a 13th century Cambodian temple’s rock sculpture of a stegosaurus with plates on its back, as well as two sauropods drawn on the tomb of Richard Bell, a Bishop of Carlisle, who died in 1495.

“No paleontologists were around back then,” Wile said.

While he believes that proves dinosaurs roamed the Earth in recent history, critics say the drawings could be based on fossil remains, or they could be hoaxes, or they represent eagles or a lizard standing on its hind legs, and the alleged plates on the alleged stegosaurus’ back could be a decoration added above a drawing of a rhinoceros.

Dino blood vessels

A former atheist, Wile also cited laboratory studies in 2005, 2009 and 2010 that found soft tissue in the fossils of a Tyrannosaurus rex, a hadrosaur, a triceratops and a mosasaur.

“How could soft tissue stay soft over millions of years?” he asked before quoting paleontologist Alan Feduccia as saying, “It thus strains credulity to suppose that soft tissue, particularly blood vessels, and protein sequences have survived over 68 million years.”

“There’s a lot we don’t know about dinosaurs,” Wile said, such as their skin color. Another example of the unknown: Was T. rex really a powerful predator, or was it just a scavenger that ate only dead stuff? T. rex had shallow-rooted teeth, so how could it have been a predator, Wile asked.

Wile, who writes educational material for homeschoolers, provided lots of other evidence during the half-day seminar.

The several dozen church members in attendance reacted positively to the lecture.

“I kind of expect that,” Wile said. “There might have been some folks who didn’t agree with me, but they tend to recognize they’re in a minority situation. My presentations are more popular in conservative churches. They’re more likely to question the prevailing dogma of the day, whatever that dogma is. Liberal churches are more inclined to go along with the modern culture.”

‘Needless opposition’

He emphasized that his position that God created the heavens and the earth in six literal days and that he made this happen less than 8,000 years ago, is a far different view than intelligent design, a religious belief that has generated a lot of publicity at Ball State this summer.

“Some members of a newer school of creationists have temporarily set aside the question of whether the solar system, the galaxy and the universe are billions or just thousands of years old,” the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) reported in its 2008 book, “Science, Evolution and Creationism.” “But these creationists unite in contending that the physical universe and living things show evidence of ‘intelligent design.’"

For Wile and other “young Earth creationists,” “no amount of empirical evidence that the Earth is billions of years old is likely to refute their claim that the world is actually young but that God simply made it appear to be old. Because such appeals to the supernatural are not testable using the rules and processes of scientific inquiry, they cannot be a part of science.”

Science and religion are different ways of understanding.

“Needlessly placing them in opposition reduces the potential of both to contribute to a better future,” NAS concluded.

Contact news reporter Seth Slabaugh at 765 213-5834.