So please realize that I'm no religious authority, and with any 'religious questions', you're going to get different answers depending on who you ask. However, I'll try to answer your questions to the best of my abilities based on my personal beliefs.
First and foremost, if God created the world in 6 days, and on the seventh he rested; and shortly after this humans inhabited the earth, where do the pre-historic organisms that we know once inhabited the earth before man fit in? I mean, huge fossils, skeletons and ice fossils prove pretty irrefutably that they did exist, but the bible makes no mention of them?
The account in Genesis regarding the creation of the Earth, from darkness to man, doesn't exactly allow for an explanation of dinosaurs, but doesn't necessarily bar their existence.
Here's the poor explanation I received growing up:
First, a "day" in Genesis is not what we would consider 24 hours. I've always been told that a day in "God's Time" is 1,000 years, but realistically, how would anyone know that? The hebrew word for day is Yom which can be translated into MANY different meanings. One of those just being our word "Time". Vague enough for you? So what that means is that instead of 6 24 hour days, there were simply 6 cycles in which God created, literally who knows how long.
On the fifth day is when God created the vegetation and creatures. "Then" he created man in his image. What amount of time existed between his original animal 'lineup' and when he created man? No idea.
Does this explain the existence of Dinosaurs in the Bible? Absolutely not.
Here's my explanation:
I'm not stupid enough to believe that the Bible is an exact account of how things came to be. The book of Genesis was not written by Adam, presumably the first man. It is commonly believed, not proven, that it was written by Moses, and boy is there a time gap between Adam and Moses. Stories, yes stories, were passed down from generation to generation on how the world came about, but those were campfire stories told over and over again and changed over and over again. What did we end up with? Something incomplete. Nobody can deny that dinosaurs existed. I personally believe that the calamity that befell them was in preparation of creating something new, mankind. Mankind was to have the ability of being on top of the foodchain, and with our current bodily makeup, the T-Rex would destroy our asses with the quickness. So God said let's try something new. Provable? Nope.
another question i'd like to ask, is about how shoddy humans are. Things like the tailbone for a tail only a negligible amount of humans are born with, an appendix we can function usually better without, how we're not really top of the food chain, and so on.
Honestly, those are great questions, and I think that if anyone tried to explain them from a religious standpoint, they would be A. after a donation, B. after a donation, or C. Simply making crap up. I can't explain God's creations, or the variations between them. Genetic mutation does indeed exist, I just don't believe it's solely responsible for everything we see today.
and finally, we know fairly irrefutably that 'magic' as an act is not strictly 'real'. I mean, no one really believes in Santa, and no one really believes that magicians are magical. People can't float and neither can objects, because of gravity and so on. So how can one assume that the entire universe is the result of a big beardy magic man (or woman? 0_0)
I actually disagree with you there. The mind is a very powerful and mysterious little object. If we can control our fingers, and no atoms ever touch, then what states that our body of influence stops at our skin? That's a stretch I know, but think about it. Jesus said that with enough faith you can move mountains. Faith in what? God? Believing in God will allow us to move a freaking mountain? No. Faith in our own body of influence.
Back to the question, how did a magic being create all things?
What if this being was made of pure energy?
Take a hologram and cut it in two, what happens when you shine light through each piece? You get the same image, just a little distorted now.
Nothing can create from nothing, therefore God had to have created of himself. Taking the energy he already possessed, or was of his makeup, and turning it into matter, another form of energy.
You asked questions that would choke even the pope up, if he actually felt like telling the truth that is. They were completely legitimate and valid questions that don't get explained anywhere in the Bible. I don't claim to be a scholar, or a representative of God. I simply believe that something better than we exists and had some influence on our existence. So, there's my halfa@@ attempt.
Edit: Wow, lots of replies while I was typing... so my post should be up there somewhere.
