Is there anything in the Bible that gives reference to dinosaurs, because they have been proven to have existed? Isn't this trou

Is there anything in the Bible that gives reference to dinosaurs, because they have been proven to have existed? Isn't this troubling as we don't believe in the theory of evolution? (June '01)

The second half of your question presumes that the answer to the first part is "No," while, in fact, the answer to the first half is "Yes!" Read Genesis 1:20-25 and you'll learn of God's creation of every sort of creature, whether of land or sea or air (and that, by definition, includes dinosaurs). That there may be physical indications that they existed before man came on the scene can be harmonized with the Genesis account which teaches us that Man (male and female) was the last of God's creation.

Concerning the concept of "time" in Genesis 1 and whether the Six Days of Creation must be understood as six periods of 24 hours each as we compute time: St Augustine of Hippo (+430) wrote in his famous work The City of God, "What kind of days these were (i.e., what the duration of a "day" was) is extremely difficult or perhaps impossible for us to conceive, and how much more for us to say!" (Book 11, chapter 76).  In other words, since the rising and setting of the sun is used to compute time, and since the sun itself was not created until the third day of Creation, we cannot conceive what was the actual duration of each of those six days of Creation.  After all, as we are reminded by the dogmatician Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky (+1989), "Time itself received its beginning at the creation of the world: until then there was only eternity."

Reread the entire first chapter of Genesis while keeping in mind the above quote from St. Augustine of Hippo and you will easily understand that there is nothing there about which you need be troubled.