Question:

I have watched in a video by Kent Hovind where he gives the evidence that dinosaurs lived with humans and he has provided cultural evidences in which ancient inscription and arts portrayed dinosaur-like animals living with humans. And still some YEC teachers argue that Behemoth and Leviathan in book of Job refers dinosaurs . What is the case?

Answer:

Unfortunately, Kent Hovind is not a helpful source on questions related to Genesis and the age of the earth.  He claims to speak for science, but he is in fact an anti-scientist. He claims to be a scientist, but he has no accredited degrees at all and his expertise is as an evangelist and as the director of a theme park. Besides, he has been convicted and sentenced on willful  tax evasion. He is not a man of good Christian character.  He rejects nearly every principle that comes from science in order to defend his errant view that science supports the conclusion that the earth is young.  He is a Young Earth Creationist (YEC).

By the way, I believe that it is possible to support the idea of young earth by proposing that God created the earth with an appearance of age.  If God miraculously created the earth with an appearance of age, then there would be two results.  1. The earth would appear old.  2. The appearance of age would not be explainable by science–in essence it would be an unscientific explanation.  However, for reasons he will have to answer for himself, Hovind tries to claim that the earth appears young.  The problem with this is that it simply IS NOT TRUE.  The earth appears to be very old.  Every single scientific fact points to the earth being billions of years old.  There is literally not a single scientific fact which supports the conclusion that the earth is young.  YECs like to ignore this fact or to create confusion about this fact, but the fact persists nevertheless. ALL evidence, I repeat ALL evidence points to the earth being old.  This could be because God created the earth to appear old or it could be because it is in fact old.  Different believers interpret Genesis 1 to imply a young earth or metaphorically to imply an old earth.  However one thing is absolutely for sure.  Scientifically, the earth appears very old.

Because all facts lead to the conclusion that the earth appears old, Hovind is in a difficult place.  If dinosaurs died out about 65 million years ago, which is apparently true, then he has to throw dust in the air or to create a lot of smoke so as to cover for this fact.  So what he does is he tries to create the false impression that there were dinosaurs living a few thousand years ago.  The best thing we can do with this is ignore Hovind.  His claim that dinosaurs lived a few thousand years ago is pseudoscience.  What I can say for sure is that, whatever Behemoth and Leviathan are, they are not dinosaurs!!!  There has not been a dinosaur on the earth for more than sixty million years.  There is no evidence to subvert this fact, and claims by Hovind that certain drawings look like dinosaurs does nothing to undermine this fact.  Fact:  humans and dinosaurs have never lived together.  Please do Christianity in general a favor. Do not use anything published by Ken Hovind.  He is spreading misinformation and pseudoscience.  He may be sincere in his efforts, but his efforts are doing a large disservice to Christianity.

John Oakes